The Toronto (Caution: May Contain Football Like-Substance) Varsity Blues?

The U of T Varsity Blues' chances of appearing in "obscure college football scores" some time in the next 4-5 years have shot up by 4,000 per cent.

This is too good, in a football-nerd context, not too mention: Toronto has an incoming defensive back, Greg Easterbrook, who has the same name as the author of ESPN.com's eggheaded Tuesday Morning Quarterback column. The mind behind TMQ, Gregg Easterbrook, whose football obsessions include obscure colleges, conservative coaching decisions and pass-wackiness, is the one with the extra G.

One can only hope this gets the Varsity Blues a mention on TMQ at some point, notwithstanding that Page 2 hasn't been hip since Varsity Blues first became a staple of late-night cable programming.

It's nice, at the risk of playing the Canadian who clings to any mention of the country in the U.S. media, to think the other Easterbrook has a secret fascination with CIS football. He did mention then-McMaster star Kojo Aidoo in his annual nonsensical mock draft column. The Queen's Golden Gaels were also mentioned last fall for executing a couple daring third-down gambles while closing out Laval in the Mitchell Bowl.

There was some hedging over whether it was worth posting about Easterbrook. Football recruiting news is handled very well by Canada Football Chat and the 25 schools planning to participate in CIS football this season. For the rest of us, there so much uncertainty over what those players might become in a few years. However, The Sporting Blog had a post on Tuesday about some college basketball recruits with odd names, so the attitude was, whatthehell.

All that is known about Easterbrook is he played at Ernestown Secondary School near Kingston, whose program is only two years old. He presumably appreciates football success can be a long time in the waiting for a school, not a bad understanding to bring to a Toronto team trying to turn the corner under coach Greg DeLaval.

"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." (Sept. 18, 2008)

The Varsity Blues should seize the day with their Greg Easterbrook, if he becomes a starter. As TMQ would say, be bold and the football gods will smile upon you, U of T.

(Totally self-indulgent, I know.)

From ESS to ESPN ... Good luck and godspeed, A.V.

Never say Ernestown Secondary School students are not accomplished — ESPN, hooping it up in Italy or designing video games.

On the first count, all the best to Adnan Virk in this next stage of his broadcasting career, working as an anchor for ESPNews. By his reckoning, Adnan would be the first Muslim on-air personality at the worldwide leader.

People would naturally identify A.V. with Toronto, he's lived there longer than he did in the Kingston area. Hopefully people in the Limestone City know their corner of the universe was where such an immense talent began his long road to glory.

Hoser hoops heaven... Canada worlds-bound

Canada Basketball needed Friday night the way a man engulfed in flames could use a glass of water.

That's is a best stab at capturing the meaning of Canada earned a spot at the 2010 world basketball championship with an 80-76 win over the Dominican Republic at the qualifier in San Juan, Puerto Rico. As Doug Smith of the Toronto Star wrote, "The magnitude of the win cannot be overstated. With solid development programs at the under-19 and under-17 levels, Canada desperately needed to see some success at the senior level to give the teenagers something to aspire to."

There is hope, to borrow that overused one-word aphorism. It was furnished by Jermaine Anderson, Carl English, Levon Kendall, Andy Rautins, Jesse Young and a Carleton Raven, Aaron Doornekamp. None are household names with the rank-and-file Canadian sports fan, although Aaron might be pushing for the status of being Ernestown Secondary School's most famous alumnus after those two cooler-than-freon three-pointers he drained in the fourth quarter to keep the Dominicans at bay. Whatever is to come — and there is lots more to come — for Canada on the court, Friday felt like a catalytic event.

Please remember, if you are so inclined, which group of quote, unquote obscure Euro-ballers helped with this big step forward. Canada had only NBAer at this tournament, the Miami Heat forward Joel Anthony. The team was still celebrating when Leo Rautins told TrueHoop that he wants to have a few more NBA players next summer in Turkey. He's hoping Steve Nash will take time out from saving the world to lace up for his country one last time. The San Antonio Spurs forward Matt Bonner, an ex-Raptor who is married to a Toronto woman, is taking out citizenship. Bonner would be a good fit into the FIBA game, which prizes a big man who can shoot. Rautins is hopeful of getting Jamaal Magloire (don't hold your breath).

Meantime, as Smith alluded to, Canada has a lot of young talent coming up such as Junior Cadougan, Mangisto Arop, Kelly Olynyk, Cory Joseph and Tristan Thompson. Some of the guys who were on the floor Friday will be pushed out in the years to come, such is the nature of sports.

Perhaps the San Juan crew will stand out in time the way Blue Jays fans remember Doug Ault and Bob Bailor. They got it started.

It is understandable if people do not consider Canada earning its first world berth since 2002 as a big deal. The only Team Canada most people across this great country care about, let's be honest, is the one with skates and sticks which will hit the ice in Vancouver next February at the Olympics. That is fine. However, some do believe being a proud Canadian and having a serious basketball jones can overlap, no matter what is implied by Molson's ads.

Maybe there is no deeper meaning to that beyond just loving basketball. Cheering for Canada on the hardwood, with the U.S. having such a larger player pool and so many resources devoted to hoops, is a lesson in being an underdog. It also seems to evoke the doubt Canadians are always going to face. That's why it's awesome, speaking as someone from the same corner of the world, to see that Doornekamp played a significant role in the final minutes with those two threes. He's had doubters all along, being from Odessa, having played at a smaller high school, making the national team from a CIS school, and he has come out shining.


It is almost seems like living in the past to play up that Aaron is an ESS grad, but then again there are not many Eagles even compared to other Kingston-area high schools, so attention must be paid. Imagine some young baller, maybe in Toronto, or Vancouver, who will grow up to represent his country. He might never hear of places such as Odessa, or Patrick's Cove, N.L., Carl English's hometown, but a small debt will be owed to those places. And that's pretty cool.

