Ocala is home to Trinity Catholic High School, which holds the record for the longest high school football championship game in Florida history, going into triple overtime.
on January 6, 2011, the mayor declared January 6 as Trinity Catholic Celtics Day, in honor of this feat.
Ocala, Florida was home Belleview Bulldogs in the FCSL before it folded in 2008. It is also home to one of the largest youth football leagues in the state in the MCYFL. Ocala is hosting the regional events for the Junior League in the Little League World Series in August 2010.
In 1995, Ocala was named an All-America City Award winner.
Ocala has two sister cities:
Several major highways pass through Ocala, including Interstate 75, U.S. Highway 27, U.S. Route 301, and U.S. Highway 441. Ocala was on the western leg of the historic Dixie Highway.
Ocala International Airport provides general aviation services to the community. Ocala Suntran provides bus service throughout select parts of the city. One of the major hubs for Suntran is the former Ocala Union Station, which served Amtrak trains until November 2004.
Ocala is the home for the Ocala Symphony Orchestra. The Ocala Symphony Orchestra, Inc., a non-profit organization, began in 1975, when a group of musicians and citizens set out to create a symphonic orchestra for the area. In the fall of 1976 a four-concert subscription season was initiated - a format that continues to this day. The Ocala Symphony Orchestra was later incorporated in the State of Florida and recognized by the IRS as a 501c3 non-profit corporation.
Also, the Ocala Civic Theatre is located in Ocala, and it presents professional-quality, live productions at an affordable price. Ocala Civic Theatre produces more than twelve fully staged productions each season, in addition to hosting touring companies. The Theatre offers a year-round education program that reaches over 1000 students each year. Both skills classes and performance classes are offered to students ages 4–18. This volunteer-based organization is one of the largest community theaters in the state and serves more than 50,000 Marion, Citrus and Lake County residents each season.
Islet
Islets are small islands. Examples are Ortac in the English Channel and the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.
Grand Ole Opry
The Grand Ole Opry is a country music organization. It performs a concert every week and gives awards. The legendary Loretta lynn has been performing there for over 50 years. Also the famous Carrie Underwood has been playing there since 2006 and still plays there today. The type of music that they play is country music
Russia at the Olympics
Russia has been at the modern Olympic Games many times. They have been called different nations. As the Russian Empire, they were first at the 1900 Games. They returned again in 1908 and 1912. After the Russian revolution in 1917, and the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922, they were not at the Olympics again until the 1952 Summer Olympics. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia competed as part of the Unified Team in 1992. They returned once again as "Russia" at the 1994 Winter Olympics.
The Soviet Union hosted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Russia will host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Since 2012, Russian athletes have won a total of 404 medals (399 since 1994) at the Summer Olympic Games. They have another 91 at the Winter Olympic Games. Over the most recent ten Games (since 1994), Russia's 495 total medals, including 170 gold medals, are second only to the United States (with 631 and 237, respectively).
The Russian Olympic Committee was formed in 1991 and recognized in 1993.
Neil Lennon
Neil Francis Lennon (born 25 June 1971) is a football manager and former player from Northern Ireland. He is the manager and former captain of Celtic.
During his playing career he represented English clubs Manchester City, Crewe Alexandra and Leicester City before moving to Scottish club Celtic where he made over 200 appearances as a midfielder. Before retiring as a player, he returned to England to represent Nottingham Forest and Wycombe Wanderers.
Lennon made 40 appearances for Northern Ireland in nine years, scoring two goals.
Advanced Light Source
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California is a synchrotron light source. It was built from 1987 to 1993. 210 scientists and staff currently work there.
The ALS is a national user facility. The ALS makes intense light for scientific and technological research. It is one of the world's brightest sources of ultraviolet and soft x-ray beams. Each year over 2000 researchers go to the ALS from universities, industries, and government laboratories around the world. ALS is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Sciences.
The ALS has over forty beamlines. They do a wide range of science at the same time as each other. Any qualified scientist can ask to use the ALS beamlines. Proposals are reviewed by others. The proposals which most people agree on are allowed to use the ALS. The ALS does not charge money to use if the user's research is made public.
The Advanced Light Source's current director is Roger Falcone.
Physicists in Berkeley California began working on accelerating subatomic particles in the 1920s. In 1929, Ernest O. Lawrence built the first cyclotron to accelerate subatomic particles. During World War II, a laboratory there was a part of the Manhattan Project. They were given money from the military. In 1942, Lawrence hired Arthur Brown, Jr. (designer of the Coit Tower in San Francisco) to design a new round building to hold Lawrence's new 4.67 m (184 in) cyclotron. That building, with expansions, is the one which the ALS is in today. The laboratory was a part of the United States Atomic Energy Commission until 1977 when it was moved to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Physicists kept on improving particle accelerators by increasing their energy. The designers wanted higher energy to study smaller building blocks of matter. From the start, physicists realized that as charged particles spun around, they gave off electromagnetic radiation. In the early 1950s, other scientists started to use this radiation for experiments unrelated to the "atom smashing" collisions that were the primary goal of the machines. Particle accelerators shifted from cyclotrons to synchrotrons where the particles traveled in a circle rather than in a spiral path. Construction costs increased as synchrotrons got bigger to the point that many nations joined to build just one very big synchrotron in Europe (CERN) to conduct atom smashing experiments. Other synchrotron labs, such as the Lawrence Berkeley Lab did not have enough energy to discover new particles. So, they switched to using their machines as a source of electromagnetic radiation. Instead of tuning the machine to make particles travel faster, they learned how to wiggle the particle beam to give off particular frequencies of light. In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists wanted to redesign synchrotrons to generate brighter light (more intense electromagnetic radiation) than ever before. These designs were called "third generation synchrotrons." The ALS was the first third generation synchrontron put into operation.
When the Advanced Light Source was first proposed in the early 1980s by former Lawrence Berkeley Lab director David Shirley, skeptics dubbed it "Shirley's Temple" and doubted the use of a synchrotron tuned to make soft x-rays and ultraviolet light. According to former ALS director Daniel Chemla, "The scientific case for a third-generation soft x-ray facility such as the ALS had always been fundamentally sound. However, getting the larger scientific community to believe it was an uphill battle"
In the 1987 Reagan administration budget, President Ronald Reagan allocated $1.5 million for the construction of the Advanced Light Source.
Undulator