Category Archives: Sunday Column

Jun 26 2011

Sunday Column: Are You Excited for the 2011 Women’s World Cup?

The Women's World Cup kicked off Sunday, but will you be watching?

By Matt Noonan 

It’s been years since I laced up my cleats, stretched my socks, as well as kicked around a soccer ball.

In 2006, I caught World Cup Fever, as Team USA, as well as other countries caught my attention by playing a sport that I certainly don’t enjoy watching. In fact, I never watch soccer, but for the first few weeks of that particular summer, I was glued to my television.

Did I know any of the players? Nope. I don’t know a single name. In fact, I still don’t know enough names to fill up a roster; so again, I’ll admit that I’m not a soccer hooligan.

How about the sport itself, do you know anything about it? Yes. I do know something about the sport of soccer, especially since I played it when I was younger, but again, I don’t care about it.

The sport of soccer isn’t the most popular activity in the United States. Sure, there’s football, basketball, baseball and hockey, but seriously, soccer, are you kidding me? Heck, I think it ranks lower than lacrosse and cross-country.

Yet, what’s so remarkable is the fact that so many young Americans grow up playing this particular sport and only a few continue the game in high school and college. Ask any of those young soccer players that are our neighbors or peers and I’m sure they can tell you about a variety of teams overseas, as well as name a few other players besides David Beckham.

When I was a student at Wheaton College (Massachusetts), the entire men’s soccer team displayed their affection for the sport by watching the various European games on televisions or laptops. They lived in the breath the sport, but again, I didn’t.

Although, there’s something special about the World Cup that really makes me want to watch soccer. What exactly is “that thing” that makes me want to watch soccer? I don’t know, but when I figure it out, I’ll call you, OK?

The World Cup is a special international event that celebrates various regions of the world coming together to play soccer. Politics and economics are ruled out, as teams put aside their foreign differences, most of the time, and play a game that captivates an audience of die-hards, as well as those that are considered casual supporters too.

Yet, what am I saying? Am I slowly admitting that I like soccer, especially the World Cup?

Uh oh!

OK, I admit it. I’m  “closet soccer fan,” but again, I really like the World Cup. In fact, I am super excited to start following and watching the Women’s tournament for the next few weeks and yes, I’ll do my very best to watch a great deal of games.

Of course, I am an American, so I’ll be cheering on Team USA to their first championship since 1999 and yes I do remember that finale quite vividly.

So, I guess… I like soccer.

OK, maybe it’s not my favorite sport, but after playing it as a young boy, as well as broadcasting it in college, I guess I like it. Sure, I don’t know players, teams or organizations, but that’s OK, right?

I’ll certainly be watching and maybe, covering some games for Noontime Sports, but in the meantime, I better start studying up on my soccer terminology, otherwise, I’ll have to admit my love for croquet.

Apr 24 2011

Sunday Column: “Breakin’ It Down With Bailey…Stenson”

Stenson will always be remembered for her softball career at the University of Washington, but exactly, what is it that makes her story so special?

By Stacey Kilpatrick 

Bailey Stenson might be one of the funniest people I’ve talked with, yet we haven’t even met. The former number 20 softball player of team Purp and Gold at the University of Washington, the forever Husky, causes me to crack a few laughs through her sarcasm, bluntness and genuine positive, perky persona about life.

The Washington born-and-raised 23-year-old listens to Kanye West over Taylor Swift, although she never saw their 2009 MTV feud, (“I didn’t even see what happened between him and Taylor, not even on YouTube. I live under a rock when it comes to that stuff. I don’t watch much TV or really surf the internet. Who am I? A Grandma?”), she likes East Coaster Paul Pierce over L.A.’s King Kobe Bryant, though she’s not a big NBA supporter. She’s more of a Facebook nerd than Twitter, she loves hitting and running the bases, but also loves making sure that nothing hits the grass and interviewing others is her style. She thinks she’s “bad at being interviewed.”

