Archive for November, 2007
Nov. 30, 2007 — A pandemic
I can’t remember who said this, but I’ll try to paraphrase it.
If something happens once, it’s an event. Twice, it’s a coincidence. Three times, it’s a trend.
But what about four? A full-blown epidemic? OK, how about ten?
Last night, they held a vigil for the tenth teenager to die in a car crash this month in the state of Maryland alone.
And for the fourth time in the past six weeks, we’ve lost a member of the American field hockey community aged 16 or younger.
Please pray for the players and coaches of Waldorf Thomas Stone (Md.) as they try to cope with the death of sophomore Stephanie Weir.
Nov. 29, 2007 — Racking up the trophies
A few months ago, we discussed the tradition of great American goalkeepers in team sports.
Hopefully, it continues all the way to Beijing.
Nov. 28, 2007 — A change in the offing
Twenty three years ago, the Intercontinental Cup of field hockey was played in the United States.
One of the sites used was a patch of land near Hillwood Lakes at Trenton State College just north of the state capitol in Ewing, N.J.
If you watch tape of the games, you’ll notice the lack of a grandstand on the other side of the field. That 6,000-seat artifice wasn’t actually constructed until 1988.
For two decades, Lions Stadium on the campus of The College of New Jersey has been perhaps the single best place in America to watch a field hockey or lacrosse game.
The stands are elevated so that there is literally no bad seat. An area at the northwest corner of the field is separated from the outside only by a metal barricade, and alumnae often go to that rail to offer encouragement. There is an intimacy watching a game from that rail that is unmatched in my career in sport — even compared to courtside seats at a basketball game.
And, since Lions Stadium was opened in 1984, the floor of the stadium has been covered by short-grained AstroTurf; according to the school’s website, the installation featured an innovative drainage system which was the first of its kind in the United States.
But the 2007 New Jersey Tournament of Champions for field hockey represents a point in history as the last event there to be held on artificial turf: the current turf, which was installed in 1999, is scheduled to be replaced within the next few months with artificial grass.
To my mind, it’s a curious choice. TCNJ recently spent a lot of money building a soccer-specific grass facility for its soccer teams. I am surprised that the school didn’t decide to install grass at Lions Stadium and erect a Maryland-esque field hockey and lacrosse complex.
Mind you, the men’s and women’s soccer teams have won four national titles despite having to play on artificial turf like in the days of the old NASL.
The field hockey and women’s lacrosse teams, by contrast, have won 22 AIAW and NCAA titles and are having the rug pulled out from under them.
The field hockey team prefers the short turf for obvious reasons. But the lacrosse team, with its speed and quick cuts, built its game around artificial turf, a surface which was the preferred surface for NCAA Final Four play pretty much from 1993 until 2001.
There’s been a debate within the athletic department over the composition of the artificial grass: long-grain or short? I’ll be interested to see how the upcoming renovation affects the field hockey team’s gameplay next fall and beyond.
Nov. 27, 2007 — Rise of the (mini) machines
I write most of the entries on this blog with an Apple 12.1-inch iBook with a 500 mHz chip.
It was a computer built sometime in 2001, which, in the warp-speed world of technological change, is ancient.
And yet, it gets the most compliments when I sit down in a public place to write.
You see, laptop computers went “big” a few years ago — 15, 17, and 19-inch models became the industry standard. Bigger hard drives, faster (and more heat-intensive) processors became the norm instead of the exception.
Then, came the “One Laptop Per Child” program, which was conceived as a way to bring technology to the Third World. These low-cost computers, made of recycled plastic, running on a Linux operating system, and containing no hard drive, was a way to give incentives to telecommunications companies to invest in global wireless Internet access.
But an odd thing has happened as the so-called “$99 Laptop” concept has hit the market place. Other computer makers started going smaller. There is an entire new class of laptop computer called the ultra-mobile PC (UMPC). An example, the Asus Eee PC, is seen at left.
Might we actually see the rise of the Cassiopeia machines — very small hand-held PCs — which were in vogue around 2000? I’m not so sure.
