Old Tradition vs. New Tradition as Maryland faces Northwestern for NCAA D-1 Women's Lacrosse Championship in Towson

NCAA D-1 Women's Lacrosse Championship, 5:30 p.m. on CBS College Sports, DirecTV 613 Replay is tonight at 9 pm, on Monday at 6:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesday.

Well, despite my hopes that #3 North Carolina might knock-off #2 Northwestern on Friday night so that they would have a chance at possibly winning their third NCAA title this year in a Women's sport that I follow -having previously won the Field Hockey and Soccer titles- the Wildcats, and in particular, their plucky and ridiculously-talented Senior play-maker Katrina Dowd, last year's tourney MVP, would hear none of that, as Northwestern won going-away 15-10 against the talented Tar Heels, who'd given the Wildcats AND Maryland their only losses of the season, after scoring four straight goals.
http://nusports.cstv.com/sports/w-lacros/mtt/dowd_katrina00.html

So now, Dowd and her Wildcats find the only thing standing in their way of winning their 6th straight NCAA title are the #1 Maryland Terrapins, the very school that dominated the sport for most of the past 20 years, with 9 titles of their own, including seven straight from 1995-2001 under former head coach Cindy Timchal.

The Terps dispatched a valiant un-ranked Syracuse squad that could never get any offensive momentum going against the stifling Terp defense, winning 14-5, with a late goal by former Glenelg Gladiator Kristy Black, who was a field hockey teammate of my oldest niece.
http://www.umterps.com/sports/w-lacros/mtt/black_kristy00.html

Friday's attendance of 8,762 fans at Johnny Unitas Stadium at Towson University for the two national Semifinals set a record for the largest United States women's lacrosse crowd.

Photo galleries of Friday night's UNC-Northwestern match:
http://tarheelblue.cstv.com/view.gal?id=70134 http://tarheelblue.cstv.com/view.gal?id=70143

UNC Women's Lacrosse homepage:
http://tarheelblue.cstv.com/sports/w-lacros/unc-w-lacros-body.html

Northwestern Women's Lacrosse homepage:
http://nusports.cstv.com/sports/w-lacros/nw-w-lacros-body.html

Northwestern tourney stats:
http://web1.ncaa.org/web_files/stats/w_lacrosse_champs_records/2010/D1/html/nu.htm

Photo gallery of Friday night's Maryland-Syracuse match: http://www.umterps.com/view.gal?id=70111
http://www.umterps.com/view.gal?id=70166

Maryland Women's Lacrosse homepage:
http://www.umterps.com/sports/w-lacros/md-w-lacros-body.html

Maryland tourney stats:
http://web1.ncaa.org/web_files/stats/w_lacrosse_champs_records/2010/D1/html/md.htm

----------------
Worth reading: Baltimore Sun's Lacrosse homepage, the best in the country:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/college/lacrosse/

Northwestern Women's Lacrosse: Inside An Unlikely Dynasty
by Hilary Lee
May 30, 2010 12:15 PM CDT http://www.rivalryesq.com/2010/5/30/1493884/northwestern-womens-lacrosse

Maryland-Northwestern Championship Game One Year In The Making
Sunday's title game between the Terps and Wildcats is a long time coming
http://www.ncaa.com/sports/w-lacros/spec-rel/052910aaa.html

Women's Lacrosse blog by Amy Farnum:
http://www.ncaa.com/blog/2010d1womenslacrosse/

Reminder: Tomorrow is the deadline for applying for 2011 NCAA Final Four basketball tickets for the games on April 2 and 4 at Reliant Stadium in Houston, hosted by the University of Houston and Rice University.
http://www.ncaa.org/wps/portal/ncaahome?WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT=/ncaa/ncaa/media+and+events/press+room/news+release+archive/2010/championships/20100520+ff+tix+rls

Something to smile about: NCAA Women's Lacrosse Final Four Weekend in Bawlmer, Hon

NCAA Women's Lacrosse Final Four, Johnny Unitas Stadium,
Towson, Md. -Home of the Tigers

Friday on CBS College Sports, DirecTV Channel 613
5:30 p.m. #1 Maryland (20-1) vs. Syracuse (15-6)
8:00 p.m. #2 Northwestern (19-1) vs. #3 North Carolina (17-2)
Sunday on CBS College Sports, 5:30 p.m. Division I Championship

I'm pretty sure that Maryland will win the first game since I've seen Georgetown play Syracuse twice in the past few weeks, including for the Big East title two weeks ago where they beat the Orange, so I'm mostly waiting for the second game and here's why.

