A bit of a bloodless coup? That's highly spurious

One read on Melody Davidson going back behind the bench for the Canadian women's hockey team is that this might have been a bit of a dressing-room coup, less than two years out from 2010 Olympics..

You're unlikely to hear or read anything to that effect, so sorry, you're stuck with speculation from an overopinionated and undereducated blog-typin' guy. Sorry about that. The women's soccer team, along with some of our elite amateur athletes, always seems to be good for some public airing of grievances every now and again -- disputes with the CSA and other various governing bodies, conflicts over national-team and club commitments and such. For most people, though, it's an open-and-shut story -- the team didn't win the gold at the worlds in April under Peter Smith from CIS champion McGill, so a change had to be made.

The same criticism that's been levelled against Even Pellerud with the women's soccer team could be levied against Smith. He seems to be a defence-first coach and that might have made the vets feel like they were being held back. (Note the qualifiers.) He's a good coach, but he might be a bit too much on the technocrat side for a team that's inevitably going to feed off emotion at the Olympics in less than two years' time.

You won't hear that from the players, though.

(Wayne State coach Jim Fetter is on the coaching staff of the under-22 team. How's that significant in this corner of the web? It might not hurt one of his star players from the Ottawa area, Lindsay DiPietro of Manotick, from making the team.)

Related:
Davidson returns to prepare women's hockey team for 2010; Took Canada to gold at 2006 Winter Olympics in Italy (The Canadian Press)