Creative Commons Image | Courtesy of simplerich

Back in the early-late nineties I was in my mid-late childhood and April was a deceiving month if I remember it correctly. The weather started to get nice again and we’d have that one glorious long-weekend. Things started to feel a lot like summer, except there are two more months of school; the two most torturous months of school on the calendar. To offset the pain of school and slowly integrate us back into Fun, the good people of the community scheduled summer sports to start up at around the same time.

Like most families with kids o’ plenty, my siblings and I were always registered in some kind of sport – my brother played hockey in the winter and baseball in the summer; my sister and I figure skated during the winter and it was soccer, soccer, soccer all summer. This added up to quite a bit of equipment, and to my parents’ unending frustration every season we grew a little more and had to replace said equipment.

The more I think about it, my family rarely bought any sports equipment used – except for figure and hockey skates. I don’t know why those were the exception, but they were (my best guess is because the skate exchange was just down the street). Hand-me-downs were always a problem because we were inconveniently all different sizes from our cousins and from each other. So my parents usually went out and bought everything new. (If only we had the interwebs and Used.ca then, am I right?).

Apart from soccer cleats and extra-strong-brand rugby shorts, my sister and I got away pretty cheap on the equipment-buying front. The real problem was my hockey-playing brother and the bags of gear that the sport apparently requires. Considering how rancid his equipment was after a season I can understand why someone might buy it new rather than used.

Being April, that in-between month where it’s not winter anymore but it’s not really summer either; winter sports are over and summer sports are just about to kick-off; and spring cleaning is all the rage, is now the time to buy and/or sell old sports equipment?

What is the situation with sports equipment like in your family? Do you buy only new – or used – equipment? Are some kinds of equipment completely off limits to sell/buy used? Or is it all fair game? Pun intended.