The Terps lost to the Tar Heels in last year's Semifinals which was brutal for Terp fans to take since many really thought they'd do the Field Hockey & Lacrosse double-championship thing -again.

But it didn't happen, though they could at least take solace in the Wildcats beating UNC in the final, for their fifth straight NCAA title.

The Tar Heels beat the Terps in the NCAA Field Hockey championship in November, scoring the winning goal with just 11 seconds left.
More brutality for Turtle fans!

Back on April 18th, I watched the Tar Heels' huge victory at beautiful Lakeside Park in Evanston on The BigTenNetwork, their first live Women's Lacrosse telecast since the network started, and what a match to start with. http://tarheelblue.cstv.com/sports/w-lacros/recaps/041810aaa.html

As I've previously mentioned here, that was only THE single best women's lacrosse match I've ever seen, and was keyed in no small part by the elusive Megan Bosica, #2 for the Tar Heels. http://tarheelblue.cstv.com/sports/w-lacros/unc-w-lacros-body.html

Megan's from perennial lacrosse power Mt. Hebron in Howard County, MD, where my sister's family lives, one of the real traditional lacrosse and field hockey hot houses on the East Coast that exports talent to teams all over the country.
My two oldest nieces played field hockey for Glenelg, playing in the state championship game for their division three times in five years.

Bosica's ability to find a hole in the defense or pass like a laser-beam reminded me of Isiah Thomas going thru the lane for the Hoosiers, once-upon-a-time, always getting that second defender to follow him, leaving someone wide-open for the pass.
She's uncanny and never stops hustling!

I'll have some comments about the Men's NCAA Semifinals at M&T Stadium on Saturday morning.


You're not really surprised, are you, that the geniuses over at the Miami Herald's Sports section didn't even bother to list these NCAA Women's Semifinal matches in the paper today?
It's par for the course at one of the WORST-designed and edited sports sections in the entire country.

They're the same geniuses who had nothing in the paper about the UEFA Champions League title game the day before it was played.
Yeah, that's normal at newspapers that think they've got something to brag about.

See for yourself:On TV / Radio Today
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/28/1652417/on-tv-radio-today.html

UCLA edges Sooners to win 2010 NCAA Women's Gymnastics Championship at Gainesville; Coverage of Women's Sports in the Miami Herald

UCLA Bruins: They're Number One!

Above, a screenshot I took Friday night of a beaming Anna Li,
the UCLA senior gymnast, the best in the Pac-10, holding the
2010 NCAA Championship trophy in Gainesville, while jubilant
teammates show everyone who's number one this year.

Above, Bruins Rock, Los Angeles magazine, November 2006

Before I get to what was going to be the main point of
my post today, a few comments are in order about some
sports realities in the year 2010.

First, despite whatever awards they claim to have won,
the simple fact is that the Miami Herald's sports section
has long been among the worst in the country, and an
absolute embarrassment for its circulation size and the
amount of resources they have at their command.

(Future blog posts here will get into lots of details about
the whys of that, something I'm sorry to say I blame myself
for, since I've written something about it often and saved
it to Draft, but then thought that it was too petty.
But then I remembered that I'm my own Executive Editor
and Sr. VP of New Media.)
Second, the most-popular spectator sport at the Winter
Olympics is Women's Figure Skating, while the most popular
sport at the Summer Olympics is Women's Gymnastics.

We all know this even if we didn't like the sports because
the American TV networks would constantly remind us
of their primacy with their constant teasers of upcoming
action before fading to commercials, often going to shots
of petite gymnasts or leggy skaters pacing in the arena
hallway or of them contorting themselves in various
ways to get completely loose, before fading to patriotic
beer commercials.

It a TV sports production cliche as old as Olympic TV
itself in the Roone Arledge era of "Up close and
personal."