Nov. 26, 2007 — One first, one second, three winners
Over the weekend, Firestyx took silver in Pool A of the USA Field Hockey National Festival. Firestyx is made entirely of players from Emmaus (Pa.), which finished at the top of the final weekly Top 10 last week.
Emmaus has won nine state championships in the last 17 seasons. Three times, the team has strung together four-year spans in which the Hornets have won three championships: 1991 to 1994, 1994 to 1997, and 2004 to 2007.
The latest span not only confirms Emmaus as the premier program in Pennsylvania field hockey history, but also cements a group of seniors amongst some of the all-time greats of the game.
But perhaps few were greater than the Jennings triplets — Rachel, Tara, and Erin.
The greatness of the Jennings sisters cannot be found in statistics. Instead, you have to watch them play and appreciate their quickness, skill, athleticism, and team play. It didn’t matter who was alongside these triplets over four years at Emmaus — all they did was win. The team won 105 out of 109 varsity matches over their four seasons.
The only losses? One to Hummelstown Lower Dauphin (Pa.) and three to Voorhees Eastern (N.J.). That’s pretty good company.
And about 15 minutes after the 2007 final, so were the Jennings triplets. As I interviewed them, and looked into their eyes, it dawned on me that, a few minutes after I turned off the tape recorder, it would be the final time that the three of them would walk off a varsity field as teammates.
For next year, the three sisters will be heading to different schools. Erin will be playing for Princeton, Tara is heading to Duke, and Rachel will be playing for the University of Virginia. That means that all of that greatness will be spread around NCAA Division I for the next four or five autumns.
They may not have the individual impacts on Division I that Katie O’Donnell and Katelyn Falgowski have had this year, or the long-term impact that the Walls triplets from Eastern have had on James Madison the last three years.
But they’ll be fun to watch.
Nov. 25, 2007 — North of the border
This website has tracked the stories, accomplishments, and statistics of the best scholastic field hockey programs in the United States.
But how well would an Emmaus, an Eastern, a Wyoming Seminary, a La Costa Canyon compare against a scholastic team from Canada?
It’s hard to know; the only team that regularly crosses the border for games is Buffalo Nichols School (N.Y.), which plays in the Conference of Independent Schools of Ontario.
This year, Nichols had a superb regular-season campaign in CISAA play, winning five matches and playing a goalless draw against St. John Kilmarnock of Breslau, Ont. Nichols, however, lost in overtime of their playoff game against Lakefield College School.
Now, there is also good Canadian scholastic field hockey in the Maritime provinces, a good cluster of schools around Calgary, and in Ontario. But most of the best hockey is played in British Columbia.
That’s where Class AAA champion West Vancouver comes from. The Highlanders posted a 27-0 record for 2007, led by sophomore Kim Scraper, who had 11 goals in the six matches of the provincial championship tournament.
Now, given the willingness of the best field hockey competition to seek each other out over the last decade and a half, since Newtown Council Rock (Pa.) made the trip down Interstate 95 to meet Virginia Beach Frank W. Cox (Va.) in the early 1990s, isn’t it about time a couple of B.C. schools made a tour of the United States?
Nov. 24, 2007 — What if they called a strike and nobody cared?
Perhaps nothing has signaled the warp-speed changes in the entertainment industry quite like the collective yawn that the Hollywood television writers’ strike and the Broadway stagehands strike have elicited.
You see, the amount and extent of choices for the public’s entertainment dollars have multiplied so much over the last 10 years, losing Broadway plays and scripted television shows is, frankly, no big loss anymore.
Where there used to be three major networks are now hundreds of channels, some from all over the globe. My digital cable system can pick up network programming from Nigeria, Russia, Holland, and the BBC.
But what it also picks up are stations which rely a lot on reruns, such as Spike, TBS, TNT, and Sleuth. Many of these series were filmed in an era before anybody could have conceived of the Internet and home video. Very few of the residuals for these series have gone to the original writers or actors.