She’s not.

I wanted to get to know more about Stenson since I became a fan of hers in May 2009 when I stumbled upon the Women’s College World Series on ESPN. UW was playing and famed Canadian pitcher Danielle Lawrie was at the mound and Stenson was one of the Huskies playing for a spot in the outfield in Oklahoma City.

The Purp and Gold made it to OK that June. The No. 3 Huskies beat No. 14 Georgia Tech 7-1 and 7-0 in two games in Atlanta during the Super Regionals, advancing to the WCWS. They then beat No. 6 Georgia and No. 10 Arizona State to move on to the championship.

In Game 1 on June 1, the dogs pulverized the Florida Gators and pitcher Stacey Nelson, 8-0, and in Game 2 the following day, the University of Washington beat Florida, 3-2, to become the 2009 National Champions, bringing home the title back to Seattle, back to the softball field that overlooks Lake Washington and Mount Rainier.

“This moment, it just seems like a very private thing, like each individual has their own version and I don’t feel like I give it any justice without having all of their versions mashed with mine,” Stenson said, “but overall it was everything we had worked for.

“I think it was so great because we literally were aiming at a goal and made it come true. We didn’t back down. When you have 20 people buying into the same goal and all giving their everything to that one specific mindset, it’s amazing to watch it come true.

“Some teams are shocked they won, others expect it, but I think we truly just appreciated and respected the moment, the game and all of the challenges that led to all 36 hands raising that trophy. No better feeling.”

But Stenson and her teammates weren’t in the same ecstatic mindset in June 2010.

Once again, the No. 3 Huskies advanced from the Super Regionals after defeating No. 14 Oklahoma in Games 2 and 3, 3-0 and 4-0, respectively. On June 3, the No. 6 Georgia Bulldogs beat Washington 6-3. Two days later, on June 5, the Washington Huskies were topped by one run, 4-3, by No. 10 Arizona, and Washington’s hopes of winning two championships in a row had ended as the National Champions were eliminated.

“I bawled my eyes out,” Stenson said. “I was so dramatic. From taking off my jersey and my white cleats for the last time to my final at bat, I was a wreck. We had all the talent in the world that year, but it wasn’t right. It wasn’t our trophy to win. We were trying too hard to make it happen. It wasn’t Husky softball.

“I wouldn’t do it over again though. We had to go through it. While it hurts to sit here and say we had the chance to do it again and didn’t seize it, I can’t help but remind myself that we have a National Championship and a PAC-10 Championship. Both very coveted honors. Can’t be greedy.

“While I wish we would have made a better postseason run, I must thank my teammates for leaving it all. To go out and play your ‘A’ game every day, not lose very often, you need to lose, you have to experience failure in order to grow, and to hold onto that spot all season, it’s exhausting.

“We were tired, Danielle was tired, our offense, our defense, our dugout — drained. We gave it our all. We peaked every weekend. What a ride.”

So Stenson and her teammates went back to Seattle unlike the year prior, but since then, Stenson has accomplished many a feats, many individually – she’s begun her post graduation, post UW softball, post number 20 life and has even started a “blog” titled “Breakin it Down with Bailey” where she shares crazy, personal, hilarious, random stories with her friends and fans.

“I actually did not have the idea to start writing until our Sports Information Director came to me and asked if I would write for gohuskies.com,” Stenson said.

The women’s soccer team had a blog, Stenson mentioned, written by Kendyl Pele, who titled it “Kickin it with Kendyl.”

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be cool if everyone’s blog was alliteration like that?’” Stenson said. “And I thought, ‘I like to dance … Breakin it Down with Bailey might work’ and Rosie said she loved it.

Stenson soon decided to start interviewing fellow teammates and Huskies, adding eye-opening videos to her blog.

