History PopCultureIsolation / Sports

* [[XtremeKoolLetterz X-treme Sports]]

** As for {{UsefulNotes/{{rugby league}}, it's really only dominant in Oceania, northern England, and the respective French and Spanish sides of the Pyrenees Mountains. Elsewhere, people don't even know there's more than one type of rugby.

** With the exceptions of Ivy League schools and certain other prestigious colleges like MIT and Stanford, most national universities are known almost exclusively for their football and/or men's basketball teams. Some for both (e.g., Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan State), some mainly for football (Alabama, Notre Dame, Penn State), some mainly for basketball (Duke, Kentucky, Gonzaga) and some mainly for ''women's'' basketball (namely, Connecticut and Tennessee). The most publicity an Ivy League-esque institution's sports has gotten lately has been, for all the wrong reasons, Stanford's swimming program.
* [[UsefulNotes/AssociationFootball Soccer]]- compared to the rest of the world, the mainstream American middle class does not follow soccer. The US has yet to have its own football equivalent to Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth. Its popular enough for even local OTA channels to air games on local channel including even games across Latin America and Europe on English language channel. ESPN has some days devoted completely to soccer and Fox Sports even had its own soccer channel for a few years. However, unless it's [[UsefulNotes/TheWorldCup World Cup]] time, non-fans are unlikely to hear anything about soccer in America unless they very closely follow sports journalism--and broadcasts of foreign "football" matches (especially English Premier League due to the lack of a language barrier) regularly get better ratings in America than MLS matches do.

** Again like soccer, it's a CyclicTrope. Wayne Gretzky and Film/TheMightyDucks helped it out in the late 80s-early 90s but by the 2000s it faded out again, primarily due to the fumbling of the NHL's TV rights and having the league dropped from Creator/{{ESPN}} who now actively tries make its viewers believe the sport doesn't exist outside of the NCAA Division I championship[[note]]so much that their 2011 in memoriam special didn't feature a single hockey player, [[MoralEventHorizon not even the Russian team killed tragically in a plane crash the previous fall]][[/note]]. Nowadays popularity is resurging again on the heels of new generation superstars like Sidney Crosby and Jonathan Toews, while the merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal saw the not-well-known Versus (the league's cable partner) become the Creator/{{NBC}} Sports Network, bringing a more recognizable brand and greater exposure. Unfortunately, NBCSN is still a distant 2nd to ESPN who now has more reason to put the sport down now that it's cozy with their only real competition.
*** Starting with the 2021-22 season the TV rights are now held by ESPN and Turner Sports, with ESPN mainly using NHL games to push their streaming service ESPN+. So if nothing else you'll hear a lot more about hockey on ''[=SportsCenter=]''.

* Lacrosse, in a similar vein. Oldest sport in the United States, older than the country itself, but played, almost exclusively from Virginia to New York. It's expanding rapidly, though, heralded as the fastest-growing sport in the nation. It's still almost exclusively played by white, upper-middle-class boys.

** Even in countries where it has some popularity, handball isn't that big a deal. For instance, in Brazil, it's the most played sport in physical education class, and the female national team won the 2013 world championship - but the Brazilian tournament suffers from lack of exposure and financing.

* UsefulNotes/{{Cricket}}: Some estimates put it as the second-most popular sport in the world after soccer (mainly due to its popularity in India), but it has never really caught on outside of the British Empire (with the possible exceptions of the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates). In the USA, it barely rates a mention today, despite the fact that it was popular until around the time of the Civil War, and in fact, the first international cricket match was played between the USA and Canada in 1844. Anecdotal evidence even suggests that George Washington himself was a cricket enthusiast!

** As for Rugby League, it's really only dominant in Oceania, northern England, and the respective French and Spanish sides of the Pyrenees Mountains. Elsewhere, people don't even know there's more than one type of rugby.

* While college football and college basketball have huge followings in the United States, college baseball is almost completely ignored, outside of the College World Series getting some attention. The reason for this is simple... the NFL and NBA draft their players almost exclusively out of colleges, making the college versions of the sports essentially farm systems for the professional versions. On the other hand, most top MLB prospects are drafted out of high school and work their way up through different classes of the minor leagues. For the same reasons, the MLB draft tends to garner much less hype than the NFL and NBA drafts.

* Field hockey is a wildly popular sport worldwide, often considered to be second only to soccer in worldwide popularity among team sports...and to say that its fanbase in the USA is similarly lacking would be a massive {{understatement}}--while soccer at least has professional leagues with niche fanbases for men and women alike, field hockey is *only* played at the amateur level (high school/college, with occasional appearances for the UsefulNotes/OlympicGames) and is viewed as an AlwaysFemale sport notable to men only because the players wear skirts rather than shorts like most women's sports.

* Well-known gymnasts? Nadia Comăneci, Mary Lou Retton, Simone Biles, and that's it. Gabby Douglas is mainly known for being the sport's first major black star[[note]]which she actually isn't; Dianne Durham, Betty Okino, and Dominique Dawes were gymnastics legends in the '80s and '90s, but this is the pop-culture perception of Douglas anyway[[/note]], but otherwise is nowhere near as big as Biles is, and if [=McKayla=] Maroney is known for anything, it's the being the subject of the "[=McKayla=] is not impressed" meme and not her actual career.. Maybe if you're lucky you'll get Carly Patterson, Shawn Johnson, and Nastia Liukin too. People will also remember 1996 had a great team but will be hard-pressed to name its actual members, with the possible exception of Kerri Strug (and she's mainly known for her apparent one-foot vault landing with a badly injured ankle[[note]]she actually landed on both feet, but immediately picked up her injured foot; Creator/MorganFreeman perpetuated the "on just one foot" legend in a popular Visa Go World commercial[[/note]]. And tough luck naming a single male gymnast unless you're a hardcore fan.