Fronts: Beskorowany literally a big piece of the puzzle

Doug Gilmour has his big goalie: The Kingston Frontenacs just announced they have added 6-foot-5 Dallas Stars second-round draft choice Tyler Beskorowany from the Owen Sound Attack.

(And hey, they managed to get radio coverage.)

Beskorowany got drafted on upside. Part of the reason he was available was that the Sound Attack has another NHL-drafted big 'tender, Scott Stajcer (a fifth-round pick of the New York Rangers), who is a year younger. That's a big piece of the story, although it doesn't mean the deal should get panned from a Kingston perspective.

The upshot is that Beskorowany was added for relatively little, with centre Bobby Mignardi and a 2010 fourth-round pick going to the Sound Attack. One would have to figure that Beskorowany, after splitting the games almost 50/50 last season is Owen Sound, is coming in assured that he will start the season as the No. 1 netminder with either John Cullen or Mavric Parks as the backup. The people who have time invested in Beskorowany would like him to play more than 37 games and if he's as good as his NHL draft status indicates, then he should.

Some scouting reports have noted Beskorowany, who had a 3.64 goals against average and .902 save percentage with Owen Sound, has some issues with controlling rebounds. This is where you keep your fingers crossed the Frontenacs are going to be much tighter with their, cue Harry Neale, defensive zone coverage.

Parks' play in the first half of last season might have been worth a couple wins for a foundering Frontenacs team. However, even his biggest supporter will admit he had a proclivity to follow up a string of great saves by letting in a soft goal. One would hope he would rise to the challenge of having to earn his playing time after being the only option for much of last season, whether that is in Kingston.

(Kinger notes in the comments that adding a 19-year-old goalie is only a one-year move. The Frontenacs are notorious for this, but picking up a NHL-drafted goalie could also be a focal point.)

Meantime, the gang at Fronts Talk directed attention to the news the Fronts have found a radio partnership with, wait for it, 88.7 myFM in Napanee. (I would ask my parents how it sounds, but they might not be able to get from their RR1 Napanee address; just kidding, but only a little).

Far be it to put a spin on owner Doug Springer's contention that putting broadcasts on a 6,000-watt adult contemporary station will "help the team win fans in outlying areas" by saying he might want to prioritize keeping fans in Kingston's core.

Today is not the day for that. Please save smart remarks about a Kingston team having its games on a Napanee station that might be hard to get in parts of Kingston, or that trading for Beskorowany is only proof Mavric Parks is indeed one of the OHL's top goaltenders, as an anonymous commenter contended earlier this week. It's all on the up and up. Most of the commentariat has been that Gilmour has upgraded his complement of forwards and defencemen and now he has a NHL-drafted goalie.

(Although, it is almost like they are taunting Kinger. They trade for a goalie who is the same height, has the same first name and put the games on a radio station in his technically adopted hometown and make sure it's station whose signal is not much more stronger than CFRC 101.9 FM. Well played.)

Snark break: Oh, but it's new to us, love

Obligatory sideswipe at MLSE: Steve Yzerman is not good enough to rebuild the Leafs, but Wayne Gretzky says it is "no secret" he is good enough to be GM of Team Canada at the 2010 Olympics. Pierre LeBrun has also been hinting about Stevie Y for a couple days, but it's more definitive coming from the Great One.

(That would be Gretzky.)

Here's a prop bet: The Liberals will get back in office about the same time Michael Bishop gets through an entire CFL season without being benched.

Long story short, The Guardian over in England -- they speak really good European over there -- ran the same silly article about the Leafs that you've read 1,000 times. Cox Bloc has fired back.

NHLer Chris Chelios believes the doofus from Def Leppard placed the Stanley Cup upside-down on purpose.

There is no need to announce that Game 6 of the World Series will be pushed back to air a special by Barack Obama. It will long be over by then — the Series, not the election.

(See. Non-partisan political humour is possible. It's just blander than the federal leaders in Canada — all of them.)