“I like doing my interviews in a silly uncut manner because it really shows that athletes are real people too and not just focused on their sport,” Stenson said. “After about a year of writing, in fact, exactly one year, my friend Amanda suggested I make a fan page on Facebook so I worked really, really hard on getting all of my stuff loaded on there, pretty much all in one night, and people started ‘liking it’ right away.

“I have no idea how the word spread but I had like 200 people within the first week. Then I started inviting people here and there and people would reject it or add it, whatever. But I literally think I get a new fan every day somehow someway, it’s pretty incredible that 2100-plus people like it.”

“I love writing for people,” Stenson continued. “I feel like I really just spell things out. Someone might have written about something in the past, but you can bet that my version will be a lot wordier with a lot of language that is just super unprofessional and fun. I don’t ‘curr’ if my grammar is correct or if I make up words, as long as people get the point, I am good.”

Stenson then gathered all her witty blog posts and decided to put them together, along with other writings and personal pieces, and publish a book, her first, titled, “Who We Are is Why We WIN,” a quote that her former UW softball coach Heather Tarr said.

College student-athlete, National Champion, why not add another accomplishment to her list.

“The title is absolutely perfect. This quote is so great because it basically tells you, ‘Be a good person or you’re a loser” for lack of a better comparison. I think every single person I have ever played with at Washington, has done outstanding things in their lifetime and it’s because of who they are and the decisions that they choose to make that helps our program to be a success. It’s just perfect.

The idea came about for Stenson during a 2009 banquet.

“I had planned on printing all of my things off for all of the girls and binding them so they could read them (I am willing to bet that most of my teammates never read the writings). I wanted them to keep them as a memory.

“Well, we had a very short amount of time between landing in Seattle and jumping in Lake Washington for a celebratory dip and getting dressed up and celebrating our season, so I wasn’t able to get it together. I was also planning on doing the same thing for 2010, but I just never got the energy to do both seasons so I let it go. Then I kind of started talking about wanting to make it a book and people said, do it, so I listened.

“It was just an idea shared that got a great response so I chose to Google self publishers after going through three months of trying to publish on a website that I had no idea how to work, and I found the perfect publisher and am now trying to get this thing done.

“The publishing process is grueling because I am such an instant gratification person that waiting around like this is killing me. I just can’t wait.”

Stenson made the decision to donate half of her books’ proceeds to the Big Deep Breath Organization, a group that assists families whose children are battling cancer, started in honor by Ashley K. Aven’s family, after Aven, a Washington high school junior, passed away in August 2010 from AML, Acute Myeloid Leukemia.

Stenson is a leukemia survivor herself, having battled and beaten cancer as a young child.

“The moment I met Ashley and her family my life was changed,” Stenson said. “I had a really hard time before that game (that Ashley attended) and was crying to my friend Taylor about how it wasn’t fair that I got to be ok and that she is fighting to live. I went through a hard time those months following. The doctor’s called it ‘survivor’s guilt’ and I would just call it having a heart.

“It’s hard to have had cancer as a child, not really remember much of it, and see kids be affected by it. I just don’t feel right about it. Her family is such supporters of me and my decisions and I just feel that being able to help them help others will help me in the long run. It’s selfish sounding, but overall, giving back to families who are struggling just feels good at the end of the day.”

With Stenson’s time spent furiously typing away at her keyboard and figuring out her young adult life, as many recent college graduates are doing, she still makes time to play the game that has had such an amazing impact on her young life.

“I definitely keep softball in my life. I am actually booming in the lessons department, I have several people that want slapping lessons and right handed power hitting lessons, so that’s been keeping me around the game,” Stenson said.

“I am also in the process of getting a Visa to go play over in Italy. That is kind of on the fence right now so hopefully that goes through here soon. So softball is definitely a prominent figure in my life. I also play co-ed soccer on Sunday and Wednesday nights and I play basketball (20 guys and myself) on Saturday mornings.

“I actually just recently hit head with some dude and I have a pretty brutal concussion moment going on so I have been down and out from physical activity for the last week. It’s been excruciating, but I know I need to do it.