Myself, I love both sports and have been involved with
both on a high-level to an extent that would probably
surprise many people reading this, though to be sure,
that's more true with gymnastics than figure skating.

When I first got to Bloomington in late August of 1979,
the only person I actually knew and had ever met who
lived in Indiana was former Miami Central High School
grad and Indiana State and Olympic star Kurt Thomas,
though it's not like we were friends or anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Thomas_%28gymnast%29
http://www.kurtthomas.net/



But despite loving gymnastics and figure skating, or even
still having the old U.S.F.S.A. address in Boston still stuck
in my head, like a flashlight rolling around in a car trunk,
I also know that both sports have suffered over the years
publicly for many of the same reasons: less-than-scrupulous
judging, nationalistic chauvinism and frequent prima donna
athletes who defy belief with their massive egos and sense
of superiority, even when it's no longer justified.

That said, I think it's very sad that in the year 2010,
the two spectator sports that are most popular with
American women are ones that 99.99% of them have
NEVER competed in on a competitive level, whether
K-12 or college.

It's rather inconceivable that the two most popular
spectator sports for American men would ever be ones
that 99.99% of them had never participated in.

That's just one of those things that we know but don't
really ever talk about at length because we all have
experience with girls or women who have a complete
aversion to sports of any kind.

Which also explains the obesity situation with Hispanic
and African-American K-12 girls to an extent that
never gets discussed when it's so much easier to write
stories blaming McDonald's or Coca-Cola.

I mention these things because the 2010 NCAA Women's
Gymnastics Championship have been held at U-F in
Gainesville since Thursday, with the team title decided
on Friday night.

Despite this NCAA championship of one of the two most
popular spectator sports for women being held in-state,
in a place that we are used to seeing stories from, the
Miami Herald had not one word about it on Friday.

Despite the Gators having one of the better teams in the
country.

They just couldn't be bothered.

In fact, they didn't just avoid writing anything about it,
they also didn't even run the results of the two Semi-finals
on Thursday night on their Scoreboard page, page 11A,
the traditional dumping-ground of the Herald sports
section, going back to the 1960's.

This is not surprising when you consider that the night
of the two NCAA Women's Basketball Semi-finals a few
weeks ago, while the New York Times was able to
print their South Florida edition in Fort Lauderdale
and managed to not only get the story, but also photos
of that second Semi-final game in their Monday print
editions, the Miami Herald had zero information
about the second game.
ZERO!

Ask yourself this question: when was the last time you
saw a photo of a female athlete -who wasn't a golfer,
tennis player or Danica Patrick- who was on the
front page of the sports section of the Herald?

Was Don Shula still the Dolphins head coach then?

Just wondering out loud.

If you have a few minutes, you might want to bring
these and many other items you may've noticed
yourself with the Editor of the Herald's mish-mash
of a sports section, Jorge Rojas, jrojas@Miamiherald.com,
since this guy keeps a lower profile than any sports
editor of any newspaper where I've lived.
He's a veritable ghost.

And the sports section is getting worse not better.
Everyone seems to know this but the people at One
Herald Plaza.

More on this topic over the weekend.

--------------
Above, a shot of the NCAA Channel I watched Friday night's
meet on.

With the Five-in-a-Row defending champion Georgia
Gym Dogs not qualifying this year, the Women's NCAA
Gymnastics title is returning to fashionable Westwood,
one of the most beautiful college campuses in the country,
for the sixth time.

See http://tweetphoto.com/19647726 and
http://www.uclabruins.com/sports/w-gym/recaps/042310aaa.html


Super Six Team Finals from Friday night,
April 23rd, 2010: UCLA, Utah, Florida, Stanford,
Alabama, Oklahoma

The videotape starts immediately with audio, visual comes
on at about the 0:01:17 mark
http://all-access.cbssports.com/player.html?code=ncaa&media=178160


Final team results:

UCLA Bruins 197.725

Oklahoma Sooners 197.250

Alabama Crimson Tide 197.225

Stanford Cardinal 197.100

Florida Gators 197.00

Utah Utes (Red Rocks) 196.225

Individual All-Around Champion -award at 2:45:23 on tape-

Susan Jackson, Senior, LSU with a score of 39.625, winning

every event but Floor Exercise.