The Portland Winter Hawks will soon have their new owner. And another domino falls in Doug Springer's quest to be hailed as the worst owner in the Canadian Hockey League.

(The Guardian is great, yet somehow "peak" instead of "peek" made it into print, proving once again that spell check will make idiots of us all, eventually. Also, apparently pointing out that "north of the U.S. border, ESPN's hockey coverage lasts a good deal longer than it does in the U.S.," is an apposite observation overseas).

This post is worth nothing, but this is worth noting

• A couple junior hockey players from our neck of the woods, Jeremy Franklin of Bath, Ont., and David Pratt of Napanee, who play with the Wellington Dukes, have been selected to play for Canada East at the World Junior A Challenge in Camrose, Alta., in next month.
  
  As further proof all Canadians know each other, David Pratt's mother teaches with Kathie Sager, Official Mom of Out of Left Field, whose former students include Jeremy Franklin.
  
  David Pratt is apparently planning to play NCAA hockey at Clarkson University, by the way.
• Taking Note reports that the Kingston Frontenacs' Taylor Doherty and Ethan Werek are both among the Top 30 NHL draft prospects, according to Central Scouting. Doherty is No. 20 on the International Scouting Service list.
• John Murray, the overage goalie who was a bit of a band-aid on a brain tumour for the Frontenacs last season, has signed with the ECHL's Ontario Reign. The team is based in California, by the way.
• There's another Doornekamp coming down the pipeline ... the Whig-Standard had a feature on a 15-year-old basketball player named Laura Doornekamp (cousin of Aaron and Nate, for those of you scoring at home).

Snark Break...

As you and your (former) best friend had to be pulled apart while after an argument over the world's greatest marathoners got out of hand.

How did that Barack Obama sign end up in the yard of the Alaska governor's mention?

Figure skating meets will have fewer judges. This is a positive step toward no figure skating at all.

Saying "some of the color and personality has been removed from the sport" with regard to NASCAR is wrong on two counts. It has few people of colour, and it's not a sport. Please give some thought to why the drivers in NASCAR can act like buffoons and it's all part of the show, while no one would stand for it in other big American ball-and-stick games.

In all seriousness ... far be it to question what it says about us that many, present company included, can't find the outrage that there should be over the Mike Danton/David Frost story. It's such a sick story and one can only imagine what it's like for the principals, including some people in the Napanee area, to keep retelling the stories that are now more than a decade old. Where would the harm be if Danton was brought home to serve his sentence in a Canadian jail?

This post is worth nothing, but this is worth noting

• The Big Lead has posted its preview of the Raptors.
• There's no way of confirming or debunking this gut feeling, but the Kingston Frontenacs might lead the OHL in the most goals allowed in the final minute of a period. They had one last night in Saginaw (7-3 loss) and one against Oshawa last Sunday. By unofficial count, the Fronts are 0 for their last 19 power plays.
• It's irony on a base level that a list of the most subversive comedians of all time could leave out Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks.

Let the Eagles soar, while ruminating on a perfectly good game of FOOTBALL

U of T went 49 football games without a win. That's nothing.

Ernestown Secondary School went forty-eight years without a victory on the gridiron. Well, that status changed today. In the Things That Are Sad, Kind Of department, the Eagles' 23-22 win over the Loyalist Lancers gave at least one mid-'90s grad reason to change his Facebook status: "Neate is glorying in a team triumphant ... Ernestown 23 ... Loyalist 22." It calls for a celebration.

That being said, within a few minutes, four other K-Town Facebookers had shown the common courtesy to comment. Then an Out of Left Field contributor who's also a K-Towner and thus stood a chance of actually getting the joke, got a voice mail delivered in an incredibly poor imitation of the former Richardson Stadium public address announcer, CKWS sports anchor Doug Jeffries.

"A couple of out-of-town scores to pass along ... in the Kingston senior high school football league, Er-nes-town 23, Loyalist ... 22 ..."

Details of how the coach Lou Bilkovski's gridiron yearlings, the first group of Eagles to grace a gridiron, are left for tomorrow's Kingston Whig-Standard. (Loyalist is not exactly a football powerhouse, but it had at least had a team before.)