“My mom heard that each concussion does the same amount of damage as five years of heroin abuse. So 35 years of heroin abuse for me. I have obviously never done heroin, but I am sure it’s pretty bad, so five years of it must be terrifying.”

Check out Stenson’s “Breakin it Down with Bailey” on Facebook as well as her official website at http://bidwb.com/ where you can preorder her book, “Who We Are is Why We WIN.”

For more information regarding the Big Deep Breath Organization, go to http://www.bigdeepbreath.org/.

Apr 10 2011

Sunday Column: The Cult of Lacrosse

NoontimeSports.com will now feature every Sunday a weekly column that gives fans an inside look into the sports world through opinions and investigative reporting. We begin our first of many “Sunday Column’s” with a look at the sport of lacrosse, as well as the fans that are avid supporters of the game.

By Dan Rubin

On a crisp Saturday afternoon in Providence, Rhode Island, the Brown Bears took to the field against a nationally ranked Penn Quaker team with hopes of keeping their chances alive in order to compete for the Ivy League’s automatic bid.

The stands were utterly packed at Stevenson Field with crowds arriving almost two hours before the game’s start. Penn fans traveled from Philadelphia in droves, parking an RV in the stands and starting a tailgate replete with Penn lawn chairs, a Penn Quaker flag, as well as music loud enough to be heard across the field and atop the press box where I sat watching this.

If I didn’t give you the month (or, for that matter, the name of the field), the above story would sound exactly the way the average Saturday during college football season unfolds not only at Brown, but at a number of different stadia across the US.

Instead, though, it was during April, and it was for a sport that much of America hears about, but few know about. It’s about a sport that is treated like a religion within its grounds but sometimes mocked by outsiders. It has attained an almost cult-like following, as parents, friends, fans, and athletes travel hundreds of miles to watch their team. Yet, it barely has a professional league and most casual sports fans have no idea where teams play or what cities are represented.

It is the world of lacrosse.

I spent the past weekend working both men’s and women’s games for Brown, (three games in three days).  And I’ve been involved with lacrosse as a sport since I was a 14-year old freshman in high school.  But, having never played the sport itself, I’ve always taken a unique perspective of a fan that didn’t really understand its appeal. I never understood what it meant to put on the helmet, put on the eye black, and to have my parents rabidly cheering me from the stands. I never really got it, until I stood in that tailgate, next to that RV, and asked the questions.

From what I found, lacrosse has an appeal that no other sport can identify with. It’s a sport driven by passion and intensity. It traces its roots to the Iroquois tribe of Native Americans. The on-field product requires speed, athleticism, and intensity.  Even substitutions of players are on the fly during game, requiring players to go full speed to the sideline while teammates charge into the play with the same velocity.

But that passion is fueled by a love of the game, a feeling that “it’s our sport,” as one parent explained at the pre-game tailgate.  Baseball, they said, had gotten too big, too overblown.  Everybody in baseball is worried about the big payday, but they’re not willing to put their bodies on the line. The stereotype of a baseball player is to conserve energy for a long season, with strict inning and pitch counts, so as to keep players in peak condition for a playoff run. Pitchers, they say, are on a pitch count so their arms stay healthy, otherwise they’re no good to a team. In the image category, baseball is much more rigid and monitored.

Lacrosse requires peak physical condition before the season starts, they say. It takes offseason conditioning, weight training, and everything that other sports utilize. But with a season only 16-20 games long, it requires a player to be ready to go every step of the way.  An uninjured player is one that can fight through sore muscles and pulled ligaments.  Injuries, they say, are serious, and they’re taken seriously.  But there’s a football-fine line between being injured and being hurt. Lacrosse players, they proudly say, admit they’re injured long before they’re hurt.

But there’s more. Lacrosse fans point to their lack of a well-known professional league as proof of passion. Players go out and sacrifice their bodies, putting it all on the line every week when they don’t have to. Major League Lacrosse is relatively unknown outside of its ranks, and the National Lacrosse League barely receives any coverage.