Thing is, when it comes to future royalties for television series, a sizable horse has already left the barn; classic (and some not-so-classic) series are being sold on DVD and shown on cable television. And only the very forward-thinking employees have gotten paid for them.
It’s too bad that today’s writer’s guild isn’t seeing the future its withdrawal of services is creating: reality and game shows in prime time, or endless channels of sports and reruns.
When it comes to the Broadway stagehand strike, the job action has failed to completely shut down New York City’s theater district. Eight Broadway shows are still running, including the big-budget musical “Xanadu.” The off-Broadway culture of experimental theaters and plays is going strong, and theatergoers may simply choose to go there.
Or pick up a DVD.
Or watch the 500-channel universe.
Amazing what the invisible hand can do, no?
Nov. 23, 2007 — The Friday Statwatch for games played through Nov. 18
This is our last weekly Statwatch until our end-of-year package of stories is issued in December — final Top 50, The State of Hockey, Region of the Year, United States Coach of the Year, and a final Statwatch.
What follows is a compilation of statistics from not only newspaper texts and some reader submissions, but from statistics compiled by, amongst others, The Boston Globe, HighSchoolSports.Net, The North County Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Long Island Newsday, The Wilmington News-Journal, The Phoenixville News, The Asbury Park Press, The Buffalo News, The Wilkes-Barre Citizens Voice, The Allentown Morning Call, The Baltimore Sun, The Newark Star-Ledger, The Westchester Journal-News, The Rocky Mountain News, and BeyondTheDerby.com.
Team goals scored
164 Voorhees Eastern (N.J.)
162 Emmaus (Pa.)
143 Louisville Sacred Heart (Ky.)
143 Warren Quaboag Regional (Mass.)
135 Flourtown Mount St. Joseph Academy (Pa.)
130 Selinsgrove (Pa.)
127 Kingston Wyoming Seminary (Pa.)Team goals allowed
1 Lakeville Hotchkiss School (Conn.)
3 Warren Quaboag Regional (Mass.)Individidual goals scored
56 Lauren Gonsalves, Harwich (Mass.)
50 Kathleen Sharkey, Kingston Wyoming Seminary (Pa.)
47 Morgan Fleetwood, Selinsgrove (Pa.)
45 Lauren Alwine, Hummelstown Lower Dauphin (Pa.)
42 Jessica Fritz, Bayville Central Regional (N.J.)
41 Chantae Miller, Williamsville (N.Y.) North
39 Leeann Black, York Springs Bermudian Springs (Pa.)
39 Taylor Rhea, Virginia Beach Frank W. Cox (Va.)
37 Elizabeth Dwyer, Ladue Horton Watkins (Mo.)
36 Kelsey Mitchell, Voorhees Eastern (N.J.)
35 Erica Henderson, Pocomoke (Md.)
35 Kayla Littig, Carver (Mass.)
35 Brooke Borneman, Center Valley Southern Lehigh (Pa.)
34 Paige Selenski, Dallas (Pa.)
34 Katie Reinprecht, Mount St. Joseph Academy (Pa.)Individidual goals scored, career
149 Lauren Gonsalves, Harwich (Mass.)
148 Chantae Miller, Williamsville (N.Y.) North
109 Morgan Fleetwood, Selinsgrove (Pa.)Individidual assists, career
135 Chantae Miller, Williamsville (N.Y.) NorthGoalkeeper shutouts, career
55 Kieran Sweeney, Flourtown Mount St. Joseph’s Academy
53 Devon Seifert, Ocean City (N.J.)
53 Nicole Lewis, Williamsville (N.Y.) NorthWinning streak, team
54 Louisville Sacred Heart (Ky.)
47 Stowe (Vt.)Unbeaten streak, team
54 Louisville Sacred Heart (Ky.)
47 Stowe (Vt.)
If you see something amiss, make sure to send us an email so that we can improve the final Statwatch to be published in November.