An explanation is probably due for why someone who's past age 30 would get so excited over a high school football game that he did not see, played in a city that he has not lived in since 2000. It is a little sad and lacking in self-awareness, yes?

Hardly. Well, Doc, it was always a hold-your-manhood-cheap, secret shame to be such a fanboy when it came to football, while having graduated from a high school which did not field a football team. It was like a living a lie. It's not for nothing that last sentence had football in it twice -- overcompensate, much?

Napanee District Secondary School, which offered football, was about the same distance from the Sager homestead as ESS. Back in 1991, just as now, if you went to Bath Public School, you had a choice of the two high schools. A few kids from Bath tried out both. A few did, multiple times.

In our home, though, it went without saying that you would attend Ernestown. Thus as a promising career as a quarterback running back starting linebacker, how about backup offensive lineman (see artistic approximation at right), was sabotaged. (Thanks, Mom.) Instead, a career in sports writing was born. (Thanks again, Mom, for knowing your sensitive son was better off at a smaller school.)

Other people who passed through ESS have gone on to lead happy, productive lives without caring that the school had this football void forever unfilled. Oh, Ernestown has had its moments on the court in basketball (some of its grads have done very well) and volleyball. More importantly, people went on from there to get good educations and lead happy, productive lives.

Sorry, but I'm Mojo Nixon on this (not sure on Elvis, though)

That is all well and good for some, but it could it make up for the lack of football? No, it could not.

Perhaps that was one reason for becoming such a nut for the sport -- typical geek-love for something you knew full well you would never be able to get. Over the ensuing years, it honestly meant feeling envious of anyone who had played the glorious game in the way that God had intended for football to be played, with helmets, pads and the forward pass.

Rugby and soccer are nice enough games, too. They just demanded way too much running for too little tangible reward, aside from the orange slices you got to have afterward. For a kid who hated running, it was best to treat them as peculiarities, better left to the weirdos over in the United Kingdom, Europe ... Asia ... Africa .. Australia ... pretty much all of Central and South America, really.

You can imagine what it was like to carry that inside, all these years, until today. It meant putting up with a lot of ribbing from people who went to other schools in the area. The legend held that ESS had a statue of a kicking horse instead of a football team. That "persisting urban legend," by the way, has permeated the local youth culture to the point where it has to be debunked on the school website.

Thanks to an Ernestown fan who was pressed into service as a stringer (thanks again, Mom), it can be reported that Bilkovski's boys did give up the first TD of the day. However, they came back with three touchdowns, including majors from tailback Dustin Teal and tight end Kody Turner, that staked them to a big enough lead to hang on for the W. It should have come as no surprise.

The majestic Eagles even pulled off a fake-kick fumblerooskie. The long snapper dribbled the ball along the ground instead of firing it crisply back to the holder. A teammate picked it up and swept around the end .

In a one-point game, that stratagem loomed large. The Minnesota Vikings should be so inventive when they're in the scoring zone. Really, they should.

Teal, Turner and the rest of the lads might not understand why one win would make the day, hell week, for someone who passed through the same school a decade and a half ago.

They will, in time. From the kicking horse, to kicking a little arse. It won't get headlines like U of T did, but then again, I never went to that school.

Six degrees ain't just the overnight low in Ottawa

Check out the results from Event 19 at the Canadian high school rowing championships today in St. Catharines. For those of you keeping scoring at home, that's a 1-2-3 finish consisting of a boat from ol' high school (Allisha Campaigne and Meredith Papps from Ernestown, near Kingston), a pair from the current city of residence (Glenn Hay and Lindsay Heubner from Glebe Collegiate in Ottawa) and a crew from Port Dover, which falls under the old Simcoe Reformer beat.  

In the same vein,  high school track star Karelle Edwards set a meet record in the hurdles at the East Regionals last Friday — one week after a certain someone profiled her in the pages of the Ottawa Sun. Karelle erased a mark set in 2002 by a runner from, you guessed it, Napanee.