Top 5: Getting in Tournament mode

The NCAA Tournament (always capitalized) tipped off in earnest. You're been up nights trying to figure out which 10 seed might make it to the Sweet Sixteen (Michigan, maybe Minnesota with Toronto's Devoe Joseph), strip-mined The Wages of Wins for pearls of wisdom, maybe said to hell with it and picked teams based on who has a funnier nickname, although none have anything on the one matchup in the women's NCAAs between South Dakota State (the Jackrabbits) and Texas Christian (the Horned Frogs).

You're wrong if you think this is all about knowing which team doesn't have an adequate backup centre if their best big man gets in early foul trouble, although that might help you fill out your bracket. March Madness is not an event. It's an attitude.

1. Re-read portions of Will Blythe's To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry.
   
   Granted, Blythe probably went a little far trying to claim that there's no internecine hatred like Duke-Carolina internecine hatred. However, it's brilliant and it gets to the heart of why people follow sports, to rationalize irrational loathing.
   
   Duke has never done you any wrong, yet you hate them and hate yourself for picking them to reach the Elite Eight. You might not watch NCAA Division 1 hoops all season (especially since the 35-second shot clock makes for a slower-paced game to Canadian eyes which have got used to the 24-second shot clock in the CIS), but when you see Duke, you're seeing the whole bile-pushing line of succession, from J.J. Redick back to Wojo to Bobby Hurley and Christian Laettner. Who's playing for them now doesn't seem to matter much.
   
   
2. Re-read Chuck Klosterman's essay "33" (anthologized in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs). It's about the 1980s Celtics-Lakers rivalry, but it gets to the core of basketball. Relating to the sport comes down to black-and-white philosophies. You need your absolutes (do you favour a team with great bigs, or one with savvy senior guards) if you're going to be able to fill out your bracket by noon ET tomorrow.
   

   QUESTION #8: Should capital punishment be legal?
   Laker People say no, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a human rights activist who would question the validity of any practice that essentially replicates the original crime. Celtic People say yes, because anybody who's looked into Larry Bird's eyes knows he's a killer.

   This might embarrass both the person it's about and the person who said it, but a friend said that he knew the Carleton had it in the bag at the CIS Final 8 when he saw that one of the more important Ravens had noticeably deep-set eyes. He went on to explain that men have deeper-set eyes than women due to the warrior culture, when people fought with swords. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, this would mean Carleton's path to this national title started back in 1066 on some battlefield in England.
   
   
3. Go on YouTube and watch as many One Shining Moments as you can. You will cry. It's OK to cry.
   
4. Watch Hoosiers. It's a CRTC and FCC mandate that some cable channel must being airing it late at night on the eve of the Thursday first-round games. It was Reagan-era schmaltz, but it was good schmaltz.
   
5. Stay up half the night preparing arguments for why the Canadian university champion should get a NCAA bid (or saying, hey, our tournament is good enough). More than one Canadian hoops devotee has said it would be great if the CIS champs could be given a spot in the NCAAs, not as one of the no-hope 16 seeds, but maybe as a 12 seed against a team such as Utah, seeded fifth in the Midwest Regional.
   
   Imagine the interest if some wild Canadian horde were allowed inside the velvet rope. Imagine the pressure on the U.S. coaches and players to maintain the NCAA's superiority.
   

Do all that, and you'll be ready.

(Classic To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever moment on the phone with my mom earlier this week: "Did you see the Jets beat out the Raiders?" she said, referring to two area Junior C hockey teams, the Amherstview Jets and Napanee Raiders. Neither of us have ever attended a game, so taking glee in the Raiders' dust-biting might seem like bad form.

However, it made sense. The Sagers are Ernestown people, not Napanee people, no matter what our mailing address says. As kids, we played our minor hockey and ball for Ernestown Township, since it was closer to house and most of all, not Napanee, which tended to take youth sports a little too seriously. All five of us attended Ernestown Secondary School and played various sports, although it was good that my brother got to play a little football for the Napanee Golden Hawks. The lines are clearly delineated.)

CIS Corner: Hats off to Carleton

A journo friend once said what she loved about her job was that every day, you start at zero.

That analogy, at least from afar, fits the Carleton Ravens to a T (as in Turnbull, Stuart, whose 22-point, seven-rebound effort in Sunday's 87-77 championship-game win over the UBC Thunderbirds sealed the Kingston area's sweep of the Final 8 most outstanding player awards, since Napanee's Matteke Hutzler was the MOP for the Simon Fraser women's team). The way Carleton pulled it off on Saturday night, when Turnbull hit the last-second game-winner to beat Western, naturally lent itself to speculation about an emotional letdown. Everyone remembered how Acadia took down Carleton on semi-final Saturday last March and then lost to Brock less than 24 hours later.

That's all it was, talk. Carleton seems to have an attitude that if what you did yesterday still seems big, then you cannot have done much today. Mark Masters from Streaming Sports Network Canada, who was on the beat when the Ravens had that famous win streak 4-5 years ago, recalled on the air yesterday how coach Dave Smart often downplayed it, pointing out that the school didn't count losses vs. NCAA Division 1 teams. There was a logic behind it; why count when everything resets to zero as soon as the game's over?

No one on the outside looking in can ever know for sure, but that indicates why Carleton's final two wins, over the second- and third-best teams in Canada, played out the way it did in the final weekend together for the Kingston trio of Turnbull, Rob Saunders and Aaron Doornekamp. It's convenient to say there was no way Carleton could lose after the white-knuckle ride vs. Western were spot-on, since it was such a perfect storyline. It has the accidental benefit of being right, since as Carleton has shown, they weren't going to get wrapped up in being part of an instant classic.

They played like they didn't have any laurels, so it didn't seem too worrisome when UBC was hitting shots from here and there and everywhere and staking itself to a 16-4 lead. Carleton was taking its time, figuring out UBC, waiting for the second half when they could plant the tracking device known as Rob Saunders inside 'Birds guard Chris Dyck's shirt (he scored only four of his team-high 21 points after the break with Saunders on him, and didn't make a basket in the second half until inside of the 1:20 mark). It would have been homerism writ large to say it on air, not to mention it had the potential to blow up in one's face, but when Carleton had UBC's lead down to a point at halftime, 37-36, it felt like the game was over. The Thunderbirds had lost their chance to build a lead while Turnbull and Doornekamp, a combined 2-of-10 in the first 20 minutes, were looking for their shots.