Perhaps the most statistically significant event of last week was Rye (N.Y.) besting Garden City (N.Y.) 1-0 in double overtime of the New York Class B semifinals. That broke Garden City’s 62-game winning streak.
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Nov. 22, 2007 — England, DNQ
Yesterday afternoon, the English men’s national soccer team lost 3-2 to Croatia in the final qualifications for the 2008 European championships.
The loss meant that England, the nation that invented the sport, codified the Laws of the Game, and made its domestic league into a revenue stream which is the envy of even North American sports leagues, is not going to be involved in the world’s second-most important competition for national teams. It’s England’s most disappointing failure since not making the 1994 World Cup in the United States.
This morning, headlines in the country are screaming for the heads of the coaching staff (Steve McClaren is likely to be axed today), members of The Football Association, and, very likely, individual players.
The thing is, in the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), the competition is stiffer than ever before, thanks to political changes the last 20 years. Where there was once 37 UEFA national associations, there are now 53 eligible to qualify. Remember Czechoslovakia? There are now two teams. Remember East and West Germany? They’ve reunified. The Soviet Union? Yugoslavia? Broken up.
I believe that stiff competition is good for a sport, as well as good for the teams taking part; if it is difficult to qualify for a certain competition, the teams making it should be world-beaters.
Then again, consider that Greece, the 2004 European Cup winners, didn’t even qualify for the 2006 World Cup. Denmark, the 1992 European Cup champs, didn’t qualify for the 1994 World Cup.
Perhaps this will wind up being a good omen for the Lions come South Africa 2010.
Nov. 21, 2007 — A lot has changed at Oak Knoll in 25 years
In the fall of 1982, I was part of a four-player team representing my high school, participating in The Rutgers Bowl, an academic game show broadcast on statewide public television.
It wasn’t a bad gig: our team and a number of students got most of the day off for the 90-minute bus ride. Mac was behind the wheel, busing us to a small studio across the river from New Brunswick.
Our opponent that first day was Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child in Summit, N.J. While we brought enough students to fill the studio, Oak Knoll sent nobody. The four members of the team didn’t even know what its mascot was; apparently, the school was in the midst of a change from the nickname “Blue Bombers.” Anticipating the change to another flying mascot, one of their team members suggested “Aquila,” the Latin word for “eagle.”
I’m not going to divulge the final score of the game, but we moved on to the next round in what could have been called a performance worthy of the girls’ lacrosse team from Ellicott City Mount Hebron (Md.).
We won another Rutgers Bowl match before losing in the quarterfinals by 20 points — a game which we would have won had I come up with the name Walter Johnson instead of Christy Mathewson. Grrrr.
Since then, the four members of our team have found different paths in life. Our captain served with the U.S. Embassy in Tajikistan. Our math, science and sci-fi guru is a Presbyterian minister. Our English history expert is a professor in California. The fourth is your humble Founder.
Now, over the last 15 or so years, I’ve been noticing the steady improvement in Oak Knoll’s field hockey program. The school has gotten bigger, is calling itself the Royals, and earned the top seed for a couple of seasons in the New Jersey Independent Schools Athletic Association tournament for prep schools.
Their leaders in those days were a scorer named Annie Sciulli and a never-say-die attacker named Ali Sumas.
Then, Oak Knoll joined a number of teams breaking from NJISAA ranks to become full-time members of public school conferences in the 1990s. And since 2000, prep schools have won the state Group I championship six out of eight times.
But to be able to compete against the greats of the state? That was absolutely unthinkable — until you understand that the road to a Group I title almost invariably had to go through West Long Branch Shore Regional (N.J.), a team of some notoriety and excellence the past four decades.
The Royals blossomed one week ago today in a 3-2 overtime win over Voorhees Eastern (N.J.), the state’s dominant field hockey program for nine years. It was a team with a fluid attack, a bend-but-don’t-break defense, and a head coach named Ali Sumas Good.
Oak Knoll may have lost its final match 3-0 to Medford Lakes Shawnee (N.J.), but it bears understanding how far the team — and the school — have come in a quarter century.
