Disney World's ESPN Wide World of Sports
When you think of Disney World, you may automatically think of Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, or the huge castle in Magic Kingdom. But did you know that Disney World has an entire sports park just for athletes and their really devoted fans? Recently, my family and I got invited to Disney World to tour Disney’s ESPN Wide World of Sports.
The Wide World of Sports complex spans about 230 acres, all of it holding bunches and bunches of fields for any sport imaginable and any team that plays it. It also hosts more than 300 sporting events annually, including spring training camp for the Atlanta Braves, exhibition games for many other major league teams, and many amateur athlete tournaments from all over the country.
The Wide World of Sports also has some fascinating technology, and all of it is developed right there at the facilities. Through their work and with the help of the many games held at the parks, ESPN has come up with many ways to help coaches, athletes, and fans get into the game, including creating 3D televisions to make you feel like you are actually at the sporting event and high-def broadcasting so that you can see everything going on at the field. The Wide World of Sports is actually the headquarters for where the inventors of all of that technology do all of the testing and inventing for ESPN, and we got to see where they worked.
We also got to do some pretty cool stuff while we were there. We got a tour of the fields and got to go inside some of the buildings that had just been upgraded. We also saw the unveiling of the new fieldhouse for all of the athletes and coaches. At the unveiling, we saw Mia Hamm, world famous soccer player, and Jason Witten, NFL star. Mia Hamm was even signing autographs after the unveiling, and my sister and I got to take a picture with her! My dad also got very excited when we went to go see the Atlanta Braves play against the Detroit Tigers in an exhibition match.
What I liked a lot was when we got to pose for a picture and they made it look like we were on the cover of ESPN. They had us dress in a Braves jersey and hat and pose with a bat in our hands. It was a really cool picture when it came out.
So the ESPN complex was definitely a world of fun, from the 3-D television to being on the cover of ESPN! I had a great time at Disney World’s Wide World of Sports.
Photo courtesy Mari Chiles
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