Sure enough, after the break, there they came, running off the first eight points to go ahead for good, with all eight rotation players contributing: The Kingston guys (Doornekamp ripped down three offensive rebounds in that period alone), the two starters from Ottawa, Kevin McCleery (15 points, eight rebounds; UBC didn't have an answer for him) and point guard Mike Kenny; and the bench brigade of Kyle Smendziuk, Cole Hobin and Elliot Thompson, who seemed to grow up right before everyone's eyes, although in reality all three had shown signs they could be counted on play major minutes (and, he added under his breath, with the officiating, they certainly had to).

It might have been a coincidence, but a lingering image is that when Carleton was celebrating on the floor, for a couple minutes Kyle Smendziuk had the CIS championship banner draped over his narrow shoulders like a cape. It seemed kind of symbolic, almost as if the older guys who'll be moving on had said, here, you wear this for a bit, but remember, next week you start at zero.

A couple more notes from the weekend:

• Carleton's seventh man, Elliot Thompson, was an exemplar of efficiency, scoring 11 points in just nine minutes on 3-for-5 shooting. He didn't look like a backup when he came in, and at 6-foot-4, can elevate for a shot from the perimeter. It was noticeable during the Western game that he was adept at running out to contest three-pointers without fouling. It will be fun to watch him next season.
• It will require going back to check for the exact quote, but CIS president Marg McGregor did address the issue of having two OUA teams meet in the quarter-finals. It all comes down to clarity; some people believe it's absolutely not allowed and some believe it's merely to be avoided if possible (it's the latter). She suggested there would be some direction that it not happen again.
  
• If you need someone to give you a push in order to be great, then UBC and Western held up their end of the bargain admirably. Both of those teams were capable.
• Any and all suggestions on how to better spend the four-hour block on Saturday taken up by two consolation side games are welcome. One suggestion: Hold an all-star game (most of the country's best players on non-tournament teams are in town for the all-Canadian awards) and a skills competition. Have a bronze-medal game on Sunday. Ottawa and Concordia played a very entertaining consolation game, but Calgary-Western for a bronze medal would have been off the hook.
  
• The Fates have a wicked sense of humour. Imagine if you had been told Carleton and Ottawa would make it to the final Sunday, only they wouldn't play each other.
  
  Dax Dessureault, who had 22 points and 13 rebounds in his Gee-Gees valedictory, an 83-76 conso-game win over Concordia, will be sorely missed, and so with the other five-year man, captain David Labentowicz.
  
  In terms of replacing them, Nemanja (Nemo) Baletic had a good second half of the season, while centre Louis Gauthier made a couple plays yesterday where it was easy to confuse him with Big Dax.
  
  
• It is among the site's sworn goals that by the time next season, Ottawa guard Warren Ward will be known as "Worldwide" Ward. He has that much potential.
• Some big ups have to go to Andrew Bucholtz, Jared Book and Rob Pettapiece for running the liveblogs all weekend at cisblog.ca.
  
  Rob, no word of a lie, got to Scotiabank Place about 30 minutes before the UBC-Calgary semi-final after travelling from Toronto and was up and running within about 15 minutes, since some clod of an editor didn't realize how rushed he'd been getting there. (Who was that guy?)
  
  
• Ernestown Secondary School turns 50 years old next year, but it pretty much was a mini-reunion by times. A quick roll call: On the premises by times were 1996 grad Adnan Virk working as The Score's sideline reporter, '97 grad Rob Smart coaching for Carleton, Aaron Doornekamp playing for the Ravens, Donnie Gibson playing for Ottawa, along with Aaron's siblings, Amy, Ben and Nate and cousin Mike Smart, a star on Carleton's '03-05 championship teams, out in support of their kin. All of them played on high school teams coached by Tom Turnbull, Stu's dad. It's worth mentioning now, since Aaron was the last one in the Eagles-to-Ravens pipeline that began with Rob and carried on with Mike, Ben and Jessica Smart.
  

Last but not least, thank you so much to readers who took time over the weekend to say some very nice things about OOLF and cisblog.ca.

(Photo by Rob Pettapiece)

Related:
Carleton wins sixth CIS basketball title in seven years (Wayne Kondro, Ottawa Citizen)
Ravens rule CIS roost again (Shane Ross, Sun Media)
Dax all, folks ... Dessureault goes out a winner with GGs
(Shane Ross, Sun Media)

CIS Corner: Heading into semi-final Saturday

Thanks to everyone who came by Friday to help out Andrew Bucholtz, Rob Pettapiece and Jared Book with the live blogging from CIS Final 8 at Scotiabank Place on Friday, where Carleton advanced to semi-final Saturday while Ottawa was ousted by Western, with extreme prejudice.

Out of Left Field's sister site cisblog.ca set a single-day traffic record. There will be live blogs of the semis, UBC-Calgary and Western-Carleton, starting around 6 p.m. tonight. I'll join play-by-play man Mark Masters and sideline reporter Alison Sandor on the Streaming Sports Network Canada webcast at ssncanada.ca.

Anything blog-worthy will be on either of those two sites, so apologies if this ends up being a quiet weekend on this site for other matters. (What's up with Syracuse only playing one overtime tonight?)

Incidentally, Carleton's rout of St. Francis Xavier had an even stronger Kingston connection than usual. Stu Turnbull's father, area coaching legend Tom Turnbull, was interviewed during the game by The Score's Adnan Virk, one of his former students at Ernestown Secondary School. That was a sight-and-a-half to see.

CIS Corner: Raven about the Ugly American

Notes on our teams of interest from The 613...

Ravens: For reasons that remain unclear, the fine folks down in Kansas Jayhawks country still remain traumatized by Henk Doornekamp's (Aaron's proud pops) voice ringing in their ears -- three weeks after the fact.

