And in CONCACAF qualifying for the Olympics, it’s a purposeful run for the Americans as they destroyed their pool-play opposition by a combined score of 31-0.

The United States women’s Olympic program has had, historically, a better record than the national team at FIFA World Cups. The Hammers have never failed to make it to the gold-medal match in every Olympics that women’s soccer is part of the competition program, winning three golds and a silver since the inaugural women’s soccer tournament in 1996.

I’m not sure why; the ball and pitch are the same size, the pool of game officials is roughly the same, and the field of teams is about as diverse (albeit smaller, given the fact that a champion is crowned in less than three weeks).

But what could be spurring the U.S. team is the shock penalty-kick loss to Japan in last year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup. It’s a game which looked for all the world like an American victory for long stretches, but there were numerous wasted chances.

This time around, however, those chances are going in. Last night, Carly Lloyd, who couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn last summer, had the hat trick against Mexico. Sydney Leroux and Amy Rodriguez had five goals each in earlier games in this tournament.

But as was the case four years ago in Beijing, the Americans look to go into battle without a major contributor. Ali Krieger tore two ligaments in her knee in the opening match against the Dominican Republic, which opens up questions about the U.S. wing defense.

Of course, Friday night is the tipping-point match. The winner of the U.S.-Costa Rica game goes to London. The loser gets four years to reflect and wonder about what they did wrong.

Three years later, with an interim head coach, one of its best players missing, and a developmental system that is still in the cradle, USA Field Hockey made the decision to pull the men’s team out of a last-chance six-nations qualifier in New Delhi, India.

It’s a shocking fall, to be sure.

And it’s going to lead to much finger-pointing within the American field hockey community that the national governing body of the sport quit on the men’s team while funneling all of its resources — including the former men’s national team head coach — into the women’s side.

“Unavailability of many of the senior players has left the men’s program in a position where our best assembled team has a performance potential well below that required to be competitive in a tournament of this caliber,” said USA Field Hockey technical director Terry Walsh in a prepared statement.

The key unavailability was Patrick Harris, one of U.S.’s best players, and a winner of the Player of the Week award in the Dutch Hoofdklasse. He pulled out of the Pan American Games team citing his work with the Dutch firm Onesails, a custom sail production company.

The announcement of Harris’ non-participation in the Pan Ams, announced on Sept. 16th on the USA Field Hockey website, set off a viral firestorm of Internet speculation on whether there was a split within the team, or whether there was a split between team and coaching staff.

Whatever the case, the all-for-one spirit of the Boys in Blue just three years ago was absent during the Games, and the U.S. team finished fifth.

It’s not the first time in recent history the U.S. didn’t send a team to a particular tournament. A few years back, a women’s senior team was not fielded for a Champions Challenge II tournament, and the lack of rankings points from that event is still hampering the U.S. team’s world ranking.

But this decision is a setback for those (such as this space) who want to see field hockey as a sport for everybody — regardless of race, gender, class, and region — in this country.

The Pew Center released a study today saying that the percentage of adults owning a tablet computer nearly doubled in a one-month period over the Christmas holidays.

It’s an astounding number.

Now, what the numbers don’t say is whether there was a single reason for the purchases — the availability of large numbers of books, or a particularly popular program that might change the market (a “killer app”), or whether the reasons for purchase may have something to do with the marriage of the mobile telephone to the laptop computer as a single digital appliance.

I think it’s the latter, and you’re seeing manufacturers trying to outguess each other as to size, functionality, and features. It could be an interesting next few years as these kinds of devices fall into more and more hands.

But it’s hard to believe that it could be anything other than the latter, given the difficult circumstances that the former Penn State football coach experienced over the last 10 weeks.

His former offensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, was indicted on some 50 charges involving taking liberties with teenage boys, and the scandal perhaps did the worst thing possible: turned in on itself trying to find a scapegoat.

As much as some people in the news media punditry wanted to hang Paterno from the highest yardarm, you wonder if the anger was directed at the wrong people.

This space, for one, has blamed the administration of the school for trying to cover for the football team, especially in a 109-word statement that served as a death warrant for PSU president Graham Spanier, PSU athletic director Tim Curley, and PSU senior vice president Gary Schultz.

I get a feeling that, once Sandusky is put on trial, that a lot of people are going to be apologizing about their intemperate words. Regrettably, Paterno is not going to be around to hear them.

Late this evening, there were reports of the death of Joe Paterno in a hospital in State College. It took a spokesman at the hospital and Twitter feeds from family members to refute this report.

Now that information can flit at lightning speed across the globe, it is more important than ever that said news — “the first draft of history,” as it is said — is right the first time.

The fact that so many news organizations ran with this as fact is not journalism’s finest hour.

The random sample that was collected represented approximately 15 percent of all NCAA teams.

In some sports, the numbers are astonishing. While you may be reading about the high alcohol use averages in the game of lacrosse (some 95 percent of men and 85 percent of women players report having had an alcoholic beverage in the 12-month period of the survey date, there is another trend that should be of concern to frequent readers of this site.

Of all women’s NCAA championship sports, field hockey players report the highest percentage of use in the previous 12 months — some 35.7 percent. This compares to women’s lacrosse (30 percent) and women’s soccer (22.8 percent).

The table of social drug use for women’s sports shows varying use of six substances, but there is one notable decline over the last four years: alcohol amongst women’s lacrosse players. In 2005, 92.8 percent of those surveyed reported using alcohol over the last year. Four years later, it was 84.7 percent.