SOUNDS LIKE A COUNTRY SONG

You know that gesture hockey players make after they trip someone, holding their hands up in the air to profess innocence?

Some Internet equivalent of that needs to go with linking to the tabloid relevalations that Roger Clemens had a "10-year affair" with Mindy McCready (don't act like you didn't constantly channel-surf by CMT back in 1996 hoping to catch the video for Guys Do It All The Time) that allegedly began when she was 15 years old. That much redneck bathos in one package -- disgraced ballplayer, disgraced country singer -- is too much to stomach. As well, it allegedly began when she was 15 years old.

On the plus side, the Deadspinners are having their harmless (so they think) fun, which is enjoyable to read. Also, it's good to find out that you can Google "mindy mccready oxycontin," and be looking recent bikini shots of Avril Lavigne in just a couple of click-throughs.

Nothing could be finer for the members of the trivial generation on a rainy April afternoon.

THEY'RE WAITING THERE IN ALLENTOWN... AND WE'RE TAKING THIS LYING DOWN

Ottawa is big enough to take this lying down.

It's rich to read that spending five months in a world capital with a population of close to a million people amounted to being in "exile." That was the word the the Allentown, Pa., paper used on Friday to describe the experience the Lynx-cum-Lehigh Valley IronPigs players had last season.

"The players, especially those who suffered through the year's ''exile'' to Ottawa after the Phillies cut their ties with Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, are eager to experience the environment they've been told to expect at Coca-Cola Park, where they anticipate playing before nightly crowds of 7,000 or 8,000 rather than 700 or 800.

" 'Try seven or eight,' quipped catcher Jason Jaramillo when talking about the size of last year's crowds in Ottawa." -- Allentown Morning Call

Exile. Exile?! Back in the day, if an out-of-town daily talked about your city this way, whoosh, off came the gloves and it would be raining right hands, like Scotty Thornton and Chris Neil in the Bruins-Sens game today. Vengeance was expected, even at the risk of looking like Hicksville, not unlike when the Ottawa media who were in Anaheim for the Stanley Cup final last season went to Disneyland so they could -- call Ripley's! -- report back that many people in Southern California don't care much for hockey. (Thing is, some people in SoCal do like hockey, which probably would have made for a better read.)

That was then. You can split hairs over wording -- stay, stint, sojourn, whistle-stop -- but it ends there. Reading "exile" and the quotes from the players rubs a bit of salt in the wound for the baseball diehards, but not much. It's Allentown's moment, let 'em have it, they were good sports about that Billy Joel using their pain for his art once upon a time.

We can take heart in knowing that we have another team now, the Ottawa Rapids. It's for real come May 22, 2008, which can't quite be said yet about CFL Team Version 3.0. There's a chance for everyone who was culpable in the Lynx's long goodbye -- the city, the corporate crowd and the fair-weathers who should realize that no one past age 20 should ever sign an e-mail, "Go Sens Go" -- to make it right with minor-league baseball the second time around.

There's too much going on in this city, like the Senators starting the Stanley Cup playoffs and the Tulip Festival being just weeks away. It's neither here nor there that the Tulip Festival has a better chance of being kick-ass this spring, while the NHL team will be doing the wilting. (Bruins 4, Sens 0, today, everyone see?)

In other words, nice try, Allentown. You have a baseball team, but paraphrasing the great Earl McRae, Ottawa will always have the cattle castle at Lansdowne Park.

Literally.

(There are plenty of familiar names on that Lehigh Valley roster, and all the best to them in the IL Northeast Division.)

Related:
'Pigs are packing to head home (Jeff Schuler, Allentown Morning Call)

YOU'RE WELCOME!

The hometown newspaper ran an editorial that basically parrots everything which has been said here about the Kingston Frontenacs for the past several months.

It almost makes up for the paper's refusal to hire the hick from out RR1 Napanee full-time not so long ago. Almost.