Videotape ends at 2:54:45 with UCLA senior Anna Li waving
the championship trophy to the crowd.
Now THAT'S the way you want to end your college career!

The Daily Bruin
UCLA gymnastics wins sixth NCAA championship title
By Mansi Sheth
April 23, 2010 at 10:31 p.m
http://www.dailybruin.com/articles/2010/4/23/ucla-gymnastics-wins-sixth-ncaa-championship-title/

Highlights -NCAA Women's Gymnastics National Semi-final #1 and 2
Go to http://all-access.cbssports.com/player.html?code=ncaa&media=179038
and click Event Guide in upper left.

See http://www.ncaa.com/sports/w-gym/ncaa-w-gym-body.html
and official blog at: http://www.ncaa.com/blog/200910d1womensgymnastics/
and http://www.uclabruins.com/sports/w-gym/spec-rel/10-media-guide.html

South Beach Hoosier Time Machine: Revisiting Tim Padgett's "Revenge of the Hoosiers"

Given the chance that the world and our small
part of it in South Florida could be firmly and
fatally knocked-off its axis at the possibility of
the New York Jets actually making it to a
Super Bowl being played in South Florida
two weeks hence, and the Jets even using
the Dolphins training facility in Davie as
their practice facility if they beat the Colts
later this afternoon -to the apparent delight
of the smug, not-so-bright marketing
geniuses dumb enough to be quoted by name
here, in the perfectly predictable Herald
pre-Super Bowl puff piece full of cliches
http://www.miamiherald.com/614/story/1442833.html?commentSort=TimeStampAscending&pageNum=1 -
I wanted to bring up a heretofore unmentioned
yet positive reason to root against the Jets:
civility.

Not that another is really needed for the most
devout South Florida sports fans, who continually
despair of continually seeing a certain crowd
who loves to flaunt their so-called 'individuality'
by their wearing of a New York Yankees or
Mets caps, like lemmings.

This is always grating, but most galling when
observed among young kids or adults who
never actually lived there when anyone named
Seaver or Mattingly were playing.

Their much-older counterpart are equally
known to us, droning on incessantly about
stick ball really being... blah, blah, blah...

Sorry, I've already tuned you out.
This isn't 1947 and you aren't some skinny
Italian nine-year old kid in Brooklyn, capisce?

You also aren't Pele wrapping string and tape
together in your poor neighborhood in Brazil
in the early '50's to make a ball because you
are so jaw-droppingly poor.

You're from the largest city in this country,
and yet you are continually crowing and
bragging about things that have nothing
at all to do with anything you or your family
ever did or said.

And need I remind you, you are
living here, too, no?
End of diatribe, sort of.

Well, except to remind you that when the
Jets beat the Colts, Nixon still hadn't been
sworn in.

That reason to bear the Jets animus maximus
is the possible infusion into rude and antagonistic
South Florida of some well-needed Midwestern
friendliness, or if you will, some Hoosier
hospitality.

The nice welcoming cool breeze to wash away
the unrelenting torpor of humid heat and
smugness that so often pervades this place.

Sort of like what we had regularly around the
holidays in the '70's and early '80's when the
Big 12 Conference Champ always played in
the Orange Bowl Game, and tons of
well-mannered alums from Nebraska,
Oklahoma and even Colorado were all over
Miami spending money and enjoying
themselves, sometimes even saying how
much they envied us living down here
with the weather and the water.

The very same ones that grew fed-up with
bad service, high prices and non-English
speaking personnel -esp. in hotel
parking garages- and the ever-present
threat of crime near downtown Miami
and the OMNI when that was actually
something and not just an
embarrassing eyesore.

And they were chased away, too, based on
my conversations with those fans, here and
in other towns where I met them years later.
They felt unappreciated.

If the Colts win as I expect and hope, do you
really think you'll run into quite so many
people playing know-it-all smart aleck
over at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino
in Hollywood, over at The Clevelander
on South Beach or eating somewhere on
A1A in Hollywood, talking far too loudly
about real estate, and how they speculated
in South Florida real estate for years
-hello Radius and Duo!- but were
smart enough to get out in the nick of time,
as we would if the Jets are here?

