Archive for July, 2008
July 31, 2008 — What’s with Wie?
It’s been about five years since Michelle Wie was introduced as The Next Big Thing in women’s golf.
The big thing: a prodigious swing which could propel the ball nearly 300 yards.
But since winning the U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links championship in 2003, she has not won a tournament since. Too, she needs a good finish in her last LPGA event this year to avoid being sent to Qualifying School next year to earn her LPGA Tour card.
This weekend, she’s in Nevada playing in a PGA tournament thinned by a World Golf Championship event, while most of her LPGA compatriots are in England for the Women’s British Open.
She’s around the cut line after today’s score of one over par, but there are two notables. One, she is five strokes ahead of David Duval, who is one of only a handful of golfers ever to shoot under 60 strokes in a provessional tournament.
Two, she still draws people: her gallery today was the biggest on the golf course. I just hope they don’t see a car wreck tomorrow.
July 30, 2008 — The denouement of the War on Turf
Yesterday, the Consumer Products Safety Commission ruled that artificial turf is, indeed, safe. This finding contradicts the unscientific and often misleading claims of environmental groups and self-appointed community activists whose machinations threatened the existing and future physical plants for American youth sports.
Threatened investigations and lawsuits would not only have affected school districts unable to create more competition surfaces on school property, it would have especially impacted the game of field hockey, for which short-grain water-based artificial turf is the preferred surface.
Now, if we can only do something about the mandated eyewear …
July 29, 2008 — Early indicators?
Over the last few days, finals from the field hockey tournaments at the Empire State Games and the Keystone Games were played.
Hudson Valley won its fourth straight championship in the Empire State Games, defeating Long Island 2-0. The Hudson Valley dynasty is pretty impressive, and has come from hard work not only from the players, but from its head coach.
Sharon Sarsen, a NFHCA Hall of Fame coach, has a three-week regimen for her team, including triple sessions on some weekends. The results have borne great rewards in ESG play: only one time in the past 18 years has Hudson Valley failed to medal.
Over the border in Pennsylvania, the Blue Mountain region representing Lancaster and vicinity won its first U-19 championship in a decade with a 2-0 win over defending champion Lehigh Valley.
Now, I’m not 100 percent sure whether the Blue Mountain win (plus its silver in U-16 and gold in U-14) represents a sea change in Pennsylvania hockey this fall. After all, Lehigh Valley was in all three championship finals as well.
Should be interesting as some training camps begin in a couple of weeks.
July 28, 2008 — Something to think about
Did you know that there are churches out there who spy on their parishoners? And others hire armed guards for their members?
In the wake of this past weekend’s shootings in Knoxville, Tenn., a brazen church robbery near Philadelphia, and one last November in Colorado, you may wonder if the military-security complex will start focusing on churches.
But take the last line of this story, and ask yourself: why are there some religious faiths who feel that it takes man-made weaponry to protect worshipers rather than the grace of God?
July 27, 2008 — Why you should support the U.S. field hockey team
Here’s a thought two weeks out from the start of the Olympics:
Did you know that only two members of the U.S. women’s Olympic field hockey team are from towns larger than 25,000 people? And that a handful are from towns smaller than 2,000? It’s a hard-working group of women with small-town values and big-time dreams.
July 26, 2008 — The long off-season
Last weekend, I went to a girls’ lacrosse club event split between two sites near Annapolis, Md.
They needed to split the sites, because there were dozens of teams in a sunsplash of colors for as far as you could see.
It’s one of an absolute kaleidoscope of youth tournaments from New York to Colorado which have evolved over the last ten years or so. It’s gotten to the point where these tournaments are more important to the development of players and their recruitment to colleges than National Schoolgirls or the high-school season.
Which begs the question: why hasn’t this happened in field hockey? Aside from the various “state games,” there is a dearth of outdoor youth field hockey club tournaments between the Cal Cup on Memorial Day Weekend and the Big Apple Tournament near Memorial Day.
Oh, sure, there are plenty of camps, the National Futures Tournament, and the Junior Olympics. But the fact that there seems to be a major club tournament just about every weekend during the summer does create a perception.
July 25, 2008 — Where did everybody go?
The electric sign over the interstate said it all:
CRASH AHEAD: TWO LEFT LANES BLOCKED
That plus some brake lights about four miles away from the estimated site of the crash, was enough for me to take the next exit. I took an alternate route, a U.S. highway I knew paralleled the interstate, and rejoined ahead of the crash site. When I got back on the four-lane road, there was the usual gaggle of headlights in the oncoming lanes. But there was nobody … nobody! on the road around me.
For the next 16 miles, It was kind of surreal.
It also befuddled me that my fellow drivers didn’t think of taking the alternate route. But then again, I did notice that most of them had these global positioning systems in their cars that their pilots were slavishly following, without thinking.
I guess nobody driving the highway was a field hockey player.
July 24, 2008 — Making a welcome return
A few months ago, I wrote about head field hockey coaches who stepped aside to become assistants at the schools whose programs they built.
Add another one to the list: a very special one.
Robin Woodie, who was the TopOfTheCircle.com 2005 United States Coach of the Year for taking Fredericksburg Stafford (Va.) to a state championship, will return to the Indians’ sideline as a varsity assistant coach. Only this time, she’ll have her daughter Danielle beside her.
