Ottawa women's hoops stars has some WWLever-age

ESPN's women's college basketball writer Graham Hays has a survey piece up on the season. Guess which Ottawa player got a shout-out from the worldwide leader in sports:

"Courtnay Pilypaitis, Vermont: A 6-1 guard from Ontario with a Fat Lever game (sound like any ESPN analysts?), Pilypaitis averaged 6.9 rebounds, 5.5 assists, 1.6 steals and shot 40 percent from deep."

Nice.

Related:
Teams and players to watch as 2008-09 unfolds (Graham Hays, ESPN.com)

Snark break...

Getting the grouch out before coffee break ...

It stinks that the Yankees went back on their practice of confiscating fans' sunblock and making them pay a huge markup for a replacement tube. How often do you get a chance to write the headline, Yankees Greed Beyond The Pale or The Yankees Don't Care About White People?

$5 for a one-ounce tube of SPF 15 sunblock? That gives new meaning to greasing people.

Here's what what some would write if some overpaid gutless puke like, say, the Jays' A.J. Burnett, had started that game for the Mets last night.

This is why Johan Santana makes people scream: He is pitching brilliantly. He has a three-run lead against a Philadelphia team with first place in the NL East on the line. And the Mets bullpen gives up six runs in the ninth inning to lose the game.

That's the difference between being a grouch for a few minutes and being one full-time.

It's great to be young and a Canadian Patriot... the best summation of New England Patriots Nick Kaczur's legal situation: "Kaczur will have to pay $355 in fines and fees. You or I would be living an episode of Oz in similar circumstances."

Garrett Reid, troubled son of Eagles coach Andy Reid, has been sentenced to two years in drug rehab. While there, he'll get clean, learn to love himself and figure out why his dad never drafts any decent receivers.

(Obviously, you never joke about drug addiction, unless it's an actor or a pro athlete..)

Canada is introducing its flag-bearer for the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony today. They should pick the 61-year-old equestrian Ian Millar, since he might have actually been in the first Olympics -- in Athens. (What kind of saddle sores did he get riding the horse nude?)

The Canadian Olympic Association could also go with Alexandre Despatie, as the flagbearer. That way, Sidney Crosby can make it two divers in a row in 2010.

With respect to the WNBA brawl: Well, people were promised it would be electric between the L.A. Sparks and the Detroit Shock. David Stern is so mad that he already suspended Ron Artest indefinitely.



That's all it was? It's actually good to see the WNBA show some bite. Please don't go thinking that a rumble will spark American interest in the league -- it doesn't. Just ask the NHL.

Still wouldn't be something if these teams -- which teams were they again? -- meet in the WNBA final?

The OHL's Peterborough Petes introduced their new coach yesterday. There's a novel concept, eh, Doug Springer?

Hoops: The case for Stace

The fantasy of ESPN's Dan Shulman coming home to call Blue Jays games again is unlikely to ever be more than a fantasy, yet people indulge it anyways.

It's as good a time as any to start pining for another Canadian-born ESPN talent to be brought home, even if the odds against it are just as long. Stacey Dales, the former WNBA star, generally gets good reviews and she obviously knows basketball. She would be a dream hire for CBC Sports, which is committed to carry more Raptors games next season and has long been knocked for not having a strong, female on-camera presence. How does Dales working an ice-level reporter on Hockey Night in Canada on a Saturday and commentating the Raptors on a Sunday afternoon sound?

It's a nice fantasy that you can use to insulate yourself against a creeping reality. The Raptors' TV coverage, post-Chuck Swirsky, might be headed in the same direction as the Blue Jays. Each carrier will use its own talent, some of whom aren't necessarily versed in calling the sport, but who are just expected to pick it up on the fly. (What's the worse that can happen?)

There's a passing reference in Sunday's Toronto Sun that "TSN and CBC may use their own announcers to do Raptors games." The Score, which has a couple deserving folks who have each paid their dues, Tim Micallef and Adnan Virk, might want to follow suit.

