San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses the major cities and metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas. The Bay Area's nine counties are Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma. Home to approximately 7.44 million people, the nine-county Bay Area contains many cities, towns, airports, and associated regional, state, and national parks, connected by a network of roads, highways, railroads, bridges, tunnels and commuter rail. The combined statistical area of the region is the second-largest in California (after the Greater Los Angeles area), the fifth-largest in the United States, and the 43rd-largest urban area in the world.

The United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) does not use the nine-county definition of the San Francisco Bay Area. The OMB has designated a more extensive 12-county Combined Statistical Area (CSA) titled the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area which also includes the three counties of San Joaquin, Santa Cruz, and San Benito that do not border San Francisco Bay, but are economically tied to the nine counties that do.

Comcast SportsNet Bay Area

Comcast SportsNet Bay Area (sometimes abbreviated as CSN Bay Area) is an American regional sports network that is owned as a joint venture between NBCUniversal (which owns a controlling 45% interest), the San Francisco Giants (which owns 30%) and the Fox Entertainment Group division of 21st Century Fox (which owns 25%), and operates as an affiliate of Comcast SportsNet. Headquartered in San Jose, California, the channel broadcasts regional coverage of professional sports events throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Comcast SportsNet Bay Area is available on cable providers throughout Northern and Central California, Southern Oregon, and Nevada; it is also available nationwide on satellite via DirecTV and Dish Network. As of 2015, Ted Griggs serves as the president of the network.

History

The network was formed as a merger of two separate regional sports networks: the Pacific Sports Network, which launched in July 1989 as an affiliate of the Prime Network and SportsChannel Bay Area, an owned-and-operated outlet of SportsChannel America that launched in April 1990 under the ownership of Rainbow Media, the broadcasting subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corporation. The two networks merged in July 1991 into SportsChannel Pacific.

Ray Ratto

Ray Ratto (born 1954) has been a San Francisco Bay Area sportswriter since the 1970s and a sports columnist since the 1980s. He is "Senior Insider" for the TV station Comcast SportsNet Bay Area and writes for their website, CSNBayArea.com. He also has written national columns for espn.com and currently does same at CBS' sportsline.com. Beginning his column-writing career for two now-defunct newspapers, The National and the Peninsula Times Tribune, Ratto later became a staff writer, then a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. He left the Chronicle for CSNBayArea.com in 2010. Ratto is one of 60 sports writers whose ranking of college football teams makes up the AP Poll. He is a regular on Tom Tolbert's radio show on KNBR.

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Klay Thompson

Klay Alexander Thompson (born February 8, 1990) is an American professional basketball player for the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The son of former NBA player Mychal Thompson, he played college basketball for three seasons at Washington State University, where he was a two-time first-team all-conference selection in the Pac-10. Thompson was selected in the first round of the 2011 NBA draft by Golden State with the 11th overall pick. In 2014, he and teammate Stephen Curry set an NBA record with 484 combined three-pointers in a season, as the pair were given the nickname the "Splash Brothers". Thompson was named an NBA All-Star and selected to the All-NBA Team in 2015, and helped lead the Warriors win their first NBA championship since 1975.

High school career

Thompson was born in Los Angeles. At age 2, his family moved to Lake Oswego, Oregon, where he was childhood friends and Little League teammates with fellow future NBA star Kevin Love. At age 14, Thompson moved with his family to Ladera Ranch, California, and graduated from Santa Margarita Catholic High School in Rancho Santa Margarita in 2008. In his junior season he was named to the All-Area second team and to the Orange County third team. As a senior Thompson averaged 21 points per game and led SMCHS to a 30–5 record and a Division III State Championship appearance. During the state championship, Thompson set a state finals record with seven 3-pointers in a game. He was named Division III State player of the year, League MVP, first-team Best in the West, and an EA Sports Second Team All American.

Area

Area is the quantity that expresses the extent of a two-dimensional figure or shape, or planar lamina, in the plane. Surface area is its analog on the two-dimensional surface of a three-dimensional object. Area can be understood as the amount of material with a given thickness that would be necessary to fashion a model of the shape, or the amount of paint necessary to cover the surface with a single coat. It is the two-dimensional analog of the length of a curve (a one-dimensional concept) or the volume of a solid (a three-dimensional concept).

The area of a shape can be measured by comparing the shape to squares of a fixed size. In the International System of Units (SI), the standard unit of area is the square metre (written as m²), which is the area of a square whose sides are one metre long. A shape with an area of three square metres would have the same area as three such squares. In mathematics, the unit square is defined to have area one, and the area of any other shape or surface is a dimensionless real number.