It's unclear whether this is really even something to get offended by; besides, where to start? We do have someone who was, after all, a guest in a foreign country referring to 19,000-seat Scotiabank Place as a "gym." He describe the atmosphere as "quiet," which it wasn't -- maybe it was compared to a Kansas-Mizzou game at Allen Fieldhouse in February, but compared to, about 180 arenas in NCAA Division 1, it was plenty loud. There's a declaration that, "An obnoxious crowd at a Canadian college basketball game seems as hard to imagine as a martini stand at a NASCAR race" -- play to stereotypes, much? -- and last but not least, a claim that Carleton officials said Mr. Doornekamp "is always obnoxious at the games."

Gee, it would be nice to know how Carleton people actually phrased their explanation.

Henk Doornekamp is a highly involved fan, but he has life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- that's a good slogan, is any country using it? -- on his side.

That being said, it was just such a completely misleading expression of a great night in CIS. Someone in the Ottawa media should fire back at the punk, just to show Canadians aren't always so passive.

All that can be said here is that "obnoxious" is about the last adjective that should be applied to the elder Doornekamp. The Kingston bias is cheerfully acknowledged. Speaking as someone who's seen Carleton play in person a dozen times over the past two years, Mr. Doornekamp is supporting his son.

Having a media credential doesn't give anyone the right to judge him for that, not after the thousands of hours he's put into being there for all of his now adult children. It's a family matter so long as it doesn't detract from anyone else's good time (who knows, maybe it enhanced it). Besides, Mr. Doornekamp doesn't seem to get after players. He usually zeroes in on refs and opposing coaches, who are in those positions because they are mature adults who know it comes with the territory.

Kansas coach Bill Self, showing that the bigger they are, the nicer they are, even laughed it off. He said he appreciated that the heckling helped "create an environment honestly where guys felt like there was some pressure to perform."

Anyway, it is just mind-boggling why someone would take potshots at an opposing player's dad, three weeks after the game. This misportrayal also characterizes Henk Doornekamp as a dead ringer for the actor who plays Buddy Garrity on Friday Night Lights (right in photo, obviously).

That is so far off the mark. Remember, that's an expert opinion coming from someone who is a court-certified expert on the FNL franchise (it's bound to come into play in a really high-profile criminal trial at some point, because once it gets cancelled, many of its fans might go a little crazy).

Carleton, at least not in any official capacity, can't really respond.

They would make themselves look like the rubes. It does fairly demand that someone fire a broadside in return. You listening, you kids at the Charlatan? This is a more valuable lesson than anything you'll learn in the J-school.

One other Ravens note: The hockey team plays UNB in its exhibition opener tonight.

Gee-Gees: The game notes for Saturday's tilt vs. Waterloo list the following injuries for the Ottawa: Ivan Birungi (ankle), fellow receivers Ezra Millington (ankle) and Marc-Andre St-Hilaire (chest) and cornerback Ugo Levesque (knee).

That could make four receivers not dressing or limited on Saturday. Ron Kelly is a maybe, also with a gimpy ankle. That is not helping Ottawa find its form, especially in that passing game that only failed them in the opener and in the closer of the 2007 season. Th

Streaming Sports Network Canada will have the call of the women's hockey Gee-Gees exhibition game on Saturday.

Golden Gaels: Our king of Kings will be teeing up the Queen's-U of T football game later today on Offsides (4 p.m., cfrc.ca), with scarcely little help from a rather grumpy guest.

It is odd how Queen's is sort of following along the same path as it did in 2007. Just as they year, they had an easy win at home over a school from Waterloo, followed by a game at Toronto and then, cue the ominous Peter Bretter score,* a showdown at home against Western. In this case, Toronto has more fight in it than last season and the Western game isn't an elimination game.

The big theme for the Gaels seems to be one of maturity after having a little of too-much, too-soon syndrome in '07. There's optimism that based on the way they've played the second half of their past two games, they've conquered any self-doubts.

Not to look past U of T, but there's a good chance of having three 7-1 teams in the OUA (Queen's beats Western, but Ottawa beats Queen's and they all win out). That would mean having a crazy kooky points-for and against scenerio to determine who gets the byes in the semi-finals. It could happen.

(* It's not as gratuitous a Judd Apatow reference as you might think. A friend figures that Kristen Bell must have spent some time on the Queen's and/or Western campus as research for the titular rule in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.)

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

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.

Hoops: Doornekamp throws one down

There's a trickle of news out of the Canadian basketball team's training camp, but this nugget had to be included, out of hometown chauvinism:

"I am pretty sure all the big men are planning different scenarios where they can throw one down over Sam Dalembert. Today, at the end of their drills, 7-foot Nate Doornekamp rocked the rim to the delight of every 'big' at that end of the floor. Except for Sammy, who was caught looking the other way while standing under the hoop ... after realizing what occurred, the multi-millionaire NBA athlete simply stared at big Nate ... before breaking out in laughter!"
-- Jason Thom, Canada Basketball

Carleton grad Ryan Bell is apparently in a position battle with Tyler Kepkay, from the University of Utah, for the backup point guard spot. Thom also noted on his blog that Jesse Young, who was very good during the FIBA Americas tourney in Las Vegas last summer, has been having a good camp.

Canada Basketball seems headed in the right direction under its new boss, Wayne Parrish, but it's hard to tell if enough people have notice. On the FAN 590 just now, Eric Smith said, "I have heard that ticket sales have not been going the greatest," in reference to the exhibition games next week in Hamilton and Toronto. This is disappointing, since it's a sworn principle of Out of Left Field that if you're going to go nuts over 19-year-old junior hockey players every year during the holidays, you also have to at least make an effort to care about all of the Team Canadas.

(Don't be shocked if our women's softball team ends up on the podium in Beijing.)

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.

CIS Corner: Gee-Gee jumps into the Rush

Notes on our teams of interest in The 613...

