Sporting Madness

Photo: Karina LeBlanc makes a save while training with the Canadian women's team in 2007 [Photo from CTV.ca]. In what may perhaps be a big step forward for women's soccer in the United States, a Canadian played a key role. Karina LeBlanc , the long-serving Canadian international (69 caps at the senior level according to the CSA site ), made several impressive saves [ The Canadian Press ] to preserve a 2-0 victory for the Los Angeles Sol over the Washington Freedom in the first-ever game in the new Women's Professional Soccer league. It's been a long road to this point for LeBlanc. According to her bio page , she was born in Atlanta but moved to Maple Ridge, B.C. with her family at a young age. She went to Maple Ridge Secondary, where she didn't play high school soccer (as they didn't have a team at that point) but starred in basketball, track and field hockey. She then spent four very successful years playing soccer at the University of Nebraska, finishing wi...

Everyone and their sister seems to have joined the Twitterati recently, including Steve Nash , Shaq , Will Leitch and Jeff Blair . Normally, I try to resist jumping on the bandwagon, but I saw quite a bit of potential in what Neate has been doing with his feed , especially the links. I'm a long-established fan of throwing out links , but haven't had a lot of time to write those kind of detailed posts recently, so this seems like a good way to get those out along with a few quick observations here and there that I don't have time for an entire post on. Thus, I'll be adding the Twitter feed to the right-hand bar for the time being. We'll see how it develops; feel free to e-mail (andrew_bucholtz at hotmail dot com) or tweet me suggestions on what to do with the feed!

I just finished a long exploration of Vancouver's MLS chances (specifically regarding the B.C. Place plans) over at The 24th Minute : might be worth a look for any of you interested in the Whitecaps or MLS expansion. Feel free to leave comments for me there or here, or shoot me an e-mail at andrew_bucholtz [at] hotmail dot com. We can also discuss it tomorrow on Premier League Punditry (starting at 1:30 p.m. as always) if there's interest.

Neate came across a very interesting book excerpt in this weekend's New York Times magazine. It's by Michael Sokolove, and called Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports : well worth a read. Sokolove makes some very interesting points, and presents a balanced picture overall, but the centre of the piece focuses on research suggesting that girls who play sports like basketball, volleyball and soccer suffer significantly more concussions and knee injuries than boys playing the same sports: by a factor of five in certain cases. According to the NCAA, women's soccer players suffer concussions at the same rate as men's football players. I actually came across some of this data while doing my piece on concussions, but it didn't seem to fit with the larger angle of the story, so I didn't include it there. The problem is what to do with this data. Those who oppose the opportunities offered to women's sports by Title ...