While this makes you wonder if an emphasis on fitness is a reason, it doesn’t explain the simultaneous rise in field hockey players (86.6 to 94.2 percent) and in women’s soccer players (83.6 to 85.7 percent).

I’m not one to moralize on what people can put in their own bodies, but these kinds of trends are ones to watch when it comes to what is happening in our society at large. In many places worldwide, marijuana is now a decriminalized drug which is regulated and taxed.

The one thing is, I’m not sure that in this country, I’d want to be in a car traveling on the same road where a person under the influence of marijuana is coming at me in the other direction. It’s a traffic-safety nightmare in the making.

Today, she died from severe head injuries from the accident.

Freestyle skiing has come a long way from its birth as a bunch of ski bums were less interested in how fast one got from Point A to Point B on a pair of skis than in now stylishly one got there.

The early freestyle skiing events were stunt aerials, moguls, and free skiing, a kind of figure-skating on snow.

The influence of surfing and skateboarding saw the start of half pipe skiing and snowboarding, and big money sponsors helped to start “big air” events which see competitors soaring 20 feet in the air at 80 miles an hour. The safety systems in the sport are not nearly as sophisticated ad they are in other athletic fields of endeavor. The competitors do not wear body padding and most wear open-faced helmets.

In short, this is now an “extreme” pastime with speed and momentum and kinetic energy and impacts that can kill you.

At some point, people in this sport are going to have to ask themselves, “How much is too much?” Perhaps, this may be that moment.

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The roster is unchanged from the silver-medal side from Germany 2011 except for one outfield substitution. The United States will not be carrying a third goalkeeper; Hope Solo and Nicole Barnhart are the two netminders in the roster; Jill Loyden has been dropped.

Defender Stephanie Cox is also not in the side, and instead the Hammers will be carrying an extra forward: Sydney Leroux, the age-group national team star. The UCLA graduate has exactly one national-team cap, but she is also the capstone of what is going to be a generational shift within the U.S. women’s national team pool in the leadup to the next Women’s World Cup in Canada.

Leroux, drafted No. 1 overall by the Atlanta Beat in last week’s WPS draft, was a supernova in the U20 ranks, becoming the all-time leading scorer for the junior national side in FIFA competitions.

But as the most recent U20 World Cup showed, Leroux may be the last of the greatest generation of women’s national team performers that push themselves like the Chastains, Foudys, Hamms, and Overbecks. This tournament is Leroux’s chance; we’ll see if she makes the most of it.

The idea is to celebrate those who have achieved greatness in the sport and hope that their examples change attitudes. In other words, what is said here is going to do a lot less good than if the right people enter secondary-school education and get people in an urban environment to have a passion for the sport, like Holly McGarvie with the Washington Ballou (D.C.) lacrosse team, or Jamie Josephson and Brittany Kayton with their respective field hockey teams in the same city.

A decade ago, when this space interviewed long-time field hockey writer Jim Davis, the concept of having a predominantly African-American high school take up the game of field hockey was discussed. The example was the city in which he filed his stories, Trenton (N.J.) Central.

“I am disappointed that a school like Trenton has never tried it, but I wouldn’t want to see them pick up the sport without somebody who was really dedicated to the sport, and not just to say, ‘Well, now we have field hockey,’” he told me. “I can remember 20 years ago when every school had a girls’ softball team but Trenton High. I remember approaching an athletic director and saying, ‘You don’t think you’re wrong because you’re the only high school in the county without a varsity softball team?’ His response was, ‘Maybe everyone else is wrong, and we’re right.’ I never could figure out what the hell he meant by that.”

This past week, the State of New Jersey, which has oversight over the budget and planning process for the Trenton Board of Education, rejected a plan to install an artificial grass pitch in the middle of Trenton High School’s outdoor track, one which could also be used for soccer and, if there was an infrastructure in place, other field sports like lacrosse and field hockey.

The Trenton Central campus features a sprawling building which originally built in 1932 on a five-acre tract of land carved out of what had originally been the 36 acres of Chambers Farm. Additions over the years have gobbled up the original tract, and while there are dedicated athletic surfaces for the current athletic offerings at Trenton High, there is certainly room for improvement.

A new artificial grass pitch would not only have given three current varsity sports (as well as freshman and JV teams) a chance to play, but it would have also given rise to other sports within the community.

It’s not as though the city would have been lacking for people to teach lacrosse and field hockey. At one time, a U.S. men’s international field hockey player was teaching at Trenton High. At the same time, a men’s lacrosse legend was running a non-profit academy less than a mile from where our parents’ home is located.

Now, I’ll let you in on what went unspoken in the story we released last month, “The Nine-Mile Zone.” When Michelle Rhee was the schools chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools, one of her major projects was to upgrade a half-dozen athletics fields across the city to artificial grass to allow more sports to play.

Indeed, when you watch the Nine-Mile Zone story, you’ll notice football players from Deal Middle School warming up in the background after Washington Woodrow Wilson (D.C.) played a home field hockey game against Washington School Without Walls (D.C.). An artificial grass pitch can be an inherent good for a community, a place that rec leagues in many sports — field hockey, soccer, lacrosse, football, even baseball — can rent out and make money for the school district.

Too bad the State of New Jersey doesn’t have the same vision.