Bangor, Maine - Sport and Recreation

Sport and Recreation

The Eastern Maine High school basketball Tournament is held each February at the Bangor Auditorium drawing fans from central, eastern and northern Maine. The nearby University of Maine fields major college sports teams in football, ice hockey, baseball, and men's and women's basketball. Bangor has also been home to two minor league baseball teams in the past decade: the Bangor Blue Ox (1996–1997) and the Bangor Lumberjacks (2003–2004). Both were affiliated with the Northeast League that existed under that name from 1995 to 1998.

Bangor High School sports teams are traditionally strong competitors. In the state "class A" division of both baseball and basketball, Bangor holds the record for number of combined champion and runner-up placements. In football they share that record with South Portland. Both the boy's and the girl's swim teams have also tallied the most state-wide wins.

Bangor Raceway, located at the Bass Park Civic Center and Auditorium, offers live, pari-mutuel harness racing from May through July and then briefly in the fall. Also, nearby Hollywood Slots operated by Penn National Gaming is Maine's first slot machine gambling center. In 2007, construction began on a $131 million casino complex in Bangor that houses, among other things, a gaming floor featuring approximately 1,000 slot machines, an off-track betting center, a seven-story hotel, and a four-level parking garage. In 2011, it was authorized to add table games.

Since 2002, Bangor has been home to Little League International's Senior League World Series.

Bangor has also been of historical importance to professional wrestling. Vince McMahon promoted his very first wrestling event in Bangor in 1979. In 1985, the WWC Universal Heavyweight Championship changed hands for the first time outside of Puerto Rico in Bangor at an IWCCW show.

The Bangor City Forest and other nearby parks, forests and waterways support a wide variety of outdoor activities including hiking, sailing, canoeing, hunting, fishing, skiing, and snowmobiling.

The Penobscot has always been the premier salmon-fishing river in Maine, and the Bangor Salmon Pool traditionally sent the first fish caught to the President of the United States. Low fish stocks resulted in a ban on salmon fishing in 1999–2006 but the wild salmon population (and the sport) is slowly recovering. The Penobscot River Restoration Project is presently working to help the fish population by removing certain dams north of Bangor.