Let me answer my own rhetorical question:
No, you won't.

Before you watch today's AFC Championship
Game between the Colts and Jets, be sure
to read this almost three-years old piece by
TIME's Miami Bureau Chief Tim Padgett,
a proud and brilliant grad of Wabash College
by way of Carmel, Indiana, and, as it happens,
one of the most prescient Latin America
political reporters in the country.

And I'm not just saying that because he's a
Hoosier.

In Tim's case, a Hoosier-by-birth, as
opposed to my sister and I, who were
Hoosiers-by-choice, as she followed me
from North Miami Beach HS to Bloomington
three years later, in 1982, even staying in
Briscoe Quad, the same dorm near
Assembly Hall and Memorial Stadium
where I lived for my first two years there.

Why does that name Padgett sound so
familiar?

Yes, because in September, as you read here,
Tim wrote the definitive analysis piece on
South Florida in the 21st Century.

His piece was an Internet sensation nationally
precisely because it resonated with everyone
who knows anything about this area, whether
they live here or just visit.

See my original Sept. 6, 2009 post about his
article, which I titled,
Dear Florida, California, Michigan & Illinois:
It's over. See ya in the rear view mirror!
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/dear-florida-california-michigan.html

TIME
Florida Exodus: Rising Taxes Drive Out Residents

By TIM PADGETT/MIAMI

There are many things public officials probably shouldn't do during a severe recession, but no one seems to have told the leaders in Florida about them. One thing, for instance, would be giving a dozen top aides hefty raises while urging a rise in property taxes, as the mayor of Miami-Dade County recently did. Or jacking up already exorbitant hurricane-insurance premiums, as Florida's government-run property insurer just did. Or sending an army of highly paid lobbyists to push for a steep hike in electricity rates, as South Florida's public utility is doing.

And you wonder why the Sunshine State is experiencing its first net emigration of people since World War II.

See the rest of Behind Florida's Exodus: Rising Taxes, Political Ineptitude at
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1919916,00.html?xid=rss-mostpopular

A short amusing TIME piece by Tim on
his hometown of Carmel, north of Indy,
and their seeming love affair with roundabouts
or traffic circles, was here:

You Want a Revolution
By TIM PADGETT
September 4, 2008
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1838753,00.html

Carmel in the early '80's was sort of like...
well, for our purposes here, like Miami Lakes
in the late '70's when that was almost like
Dolphin City, with so many coaches and
players living there.

Except Indy had no NFL team then, as that
was Bears and Bengals territory, and we got
all their telecasts on CBS and NBC on the
Indy stations.

Carmel was very affluent, well-educated,
and had lots of smart kids, just like HML
back when they were also the dominant
South Florida high school in sports, even
having lights on their HS field, which meant
the baseball team could play at night when
more people could watch and that their
elite football team could practice in
something other than 94 degree sunshine.

(My senior year, the HML valedictorian
famously ripped the school's emphasis
on competition and sports at their graduation
ceremony, which everyone heard about
as there were both School Board members
and Channel 4 TV cameras present.)

When I was at IU, Carmel meant Mark
Hermann, the Purdue QB, who'd been
a HS star for the Greyhounds.
Carmel bad, Purdue bad!

A Purdue QB from Carmel?
Well, as it was explained to me, not unlike
what Richard Lewis would say about his
dating: two wrongs don't make a right!

IU students from Carmel, like people who
went to Harvard, were always quick to let
you know it.
Didn't mean they were bad, just perhaps
a little too quick to pat themselves on their
back for something that had nothing to do
with them personally.

Hey, that's just like that class of former
New Yorkers in South Florida I was just
impugning a few minutes ago!

By the way, while I was at IU, the NCAA's
HQ was located in Kansas City, and didn't
move to Indy until a few years after I'd said
au revoir, http://www.ncaa.org/

If any of you are interested in the job,
nominations for people interested in becoming
the NCAA President must be received by
March 10th.
See: http://www.ncaa.org/wps/portal/ncaahome?WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT=/ncaa/ncaa/ncaa+news/ncaa+news+online/2010/association-wide/ncaa_president_description

Revenge of the Hoosiers By Tim Padgett
February 5, 2007
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1585951,00.html



"In the Heart of a Great Country, Beats the Soul of Hoosier Nation." -South Beach Hoosier, 2007

C'est moi!

