CIS CORNER: PANDAS WIN WOMEN'S HOCKEY TITLE

Work commitments meanfollowing the Alberta-McGill final at the 2007 smart CIS women's hockey championship via TV and the web, so here's just some quick observations:

• UPDATE, 11:10 p.m.: The Alberta Pandas were deserving 4-0 winners over the McGill Martlets in the final on Monday night. How deep is the U of A? They won handily on a night when the top two scorers in the CIS during the regular season, Stacey McAlphine and Tarin Podloski, managed only one assist; fifth-year senior goalie Holly Tarleton stopped everything McGill could manage.
  
  The best game of the championship might have been Sunday's Laurier-Alberta pool game, which the Pandas won 4-2 after making their own breaks early, opening a four-goal lead and holding off a Hawks comeback.
  
  Congrats to the Manitoba Bisons for winning their second CIS bronze in three seasons, upsetting Laurier 3-2 on the strength of goalie Stacey Corfield's 20 stops.
  
• UPDATE, 1:33 p.m.: The Gee-Gees finally got on the scoreboard, but Moncton's Carole Gallant made 39 saves to lead the Aigles Bleues to a 6-5 win in the consolation game. Mandi Duhamel had four points for Gee-Gees, who made a nice comeback in their final 20 minutes together this season, outshooting the U de M 17-4 and coming up just one goal short.
• Laurier won't forget their captain Laurissa Kenworthy getting stoned on a 3-on-0 by Alberta's Holly Tarleton when it was 1-0 early in the second. Alberta got caught in a bad change during a penalty kill -- the second of back-to-back 5-on-3s -- and Laurier seemed certain to score. Instead, the Golden Hawks got nothing, Alberta put the pressure over the next few minutes on and got goals 80 seconds apart to stretch the lead. The Pandas were Taryn (or Tarin) Laurier apart -- Taryn Berry got the second goal and Tarin Podloski scored the 4-0 tally. OK, that was a bad pun.
• Something unique to the women's game is the refs call more penalties on teams when they're in the offensive zone and make more calls in the third period. Laurier's comeback chances ended when forward Lauren Barch got a cheesy tripping penalty with 1:06 left; it looked like the Alberta defender who feel stepped on the puck when she tried to freeze it against the boards.
• Ottawa's Fiona Aiston, Laurier's senior left-wing who'll finish her career in the bronze medal game vs. Manitoba, has scooped up both Golden Hawks game MVPs. It might have been a good idea to write about her.
• Seeing Steve Kouleas of The Score do a between-periods interview with the SSN crew was to know greatness, especially knowing how much of a buffoon it probably made the second-period guest from Friday's Laurier-Ottawa game look like (hey, any exposure is good). Kouleas called for more TV coverage of the CIS. Maybe it was lip service, but at least more people with name recognition are talking about it.
• Kouleas' broadcast partner tonight is Sami-Jo Small, the Team Canada goalie. Small is the only athlete I've ever felt compelled to ask for an autograph during my J-school career -- which you should never do, unless it's actually for a friend.
  
  About a year after the '02 Olympics, Small was in Portage la Prairie, Man., for a speaking engagement and the Daily Graphic's rookie sportswriter was dispatched to interview the Olympian. Small's talk included telling about how her older brother stuck her in goal for childhood street hockey games, which wasn't for off from a scenario that used to play itself out in the Sager family. Along with being a fellow goalie, Small, like Out of Left Field resident goaltending expert Trina Sager, studied engineering, so it seemed OK to ask for an autograph just this once.
• The rink at U of O, with a capacity of 800 to 1,200, is almost perfect for CIS hockey -- the limited spectator capacity contributes to a noisy scale model version what you get in the NCAA. Bottom line: It creates demand that you wouldn't get in a 2,000-to-3,000-seat arena.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.