That's as many four different play-by-play voices when you include Raptors NBA TV. C'est la vie for the Canadian media. Seriously, though, they should try to get Stacey Dales.

Looks like the WNBA made it

The time to call for a moratorium on guys smarting off on the WNBA even though they've never seen a game is long past.

The league tips off its 12th season tomorrow, which admit it, is about nine more more than many of us thought it would last when it began play in 1997. There's no great urge on this end to run out and buy a Candace Parker L.A. Sparks jersey. It has to be acknowledged that league seems to have turned a corner.

Fully half of the league's 14 teams now have stand-alone ownership. The Seattle Storm, who were bought by four local businesswomen after the NBA Sonics were spirited to Oklahoma City, are operated by a former project manager turned sports executive, Karen Bryant, while the L.A. team has a pair of businesswomen, Carla Christofferson and Kathy Goodman, in charge after they bought the team outright from the Lakers after connecting as season-ticket holders.

It's not all sunshine and roses. There is a reality that a lot of sports followers, of both genders, will never follow a women's professional sports league. However, why let that point of view take priority? Clearly, the WNBA's found an audience, it's starting to pick up some major advertisers (the widely publicized rookie orientation where players were given lessons on putting on makeup -- hey, what man hasn't needed some tips on grooming? -- could be read as a sop to squeamish ad execs). Recognizing its success doesn't seem too difficult.

A MORE ALARMIST NAME FOR 'SOCCER COMPLEX' WOULD BE 'KNEE LIGAMENT-KILLING FIELDS'

The physical courage, not to mention the personal sacrifices that female athletes are remarkable -- in many cases it exceeds that of the men, even though the tangible rewards (i.e., huge stacks of cash) aren't as obvious.

Michael Sokolove's forthcoming book, Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports, which is excerpted in this weekend's New York Times magazine, seems well-timed. It's a tough story to boil down to a couple paragraphs ... basically, the march toward equality on the playing fields has also meant that female athletes in some sports -- soccer, basketball, volleyball -- suffer major knee injuries at a higher rate than the guys by a factor of five in some cases.

There's also potential sexism in focusing on problems in women's sports when the success stories tend to only get lip service in the media. It's wonderful that we're in an age where a super-competitive female athlete can go for it from an early age and isn't told, "well, that's a nice hobby." That was a subtext to a feature I wrote for the Ottawa Sun a few months ago about a young hockey player named Isabel Ménard, who's in the Sport-Etudes program at Louis Riel, where during this winter she would be on the ice each school day, often doing drills alongside a possible future NHL defenceman, Erik Gudbranson, the Kingston Frontenacs' top choice in last week's OHL draft.

I only mention the above example to show the progress that's been made in the past decade or so. N The thing is, when studies show that young women absorb major injuries at a much higher rate than males in the same sport, it is worrisome. By the same token, there's a defensiveness there, since there's a worry about showing weakness and giving ammunition to the arguments against things such as Title IX, the catalyst for women getting more opportunities in sports in the U.S.

Sokolove points out that in youth sports and the U.S. military, there's evidence that females have a higher tolerance for minor injuries; the guys are more likely to beg out over a minor ailment.

See? It's complicated. Please give it a read.

(While we're here, best of luck to a couple of Ottawa-area shinny stars -- Isabel Ménard and Jamie-Lee Rattray, of Kanata, have each been invited to a national under-18 program camp in Calgary later this month. Two others from the region, Wisconsin standout Jasmine Giles and UConn's Dominique Thibault, are going to the under-22 team's camp.)

Related:
The Uneven Playing Field (Michael Sokolove, The New York Times Magazine)

BECKY IS A POPULAR RUSSIAN NAME...

European-based athletes changing their citizenship so teams can get around the quotas on import players seems to be pretty commonplace. It amounts to a business decision, nothing wrong with that, but still, it's hard not feel smug after seeing this exchange between an intereviewer and basketball player Becky Hammon, who has received Russian citizenship and will actually play on their women's basketball team at the Olympics.

Interviewer: What does it allow you to do as a Russian citizen?
Hammon: I don't know... I guess travel around and be Russian.