• Ottawa Gee-Gees right wing Nick Vernelli, an Odessa native, is joining Queen's sniper Brady Olsen with the Rapid City Rush of the Central league; his signing was just announced today. Vernelli was a key player for the hockey Gee-Gees the past couple seasons.
  
  (Way back when, Vernelli once played on a high school team that had Trina Sager, official sister of Out of Left Field, as its backup goalie. Speaking of the ol' high school, what does it say when a 31-year-old man actually notices that said ol' high school made the city semi-final in baseball? A hearty huzzah goes to a lad named Brock Cook, who scored the winning run in the final inning and as a pitcher, helped combine on a two-hitter to upset Frontenac, which is about twice the size of Ernestown.
  
• Halifax and Kingston have a lot of similarities, so maybe that explains why RMC is hiring Scott James, a Dalhousie assistant the past five seasons, as its new basketball coach.
  
  The Paladins are 1-65 in the OUA since all-everything forward Kevin Dulude graduated after the 2004-05 season. Wish James well.
• Incidentally, on the topic of Kingston and university sports, Tyler King of CFRC Sports has now posted a season's worth of Offsides podcasts, for anyone who's interested to hear what we sound like.

(Cross-posted to The CIS Blog.)

Related:
James takes RMC's head job (Chad Lucas, Halifax Herald)

LOOKS LIKE HE MADE IT...

Those who knew him when -- and knew he was born to this -- will be happy to know that Adnan Virk will soon starting working in the field as a reporter for The Score.

It's win-win -- firstly for him, and secondly for all of us late-20s, early-30s types in the media who have maybe had to do the wrong jobs for a while in order to get closer and closer to the right job. For our generation, getting a job that you like, that alone seems worthy of praise and respect. Seeing Virk, who like myself attended Ernestown Secondary School in the Kingston area, succeeding makes some of the rest of us believe that it's possible for us to.

That alone counts. Everything else is kind of secondary. Attabe, A.V.

Related:
Calmer, gentler Virk takes reporting role (Chris Zelkovich, Toronto Star)

BATTER UP: CHICAGO CUBS

It's baseball season, that mystical, wonderful time of year where you commit to a team for six months, knowing full well they won't win. Here's a starting nine for the Chicago Cubs.

1. Why haven't they won? Hall of Famer Billy Williams will turn 70 on June 15 -- also the anniversary of Brock-for-Broglio -- and he's the answer to a pretty good trivia question. Who was the last good outfielder signed originally by the Cubs who went on start for five seasons for the team?
   
   Corey Patterson? Nope, he only started for four seasons and he wasn't good. The answer is Williams, who retired in 1976.
2. Why was that in past tense? The arrival of catcher Geovany Soto and Japanese rightfielder Kosuku Fukudome, an on-base machine, does suggest the Cubs are changing their ways by trusting some players, even though they haven't already been through another organization already. It doesn't
   
   The Beep (i.e., Baseball Prospectus 2008) already figures Soto will be the best catcher in the NL Central as a rookie. It also has Fokudome down for a .401 on-base percentage in his first season Stateside.
3. What else to expect: The national media to run pitcher Ryan Dempster's pre-season prediction of a World Series title into the ground, in case that hasn't happened already. Never mind that he was probably buzzed when he said it, what on account of being Canadian and all. Our beer is stronger.
4. If you want to destroy the stage, we're all for that: Righty reliever Carlos Marmol is probably the X-factor, not having Kerry Wood as the closer. The always redoubtable RosenBlog has sounded alarm bells about Marmol having some issues with his comand this season.
   
   The Cubs starting pitching -- Carlos Zambrano, Ted Lilly, et al., -- is spoken for, at least the first four spots.
5. The experts speak: "If the Cubs ever win the World Series, the news coverage will be the most boring bunch of shit you could ever imagine." -- George Carlin


6. Worth noting: None of the three Yahoo Sports! national baseball writers see any team in the NL Comedy Central cracking 90 wins, but two of them are taking the Cubbies to finish first.


7. Silver tongue: The rant that Lee Elia got off on April 29, 1983 is on the all-time top-5 of events that baseball won't officially celebrate the anniversary of this season.
   
   
   
   


8. Forgive the guy already: It only took ex-Cubbie Moises Alou close to five years to ruefully own up to what humourist Jay Pinkerton pointed out in October 2003 -- that he wasn't going to catch that foul ball that sentenced Steve Bartman to a life of ignominy.
   
   
   
   
   

   "Everywhere I play, even now, people still yell, 'Bartman! Bartman!' I feel really bad for the kid," Alou said, shaking his head.
   
   "You know what the funny thing is?" he added a moment later. "I wouldn't have caught it, anyway." -- Jim Litke, The Associated Press, March 28

   That's not what he said at the time, of course, but like Pinkerton said, "The Cubs not winning the World Series is hardly cause for alarm — they've been doing it successfully for decades without any help. The fact that someone in the audience decided to pitch in this year just means it was one less mistake for the Cubs themselves to make."
9. Need-to-know: The Cubs can't win the Series this season. No, the nightmare scenario is that Wrigley Field gets shut down for renovations, they have to use the cross-town White Sox's stadium and they win it all playing there.

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

CIS CORNER: ESS GRAD IS LIKELY A MOSER WINNER

The cat is already out of the bag, so there's no harm in passing along word that it looks like the pride of Odessa, Carleton Ravens forward Aaron Doornekamp, will capture the Mike Moser Award as top CIS men's basketball player.

It's up at the Sun (now), along with the tournament preview which was about 95% the work of Mark Wacyk at cishoops.ca, Blair Gable with the photography and the brave but determined lads down at the sports desk. There will be more in Friday's edition.

It's kind of staggering to see Aaron reaching such heights as someone who grew up in the same corner of the world and attended his high school, Ernestown, several years earlier -- and who knows what it means to Dave Smart to have one of his nephews and prize proteges honoured.