One fan from Boston even pointed out that a prominent local newspaper can spend five pages talking about a two-inning minor league rehab stint by a relief pitcher, but they rarely spend five paragraphs talking about the Cannons and Blazers, (I was very proud to tell him about Noontime Sports’ coverage of the Blazers, by the way).

To them, the niche of lacrosse gives them a feeling of ownership over their sport.  It’s the only sport where its world championships feature a full-blown Native American tribe competing outside the United States’ national team (the Iroquois Nationals are, indeed, one of the best in the world).  Because it’s on the national radar but ranks below everything, including soccer at times, games retain the feeling of family reunions.  The same fans show up, and the parents feel a kinship among themselves.  Players from teams have a genuine dislike for one another, but they have a fervent respect for the game.  They love the feeling of crushing one another, the parents say, but at the end they both respect what the other side is trying to accomplish.

Lacrosse fans tend to not care what outsiders say about the sport, even if what is said a.) has validity and b.) is a major black eye for the sport.  No matter what anybody says about other sports, kids can go outside, pick up a rock and a stick, and play a form of baseball.  Kids from inner cities across America play basketball.  Even kids from rural areas have the ability to go out and tackle one another to unleash football’s aggression.

Outsiders look at lacrosse and say, (ignorantly at times) that it’s a rich, white-kid sport.  Indeed, the names on rosters sometimes read like a law firm’s recruiting list of partners instead.  The parents are, for the most part, wearing slacks and shoes to the game, and the perfectly manicured skin of the mothers makes outsiders turn their nose.  They point to the game and say that it requires money for equipment, requires money for travel, and the best teams are wealthy.  And they’d be right by saying the best schools are not public schools.  Where football has Alabama, Texas, and Oklahoma, lacrosse has Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Syracuse, and every school that’s in the Ivy League.  And the fans of these teams usually have the money to travel across the country, following their teams and rooting them on throughout the year.

To a casual fan, that’s the number one reason why lacrosse is never on the radar.  It’s a blue-collar vs. white-collar attitude – almost like town-gown relations in some areas.  The Duke lacrosse scandal galvanized the sport as being a bunch of rich, preppy kids who thought that “Daddy’s money” could save them.  Even though those players were innocent, people still say that it didn’t matter because the lacrosse players came from money and wealth, while the rest of us scraped by.

The scandal is five years old this year.  It’s long forgotten in pop culture, but the name “lacrosse” still brings that perception to the forefront.  When Duke won the men’s national title last year, the first question of the postgame interview started with the phrase, “It’s been a long time coming for this program…”  Everybody knew what that meant, even if 90% of the team wasn’t even at Duke during that time.  The name “lacrosse” evoked the images of a scandal gone wrong, and it still evoked a stereotype of a sport that may never shed it.

But to those at the game, they couldn’t care less.  They don’t care what people say about it.  They care only about the speed of the game, the passion of the players, the next road trip where they can park an SUV.  They look at their chance to pack another stadium, root for their team, and hope for a chance at a national title.  On Sunday, Brown’s women’s lacrosse team hosted the #3-ranked Duke Blue Devils (ironically enough).  Duke packed half the stands with a sea of blue to root on their team.  Brown packed a sea of white and brown.  The barely-.500 Bears took a one-goal lead against Duke before the Devils rallied to force overtime.  In OT, the back-and-forth seesaw battle saw the Devils win in the sudden-death 3rd extra frame.  As the girls from Brown walked off the field, both teams’ fans stood and applauded what they saw in a show of mutual respect and admiration.  Duke’s head coach shook her head and smiled at Brown’s head coach as they embraced in the middle of the field.

As the sun slowly dipped and the nighttime sky began to appear, people packed up their cars, and the lights went out on Stevenson.  There were plans to make for next week.