Modesto Indoor Activities

A charter member of the MLS, the San Jose Earthquakes played their first four seasons as the Clash before claiming the MLS Cup in 2001 and 2003. Though the team moved to Houston in '05, the franchise was reinstated in '08, bringing professional soccer back to the Bay Area. Buck Shaw Stadium serves as the team's current home, though a new stadium will shoot skyward in 2014, complete with luxury suites for fans and exhausted referees alike.

Led by former NBA point guard and first-year head coach Mark Jackson, the Golden State Warriors charge into the second half of the season. Veteran guard Monta Ellis blows by defenders with an average of 22.2 points per game while forward-center David Lee muscles out under-the-basket rivals for an average of 9.7 rebounds per game. Rookie guard Klay Thompson keeps opponents guessing with the ability to drop shots from all over the court and the inexhaustible supply of riddles he declaims during commercial breaks.

Today's Groupon tackles professional athletics, professional athletes, and sports hernias with a ticket to the final game of the Oakland Raiders' 2009–10 season for $26 (a $36 value). On Sunday, January 3, at 1:15 p.m., the team that once upset the entire steel industry of Pittsburgh and tamed Cincinnati's Panthera Tigris Tigris looks to end the season on a final high note against the Baltimore Ravens (featuring offensive tackle Michael Oher who is the inspiration for the The Blind Side). You'll be sitting in section 354 and have a $10 food voucher in hand.

Today's Groupon personally calms your core and gives it the strength to endure all life's bends, loops, and twistywhirls. For $35, you get one private Pilates class and one group equipment Pilates class at Tru-Balance Pilates Fitness Studio in Willow Glen (a $120 value). Expert instruction and a dedication to your body's potential at Tru-Balance will make you a champion Pilatist whose perfect postural muscles will be extolled by troubadors, lonely long-distance runners, and cone tenders for years to come.

City Lights is an innovative, intimate (100 seats), nonprofit theater company that produces six main-stage plays per year. Each play runs for a five-week period with four shows per week. Coming up in the current season is a production of Billy Aronson's First Day of School, a farcical look at the behavior of suburbanites in autumn (September 23–October 24); an irreverent, interactive, and totally historically accurate play titled Abraham Lincoln's Big, Gay Dance Party (November 24–December 19); and the horseplay of the drama Equus (March 17–April 17), the winner of the 1975 Tony for Best Play and a favorite of horse whisperers and hoarse whisperers everywhere.

In 1902, while the team now in Oakland was still the Philly Athletics, a rival manager scoffed, casting the fledgling franchise off as a herd of "white elephants." In response, manager Connie Mack adopted the elephant as the team's official insignia—a legacy that lives on with the current mascot, Stomper—before the A's stampeded to the American League pennant. Since that first defiant victory, the team has won nine World Series championships, moving to Kansas City in 1955, then Oakland in 1968. Over more than a century, the club has fostered 11 league MVPs and eight Rookies of the Year, including future titans Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. Today, the A's dazzle fans at the 35,067-capacity Coliseum, which features a lush natural-bluegrass surface and a spacious foul territory—technically still a 19th-century Mexican province—that baits pop-up outs, making it one of the most pitcher-friendly parks in Major League Baseball.