Who knew it would ever reach this point back in the winter of '95-96? At that time, Rob Smart was starring for the senior basketball team at ESS (one time in Gravenhurst, he scored 36 points in the first half, then said at halftime, "let's try to get everyone on the scoresheet," and almost did, except for one klutzy red-headed kid with no hops who shouldn't have even been there). Dave was helping coach the junior team which had Mike Smart and Ben Doornekamp. The senior girls team won the Kingston-area league with Amy Doornekamp playing post for Stu Turnbull's dad, Tom, while across the parking lot at Odessa Public School, Nate and Aaron were honing their games. There was a Canadian hoops dynasty taking shape right under our noses.

(As for the scoop, well played, sir. Picture Steve Garvey clapping into his glove after Reggie Jackson hit his third homer in the final game of the 1977 World Series.)

CIS CORNER: JAYHAWKS COMING NORTH

Notes on our teams of interest from The 613...

BASKETBALL

The Lawrence Journal-World reported today that "it looks as if" the  Kansas Jayhawks, a potential Final Four team, will make the trip north for the NCAA weekend to "likely play two games Saturday, Aug. 30, and one on Aug. 31, both in Ottawa, Ontario. KU likely will play Carleton University and a yet-to-be-determined foe in a day/night doubleheader on Aug. 30. Carleton’s Ravens Nest seats 1,400 fans. (We had this on The CIS Blog a while back, but with less details.)

The Jayhawks then would meet Ottawa University on Aug. 31 at Ottawa’s 1,000-seat Montpetit Hall."

As for the OUA East awards, no doubt there was a good debate over going with Ottawa big man Dax Dessurealt over Carleton guard Ryan Bell for defensive player of the year. Bell is the division's Ken Shields nominee (all-around good player and good person) and Ravens teammate Aaron Doornekamp is officially the Mike Moser nominee.

Doornekamp will be be up against two other players with Ottawa region ties — Acadia's Leonel Saintil and Laval's J.P. Morin — for the national award.

The Gee-Gees' Josh Gibson-Bascombe and Ravens' Stu Turnbull are the first-team guards; Queen's Mitch Leger and Simon Mitchell along with graduating Gee-Gee Sean Peter made the second team.

The Gaels' Jon Ogden was rookie of the year, with teammate Travis Mitchell and Carleton's Elliot Thompson also making the all-rookie team.

(Tyler, any problem with that?)

HOCKEY

Spoken like a true Queen'sman: A press release comes out that Golden Gaels hockey coach Brett Gibson has been named the OUA East coach of the year and, no word of a lie, first reaction was, "Whew, tough call."

Gibson guided the Gaels to a first-place finish -- but in a weak division -- and helped the Gaels keep their chins up despite not having a true home arena, practising and playing games in three different rinks, two of them nowhere near the campus. That's admirable. Fred Parker steering Carleton to a playoff berth their first time out, that was pretty good too.

Of course, Gibson had one benefit over Parker: Goalie Ryan Gibb, who was named the East's MVP. Who knows where Queen's ends up without him.

The Enterprise-ing one, Brady Olsen, was named the conference's most sportsmanlike player. Gaels goalie Ryan Gibb was an obvious first-team all-star selection (Mathieu Poitras of McGill probably won't be worrying too much about it while he's getting ready for the nationals). Carleton forward Jared Cipparone and Ottawa goalie Riley Whitlock were all-rookie selections.

FOOTBALL

Did everyone see that the Gee-Gees' two best defensive linemen, Tyler Dawe and Dan Kennedy, are both invited to the CFL evaluation camp? Quarterback Josh Sacobie and McGill slotback Erik Galas, who's from the city, were also invited.

Queen's Mike Giffin, who'd probably need to switch to fullback at the CFL level, is also invited.

NICE LITTLE SCORE...

Adnan Virk, a good ol' Kingston boy and graduate of Ernestown Secondary School (go Eagles!), is going to be in a lot more living rooms very soon.

The Score has signed a deal to do the sportscasts for Global News Ontario and Virk has been tapped to do the weekend updates, which sounds like a not half-bad deal for both him and his bosses. This brings on-air talents such as Virk, Tim Micallef and Sid Seixeiro to more people who might not have The Score on a basic cable package, and if it's part of any of them catching on at the CBC or one of the two bigger sports networks in Canada, all the better.

There's the obvious question of who the hell still relies on a 6 p.m. newscast to get their sports fix, but that's neither here nor there.

CIS CORNER: GGs READY TO BE ROAD WARRIORS

Notes on our teams of interest in The 613...

HOCKEY

• Gee-Gees: Ottawa will have to get it done on the road over their final four games after a 6-0 thumping of UOIT in their final home game on Sunday. Kingston native Nick Vernelli contributed a couple helpers.
  
  This actually happened: Brunt and Garrioch came to blows. No, not the Globe & Mail's Stephen Brunt and the Ottawa Sun's Bruce Garrioch, but UOIT's Ian Brunt and the U of O's Dylan Garrioch threw down in fisticuffs.
  

• Gaels: Only an oral poet of Tyler King's stature can do right by the Gaels' 5-4 shootout win over Carleton on Saturday night. Their magic number over Toronto to win the division is 3, and they have Ryerson (now out of the playoffs) and RMC left while the U of T still has two games against powerhouse Lakehead.
  
  Ryan Gibb stopped 64-of-71 shots across the two games. Great point raised by TK is that Ryerson is really taking hockey seriously now, which means Queen's will have to step up their recruiting and budget for hockey. Or they could just eliminate it.
• Ravens: A three-point weekend, with two of the points coming against Concordia, was almost as good as Carleton could have expected. They're at UQTR next weekend.

Here's an update on the standings (top six make playoffs).

1. Trois-Rivieres: 35, 5 (division leader)
2. Queen's: 27, 2 (division leader)
3. McGill: 31, 5
4. Toronto: 25, 4
5. Carleton: 25, 4
6. Ottawa: 24, 4
7. Concordia: 23, 5
8. RMC: 22, 3

HOOPS

There's a full account of the Capital Hoops Classic, which Carleton squeaked out 70-66, at cishoops.ca and the Ottawa papers have recaps today, no doubt. (Plus there's a rundown on how the top teams did over at The CIS Blog.)

