Kat Cornetta

Sports writer - Grant writer

Category: Boston Celtics

Tickets For Charity: Give Back By Getting The Tickets You Want

20 April, 2011 /

I recently met the fabulously passionate staff of Tickets For Charity, an organization that uses the demand for sports and concert tickets to help charities nationwide.

Teams and concert promoters provide Tickets For Charity tickets to high-profile events which the organization turns around and sells at the market value. That premium price you would usually be paying then goes to a charity group as opposed to a profit margin. Tickets For Charity also develops VIP packages that provide fans access to events that they couldn’t get unless they were in the know.

Currently, Tickets For Charity has Boston Red Sox regular season tickets and both Boston Bruins and Celtics playoff tickets. With each purchase, you can designate what group receives the charitable portion of your purchase price, including the official charities of the Bruins, Celtics and Red Sox.

I hung out with the Tickets for Charity crew at Jerry Remy’s (a very neat take-in in itself), and was impressed at how dedicated they are to the cause and how knowledgeable they are about sports. This is code for, “We had a long conversation about the woes of the Buffalo Bills” and “We talked college hockey.” These aren’t folks oblivious to the passion of sports fans – they’re sports fans themselves.

If you’re going to be paying out the nose to get to a must-see sporting event – especially a playoff game – why not help out others in the process?

During the Red Sox season, Tickets for Charity will be giving you the opportunity to win some unique ticket packages, including Green Monster seats for a Yankees-Red Sox game, Fenway Park tours plus lunch, and tickets to the Red Sox Foundation’s Picnic in the Park. Stay tuned – I’ll have more info as we get closer to these giveaways!

Sports in Unexpected Places: Celtics in Autumn

2 October, 2010 /

On Friday night, I visited  the Topsfield Fair, which is a giant agricultural fair that marks the end of the fair season in Massachusetts. (For my fellow New York natives, it’s like a less state-pridey version of the New York State Fair, without the dairy bar and the New York State Lottery booth. Which, I mean, are the only parts of the NY State Fair I remember.)

Dodging downpours while leaping from exhibit to exhibit, I came across a vegetable display that any Boston sports fan has to give major props to: The Boston Celtics in Gourd Form.

A diorama of the Boston Celtics done in gourds from the Topsfield Fair.

The Gourd Celtics (Photo by me)

A local Cub Scout troop submitted their autumn gourd Boston Celtics display to the vegetable diorama competition, and obviously won first prize. What better way to celebrate your defending Eastern Conference Champions than to make semblances of them in gourds?

Oh no! Kendrick Perkins is down. Out three weeks with a bruised pumpkin. (I don’t know how well you can see the writing on the “jersey,” but it did read Kendrick Perkins.)

The Kendrick Perkins Gourd is down.

Oops. Kendrick Perkins Gourd is down. (Photo by me)

Major kudos to this Cub Scout troop for giving us a great example of Sports in Unexplained Places. Congratulations on winning first place.

They Hate Me: Western NY’s Toxic Back and Forth Relationship with Basketball

31 October, 2008 /

Pravin commented earlier this week on my treatise on New York State sports fandom with a great question on basketball in Western New York:

And where does basketball fit into all of this? Is there a particular team that people in Western New York prefer to root for? I’d imagine that the Knicks–not even factoring in their past seven seasons of futility–represent everything that upstaters hate about downstate. There is the connection between the old Buffalo Braves and L.A. Clippers, but not even the most ardent fan of the A.B.A. would retain that kind of loyalty.

Now, I have been in quite a few relationships in my day, including some of those of the on-and-off, back and forth, toxic variety.  (Who hasn’t in their day?  The degrees of severity vary, but everyone’s had at least one.)  But none come close to the toxic back and forth relationship that professional basketball has had with my home region of Western New York.  Professional basketball took Western New York and toyed with its emotions – “You want an NBA Championship? Here you go. Oh, wait – you aren’t “big enough” to support professional sports!  Sorry, let’s move the team away.” – until a whole generation and their children decided enough was enough, and ceased following the NBA all together.

Continue reading

On Being The Best Luck Charm

18 June, 2008 /

The Front Page of the Boston GlobeNever have I been a true fan of professional basketball. Yeah, as a tweenager, there was some excitement in Rochester when the Toronto Raptors came into existence- but they quickly flew away, once we realized how horrendous they really were. (Although that never stopped the proliferation of purple Vince Carter jerseys around the city.) But otherwise, the NBA did not register on my radar – I’m really short, I grew up in Hockey Land USA (Detroit can be Hockey Town, but Western New York is Hockey Land), and out of all the professional sports out there, my father thought basketball was the most corrupt. (Ever the conspiracy theorist, my father believed that all sports were corrupt – but he watched most of them anyway, because they were fun.) This all added up to my never exhausting my Sports Girl energy on following the Boston Celtics when I moved up here four years ago.

Last night, however, I became the most despised of all sports fans – the bandwagon jumper – and went to a local bar to watch Game 6 of the NBA Finals. Since I moved here, I’ve spent every potential championship game for a Boston sports team working an event on campus designed to keep the students from rioting. For the first time, a Boston team could win a championship and there were only a handful of students around, and thus no need to throw an arena-sized viewing party. Continue reading

Follow Me

Twitter / Google + / Instagram / Pinterest / Tumblr / FanCred /

© 2024 Kat Cornetta

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