Thing is, since Robin Woodie left the sideline after her championship season, the Indians have done reasonably well without her. Stafford made the state tournament in 2006 and 2007, and made the state final a year ago before losing to Virginia Beach Frank W. Cox (Va.).
Welcome back, Robin.
July 23, 2008 — Hard women, hard tackles, hard choices
In the last dozen or so years of the women’s sports revolution, you have seen the occasional adoption of characteristics of men’s professional athletics.
Last night, however, was something different.
When the Detroit Pistons and Los Angeles Sparks got involved in a melee at the end of their game, it was the manifestation of the characteristics of their coaches. But it was also perhaps one of the first signs that more and more games in the WNBA and in women’s pro sports, are being seen as competitive.
Let me explain. When the WNBA, WUSA, and National Pro Fastpitch were formed in the late 1990s on the backs of Olympic, World Cup, or world championship teams, not many fans of the Hamms and Lobos and Richardsons understood that their heroines would be competing against each other on a regular basis. This put people whose utter fascination with the national team prevented them from seeing, say, Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain as competitors rather than teammates.
In other words, the average fan who came to a WUSA or WNBA or WPF match didn’t actually root for the club — they came to see one or two players, often on opposite teams. The effect was, when a good play was made, the fans would say, “Oh, isn’t that nice?” instead of giving a throaty cheer to encourage their team.
In addition, potential paying customers had to wonder how competitive the women’s pro sports leagues would be. You would think that, in a league in which superstar players are seeded amongst the teams, the teams are likely to be relatively even. This led to great competitiveness in the WUSA from 2001 to 2003.
On the other hand, I wonder if the Houston Comets’ dominance in the early days of the WNBA created a kind of cynicism that the league’s front office wanted Houston or New York or Los Angeles to win since the three players on most WNBA publicity gear from the early days were Sheryl Swoopes and Cynthia Cooper of Houston, Rebecca Lobo of New York, and Lisa Leslie from Los Angeles.
Now, I’ve seen plenty of competitive juices flowing from watching field hockey and lacrosse for a long time. And from my seat watching a couple of dozen Washington Freedom matches, I can tell you that there was a fierce competitiveness and rivalry brewing not only between teams, but also between and within two strata of players in the WUSA.
Before the league began, the WUSA designated anyone playing for the United States in the 1999 World Cup finals as a “League Founding Player.” This went from the front line all the way to the backup goalkeepers. As a result, you saw some internecine rivalries even within teams when LFPs either got injuried, slipped in their quality of play, or, in the case of Michelle Akers, never even played a game.
The two-tiered system, I think, was the worst possible thing for the WUSA. The U.S. national team, although revered, also had a handful of weak links. Other players who didn’t make the ‘99 roster had much stronger overall careers in the WUSA than some of the LFPs.
That being said, the league had some of the finest competition in the women’s sports revolution during the league’s final year, 2003. In that Founders’ Cup final between Washington and Atlanta, you had players fighting for every ball, tackle, and chance. And although the gorgeous Abby Wambach header is the lasting memory, you must remember that, two minutes earlier, Atlanta had a player sent off for a foul tackle.
Now, in National Pro Fastpitch, the games are indeed competitive — if you can find them. Teams have jumped around from the original Southeastern locations. Even today’s teams are hard to locate. The Washington, D.C. team plays its games on a high school field in Chantilly, Va. The Philadelphia team plays its games in a public park an hour north, in Allentown.
But part of the competitiveness comes from the fact that many of today’s softball superstars train together full-time for the national team and never set foot in an NPF stadium except for barnstorming matches. In other words, this arrangement robs people of the chance to see a Crystal Bustos bomb blast or Cat Osterman’s near-perfect windmill pitching style.
The WNBA, however, has integrated its star players into the league. It has matured enough so that the franchises have developed distinct personalities — not only from the collection of players, but from the coaches.
Consider, for example, the coaches for the Detroit Shock — Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn. Consider also the head coach for Los Angeles, Michael Cooper. Neither of these three NBA veterans backed down from anyone or anything as players, and certainly their players didn’t back down from last night’s altercation.
Commentators around the blogosphere and in the newspapers may talk about the shame of it all, or that it was a publicity lever.
The way I see it, the WNBA — and women’s sports in general — have now begun to hit a competitiveness apex at which players are willing now to do anything in order to win. To me, that’s progress.
July 22, 2008 — One in a million … or billion
A dozen years ago, I wrote a column detailing which 10 regional athletes I thought might have an impact in future Olympics.
I did pick a goalie who had a supporting role for the U.S. women’s soccer team and a pair of ice hockey players, all of whom won gold.
The rest? Complete busts.
At least I have a better percentage than the nation of China, who has a pool of some 300,000 retired professional athletes, some of whom live as wards of the state. I heard a heartbreaking story this morning about skier Zhao Yonghua, who is diabetic, but her taskmasters for China’s national governing body kept making her train. She is now bedridden.
And starting tonight, HBO’s Real Sports is going to broadcast a segment about the physical toll on the athletes in the American gymnastics system.
So, when you’re being bombarded with all of the Olympic previews, hype, and stories of hometown glory, I ask you to spare a thought for those who didn’t make it.