Related:
Hockey team feeling the heat (Kingston Whig-Standard)

CIS CORNER: GGs TAKE OUT TORONTO

Notes of interest from The 613 ...

HOOPS

• Gee-Gees: Just nine turnovers and only four missed free throws on the road in the playoffs -- that's why Ottawa and not Toronto is headed to the OUA East final after the Gee-Gees won 63-60 on Sunday (Josh Gibson-Bascombe had 19 points, eight rebounds, six steals and five assists in 39 minutes). When they can do that, you start wondering if it was meant to be.
  
  It's too bad for the U of T -- the best team not to go to the Final 8 for two years running.
  
  (The U of T women's team is headed to nationals, though. Kyla Burwash, from the Ottawa area and a former Golden Gael, hit the game-tying three-pointer with 29 seconds left in an eventual overtime win over York in the OUA East final on Sunday.)
• Ravens: The final score, 96-44, read like the blood pressure of a very unhealthy person. You'd almost think Carleton's Kingston guys — Rob Saunders and Stu Turnbull with 17 points apiece, Aaron Doornekamp hooping 14 in just 17 minutes — had something to prove. Carleton is always at their scariest coming off a game where they didn't feel they performed to expectations, which is probably how that surprise squeaker vs. Ottawa last week could be categorized. There's not much more for us to say.
  
  It's the 300th career win for Dave Smart at Carleton — congrats are in order.
• Gaels: Bottom line, Queen's should have nothing to hang their heads over, despite the score tonight. Rob Smart's team actually has people in Kingston who aren't directly tied to Queen's talking about basketball for probably the first time in a long while and that's no mean feat. It's a good, young team and replacing one or both of the Mitchell brothers will be no easy task, but the program's headed in a good direction. Simon Mitchell, the senior, had 13 points tonight in his likely valedictory.
• Napanee's Matteke Hutzler, the sophomore forward for the Simon Fraser's women's team, got plenty of pub from the Vancouver Province on Saturday. (There's another paper that has a blog dedicated to university coverage. It's always good to see someone else implement ideas that got ignored when you suggested them in your workplace more than a year ago.)

WOMEN'S HOCKEY

• Gaels: Queen's Melissa John stopped 78-of-82 shots over two games against Laurier and it wasn't enough, as the Golden Hawks won 1-0 tonight to complete a sweep of the OUA semi-final.
• Ravens: What, sweeping Ottawa to win their first playoff series wasn'tmemorable enough for Carleton -- they also had to play four OTs?
  
  The Ravens' Kerri Palmer scored a power-play goal after 59:27 of overtime to end the longest Quebec conference women's hockey game ever.
  
  Talk about a strange game. Kaila Lassaline, a rookie for Carleton who didn't have a goal in the regular season, had two by the end of the first period. Ottawa's Melissa DiPetta stopped 57 shots in the marathon, while Carleton's Valerie Charbonneau blocked 53.
  
  (Devil's advocate: Queen's and Carleton might have better teams than Ottawa, who's hosting nationals.)

MEN'S HOCKEY

• Gee-Gees: Trois-Rivieres did their thing, getting their usual three power-play goals to race out in front 4-1, and then playing possum for the last two periods. The Gee-Gees played a good second period but couldn't cut into the lead. On a 4-on-4 late in the frame, Rob Jarvis came in off the point and had the goalie, Sylvain Michaud (lucky No. 13 -- never seen that on a goalie), beat, but lost the puck before he could complete the deke and cut the lead to one goal. A minute later, Trois-Rivieres' Samuel Beland scored the eventual series-winner.
• Gaels: McGill winning tonight 2-0 to complete the sweep of Queen's (but they won their division!) was probably no surprise. Ryan Gibb stopped 42-of-44 in a losing cause for the Golden Gaels. Gatineau native Mathieu Poitras had the 23-save shutout and even assisted on the clinching goal.
  
  The Whig had a story on Friday that captured what both Queen's hockey teams dealt with this season, splitting home games between two arenas off-campus (the men's team even went to a third rink to practise).