Be honest- every time you drive past LA Fitness of Lake Grove, don’t you get a little fired up?
This location, of course, once played host to an Island staple near and dear to the hearts of many Mid-Suffolk County millennials before shutting down on June 30, 2007 – fifteen years ago last Thursday.
Growing up in the 90s and the aughts meant the “Chuck E. Cheese, The Rinx and Sports Plus” birthday party rotation. The best part: just because your whole class may have been invited did not mean you were obligated to explore what Sports Plus had in store as a collective. When you arrived, you could break off and have side adventures with the recess mates, and without having to condense your calorie-burning hangouts into 20-minute intervals for a change.
“Sports Plus – where you go for laser tag, video games, ice hockey, bowling, and decent pizza. It kept kids away from drugs and gangs, and let them let loose,” said Gary Baker, 29, of Hauppauge – graduating class of 2011.
Another Hauppauge alum, Messenger eSports and international correspondent Connor Cunningham, 25, who is currently an EPIK-certified grade school teacher in South Korea, notes the “bittersweetness” of what, he didn’t realize at the time, would be the last visit he’d pay to the beloved recreation hub. “You know the game where you put tokens into a big pile that slowly gets pushed down?”
Who could forget it?
“The last time I ever went, some dude walked over and just grabbed the machine and tilted it at a 45-degree angle. All the coins fell down and the alarm started going crazy. Eleven-year-olds we were, we all took as many tickets as we could and ran. So I kept all the tickets for something big – sadly never to be spent.”
But you simply can’t take away memories like these. Those are “priceless,” according to Joe DeRamo, 23, of Smithtown. While DeRamo is technically a member of “Generation Z,” such was the advantage of having two older brothers with plenty of friends, and plenty of open-season birthday party shenanigans that weren’t crowded enough to deny someone’s little brother the chance to partake.
“I remember the first time my mom took us, we took a walk around the massive complex and were stunned by all of its glory. What kid wouldn’t want to spend their weekends there? You could be running around the arcade for hours at a time. I will never forget my brother telling me that one of his friends punched, and broke, one of the robotic clowns from the haunted house upstairs. Whenever Sports Plus comes up in conversation, there is nothing but amazing memories of the iconic and thrilling amusement center.”
We all have Sports Plus stories like this one, don’t we? Remember criticizing your 9-year-old best buddy’s positively reckless Go-kart driving skills, then subsequently eating it when you took over the wheel? Remember training for the end-of-the-year carnival’s seemingly sky-high hot pink slide all school year long at its Sports Plus-set indoor counterpart? Remember spinning off with your crush and her friends to play a variation of hide-and-seek at one point, and thinking a dolphin dive into the ball pit was the most original hiding place anyone’s ever conceived? These are things the mere closing of a building can never take away.
“Sports Plus was a kid’s dream turned into a reality,” said Gian Fasano, 27, of Port Jefferson Station. “I had my birthday party there at 10 years old, and it was one that I will never forget, even into my adult life. Families united there, kids had a place to experience it all and try new things they had never experienced before. I personally think that this day and age would benefit from a place like Sports Plus to really allow us to connect in the physical sense and return to days of family time and childhood investment.”
Whatever happened during your childhood, good or bad, made you you. And, in many ways, that’s the beauty of life itself – where one’s unwaning fondness for a place as long-buried as “Sports Plus” allows us to better relish in, rather than ignore, the entirety of our past experiences.
Fasano added, “Sports Plus will live on in all those who experienced it, and allow us to imagine what the future could look like for the next generations to come.”
We at The Messenger couldn’t have put it better ourselves. As always, don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened!