Exciting match expected today when Terps play Tar Heels for NCAA D1 Field Hockey title

At Noon on Sunday I'm watching the NCAA
D1 Field Hockey championship match on
CBSC -CBS College Sports, DirecTV 613-
between undefeated, # 1 and defending champion
Maryland and #3 19-2 North Carolina in what
looks to be a really exciting match from Winston-Salem.

http://www.ncaa.com/sports/w-fieldh/ncaa-w-fieldh-body.html

http://www.ncaa.com/brackets/2009/ncaa_bracket_DI_field_hockey.html

http://www.ncaa.com/sports/w-fieldh/champpage/w-fieldh-div1-index.html

http://wakeforestsports.cstv.com/sports/w-fieldh/spec-rel/09-wake-fieldh-final-four.html

In my opinion, the handful of matches televised
this past season on The BigTen Network were
much better than in the past, though Michigan
State naturally got the lion's share of the games,
befitting their national reputation and consistent
Top 15 ranking.

Last year's Big Ten tourney in Bloomington
was played under some cold, wet and windy
conditions on the field just off of 17th Street
between Fee Lane and N. Jordan.
The weather sometimes seemed to affect play,
which is always a possibility in early November
in Bloomington.

This year's tourney up in East Lansing,
thankfully, seemed blessed with much nicer
weather that allowed all the teams to flash
their skills.

I was very pleased to see IU make it to
the finals against the Spartans on Nov. 8th,
and to be able to watch the match from
beginning to end.

Though they ultimately lost 3-2 to an
excellent Spartan squad, whom I knew
fairly well from watching their earlier matches
on TV over the past few months,
the closeness of the match and the
gritty spirit and character the Hoosiers
displayed in hanging-tough with a top
national team on the road, clearly
demonstrated to all who are paying
close attention to the sport, that IU's
growing positive national reputation
is well-deserved.

Kudos to Hoosier Head Coach
Amy Robertson and her assistants
for getting the most out of the team
and making it to the NCAA Sweet 16
this year, before losing to a tough
Wake Forest squad, which is always
well-coached and full of very talented
international players.
http://iuhoosiers.cstv.com/sports/w-fieldh/ind-w-fieldh-body.html


Efforts like those will only increase the
positive word-of-mouth about the
Hoosier's FH program's upward direction
and increase the flow of high-quality
recruits from field hockey hot-spots
on the East Coast and in the Midwest
to Bloomington.

Not that it wouldn't be great to get
some silly-talented girls from
The Netherlands or Great Britain,
though!
http://www.knhb.nl/


Thru fortuitous timing, that same day,
I was also able to watch the ACC
tourney final and watch the Terps
stage an amazing comeback in
overtime against a scrappy and
ultimately somewhat heart-broken
#2 UVA squad at Charlottesville,
one of my favorite places.
http://www.virginiasports.com/SportSelect.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=17800&SPID=10593&SPSID=92022

The talented Cavaliers regrouped
and later eliminated Michigan State
from the NCAA tourney 3-2 and
made it to the Final Four where they
lost 3-2 on Friday to UNC .
http://www.ncaa.com/splash/2009fhockeysplash.htmldefault.aspx?id=188

The sheer talent and ability of the
Terps in that game demonstrated
once again that no matter what the
score is, no matter how well you're
playing, you can NEVER EVER
take your foot off the accelerator
when you play Maryland.

They will not quit, no matter how
close to the end of the match it gets.
They are relentless!

The Terps tradition of winning NCAA
titles and playing tough matches even
when they are not at their best, is a
valuable lesson that ought to be more
widely-known and appreciated than it
currently is.
http://www.umterps.com/sports/w-fieldh/archive/090809aab.html
http://www.umterps.com/sports/w-fieldh/md-w-fieldh-body-main.html
http://www.umterps.com/view.gal?id=58544

I like them to win 4-2 over a talented
Tar Heels squad.
http://tarheelblue.cstv.com/sports/w-fieldh/unc-w-fieldh-body.html