Quite a night for the alma mater: Former Ernestown Eagles Aaron Doornekamp (20 points for Carleton) and Donnie Gibson (19) were the game's high scorers, while Stu Turnbull, whose dad coached at the school for many years, was player of the game. (As predicted, he had a big night with 14 points.) In other words, ESS didn't need N.S. around... that was pretty much how it was during my one and only year of senior basketball.

Some of us have friends in town and had to pass on the Capital Hoops Classic, but did get to write about for the Ottawa Sun.

Couple Hometown Breakdown notes: Navan's Travis Mitchell had 20 points to keep Queen's in the hunt on Friday against Carleton; Jacqui Snyder, of Odessa, had 15 points in as many minutes for the women's hoops Ravens in their loss to Queen's on Friday.

Good on the Whig-Standard for noting it's been 10 years since Queen's beat Carleton in men's basketball. You know how long ago that was? That 65-64 win on Jan. 30, 1998 (John Purdy hit the winning layup at the buzzer off an inbounds pass under the basket) was the first basketball game that a writer named Nathan Sager covered for The Queen's Journal.

CFRC Sports blog. Speaking of Queen's kids, Andrew Bucholtz, assistant sports ed. at The Queen's Journal, also his Sporting Madness. He's been handing out links like Deron Williams dropping dimes, so it's about time attention was paid.

(That's how you do it! That's how you drop in a link and make it seem organic.)

FOOTBALL

Kingston's own Rob Bagg, who signed with the Saskatchewan Roughriders earlier this week stands to be the fourth Gaels receiver who was were playing football in Kingston in the fall of 2002 who has seen time in the CFL. That fall, Brad Smith (now with the Alouettes), Iain Fleming and Craig Spear (who had brief flings in the league) were with the Gaels, while Bagg was catching passes and returning punts for Frontenac Secondary.

The Gaels running back from that season, Bryan Crawford, is now with the Argos. Here's a vote of confidence that another runner, Mike Giffin, who was at Bayridge Secondary back in '02, will be in the CFL soon.

CFRC's play-by-play man from 2002, Dan Vertlieb, has done them all one better -- he's doing PR at the Super Bowl.

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

CIS CORNER: DOORNEKAMP DOMINATES IN PAINT

Notes relating to our teams of interest from The 613...

HOOPS

• Ravens: Quite a night for Aaron Doornekamp with a career-high 33 points, 17 rebounds in Carleton's 81-73 win over the Windsor Lancers in the big 1-vs.-2 matchup on Saturday. Obviously, this is being written without benefit of having seen the game, but those numbers paint a picture of is a legit player-of-the-year kind of game.
  
  Doornekamp was outrebounded by Lancers 6-foot-8 post player Greg Surmacz in both Carleton-Windsor games last season. Anyone think the pride of Odessa, Ont., was aware of that going into the game last night?
  
  Ryan Bell (14 points) and Stu Turnbull (11) shared the team lead with five assists apiece for the unbeaten Ravens.
• Gee-Gees: While Doornekamp was dominating, his former Ernestown S.S. running mate, Donnie Gibson, had a team-high 19 points, 12 rebounds in the U of O's 84-67 win over Western. As crazy it sounds to say this about a team who took down Windsor on Friday, the Gee-Gees' best measuring stick might be its Guelph-Brock road trip next weekend. The Gryphons on their home floor offer a tough test, plus the last weekend set before exam break is always a test of a young team's focus.
  
  This is heart-warming: The Gee-Gees had 19 offensive boards and forced 18 turnovers.
• Gaels: Descriptives like "ragged" and "choppy," well, those are merit badges for the Tricolour. Queen's (4-2) held Laurier and Waterloo to 29.6% shooting during a weekend sweep. Mitch Leger had the double-double in Saturday's 61-53 over the Warriors.

HOCKEY

• Gaels: Ryan Gibb or Brady Morrison making an absurd amount of saves (60 in Saturday's 3-0 loss to Trois-Rivieres) to keep the score respectable, on the heels and of a white-knuckle win, that's a paradigm weekend for Queen's. (How's that, T.K.?)
  
  A split out of the Concordia/Trois-Rivieres weekend keeps the Gaels just ahead of RMC in their division. Friday's 4-3 win at Concordia was nip and tuck all the way. Defenceman Mike Bushby scored with 4:08 left (25 seconds after the Stingers had gone ahead) to force overtime before Brady Olsen got the OT winner.
• Ravens: Sunday's 7-2 win over Ryerson -- Carleton got four goals in a span of 133 seconds in the middle period -- was much-needed. Mike Scerbo got a tying goal to make it 2-2 in the second, and it just flowed from that point forward. Doug Jewer made 38 saves.
• Gee-Gees: The women's hockey team lost 5-3 to McGill on Saturday, but they were the first team to beat the Olympic golden girl, Martlets goalie Charline Labonté, twice in a game this season. The Gee-Gees, who got goals from Kim Kerr, Laura Cardiff and Mandi Duhamel, had the lead and were tied in the third period; there should almost be credit in the standings for that.
  
  If you were making a list of CIS programs that could probably do OK in the NCAA, McGill women's hockey would be among them.
  
  The U of O men are set up well for the rest of the pre-exam break schedule after downing Ryerson 7-3 on Friday. Back-to-back goals 1:23 apart in the second by Colin Bowie and Nick Vernelli, the latter a shortie, turned the game.

By the way, there was a liveblog done of the Vanier Cup, but it's over at The CIS Blog.

RAPTORS: IT GETS BETTER

Reaction to the Raptors' 105-96 loss to Orlando:

• Take it away, Luba: It's just the storm, before the calm. (Hey, Adnan Virk of The Score not the only one who can make 1980s pop-culture references apropos of nothing.)
  
  At times it felt like Sam Mitchell got together over the summer with Jays manager John Gibbons to trade notes, presumably over a couple mimosas, on how to make it is hard as possible for a team to win. Smitch looked like he has no idea how to have the players ready to start a quarter, or how to make adjustments at the halftime and quarter breaks.
  
  It was 17-4 (no Raptors baskets) after six minutes. Orlando had a 10-2 run to start the second quarter, a 9-4 spurt to start the third and ran off the first 11 points of the fourth. Part of that was the matchup problem created by Dwight Howard going against a less-than-full-strength Chris Bosh and the Raptors having a poor shooting night, but don't the best coaches usually figure out how to get their teams some stops and some easy baskets early in a quarter ?
  
  Seriously, that's about 14 minutes of basketball that the game turned on. Play it even in those stages, and it's a decisive win. It was odd that they didn't slug the ball inside in the final 5:12 when Howard was playing with five fouls, but it's November. Orlando's Stan Van Gundy outcoached the hell out of Smitch, but a a coach who looks like Ron Jeremy's long-lost twin brother should be a crafty bastard.
  
  (UPDATE: At least they're addressing it -- Rasho Nesterovič is going to start at centre with Andrea Bargnani as the sixth man.)
  
• It's way too early to start calling for Smitch's head. The true sports city that Toronto might be one day (Step One: Stop playing Leafs and Raptors fans against each other) doesn't do that.
• Why Juan Dixon is Juan Dixon: He made a couple baskets during that game-tying 13-2 run in the fourth while Howard was on the bench. About 30 seconds after Howard returned, he tried to drive and missed. That was about the last time the Raptors went inside, and it came from their least physically imposing player. The ball has to go to Bosh in that situation. (Read that closely: It's not a diss on Dixon. Shooting guards in point guard bodies don't come with self-awareness.)
  
• Other than that, it feels like a calm has descended. On the plus side, Andrea Bargnani (16 points on 7-of-18, eight rebounds) played with some confettura, which he didn't do on nights as a rookie when his shot wasn't falling. He was right there in the third quarter with seven points on a 9-2 Raptors run, getting two rebounds on D and pressuring Hedo Turkoglu into a miss. He and Bosh played with some fire; now they just need some finish. It will come.
• Raptor Land, who is more of a baller than I am, pointed out Jorge Garbajosa was also a big part of a third-quarter push. He isn't getting the minutes he needs to make his team-oriented game work. They might have to go back to him playing major minutes or starting.

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

CIS CORNER: GEE-GEES SHOCKED

Notes on our CIS teams of interest from The 613...

FOOTBALL

• To someone who had to be elsewhere, it hard to wrap one's mind how the Ottawa Gee-Gees contrived to lose to the Western Mustangs 23-16 in an OUA semi-final. If you said the Gee-Gees would hold Western's running back Randy McAuley to 10 yards rushing, the expected score would have been, oh, something like 41-13.
  
  What happened? Ottawa's leading receiver, David Crane, was ruled out with injuries, meaning star QB Josh Sacobie did not have his security blanket. It wasn't just that the receivers dropped first-down passes that might have gone to Crane; the young receivers weren't able to tap into his experience like they would have with him in uniform.
  
  Three times, the Gee-Gees settled for field goal tries inside Western's 20-yard line, and they missed one. (Queen's, incidentally, also settled for kicking it three times in the red zone one week before.)
  
  Throw in a couple blown coverages and the Gee-Gees ended up on the wrong end of the most unexpected semi-upset in the OUA since an 8-0 Western team was upset by Waterloo in 1999.
• More football coverage is over at The CIS Blog. No sooner had Guelph run off the final seconds of its upset over Laurier, setting up the Yates Cup matchup vs. Western, than a friend called to say, "The Guelph Gryphons, that's your team for the next week."
  
  Guhhhhh. Guelph is a fine team that has enough to work on without worrying about yours truly being a friggin' jinx. Guelph will be at home, they play tough defence (don't let that 24-point first quarter against Laurier be too much of an influence) and should match up well against Western's conservative offence.

HOCKEY

• Gaels: So long as Ryan Gibb stops something on the order of 79-of-84 shots each weekend, Queen's will be fine. They edged Ryerson 4-3 at the Memorial Centre on Saturday night to complete a four-point weekend and get to .500.
• Gee-Gees: The men's team had the dreaded no-point weekend, which could cost 'em in a tight Eastern Conference which doesn't seem to have any cupcake teams. One-time Sudbury Wolves forward Trevor Blanchard had a natural hat trick in the third period in Concordia's penalty-filled 4-2 win over the Gee-Gees on Sunday.
  
  Rob Jarvis scored both for the Gee-Gees; Kevin Glode assisted on both goals in Saturday's 3-2 loss vs. McGill at Scotiabank Place.
  
  The U of O women evened the season series with Carleton with a 3-0 win, with Joelle Charlebois factoring in all three goals (she had one less point than she did in her entire rookie season) and Jessika Audet notching the shutout.

HOOPS

• Ravens/Gee-Gees: The U of O's first basketball road games at Lakehead next Friday will be webcast at http://events.news-cast.com/events/Basketball, starting with the women's game at 6 p.m. The same source will also air the Carleton-Lakehead games on Saturday night.
  
  The Ravens and Gee-Gees women's team open the season on Tuesday at the Ravens' Nest, of course.
• Elsewhere... Cassandra Carpenter of Kanata put up 21 points and 10 boards in Laurentian's three-point loss to York. South of the border, Vermont's Courtnay Pilypaitis (of Orleans) had nine points, nine assists and four steals in a pre-season game vs. the Bishop's Gaiters on Saturday.

Last but not least, hat tip to the Gee-Gees women's soccer team for clinching a return trip to the CIS championship, as they ultimately ended up OUA runners-up to the York Lions.

One more footy note: Nod to a one-time Ernestown Eagle, Paul Paudyn, for scoring the only goal the Queen's Golden Gaels men's soccer team needed to beat Carleton 1-0 for the OUA bronze medal. It's not a trip to nationals, but it's a nice consolation prize. Another Gaels footy standout from that corner of the universe, Wade Ennis, was named an OUA all-star last week.