Day: November 22, 2005

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Boo!! Hiss!! Boring!!

Some of you may remember my campaign last spring to name the new State College minor league baseball team the Sliders. My nominee had been one of seven (the others were Black Bears, Copperheads, Miners, Mountain Bats, Ridge Riders, and Stags) selected to be semifinalists. I put some serious effort into promoting my choice (I even handed out business cards promoting the name)

Let’s just say that my suggestion didn’t meet with universal acclaim (Click here to read a local writer’s opinion),

Evidently, team managemant felt the same as the above writer because they wound up throwing out all seven of the semifinalists and starting over with a new list of finalist. They were Anglers, Coalys, Furnace, Haymakers, and Spikes.

The grand announcement of the winner was today. And the winner is, drumroll please:

All I can say is “boring”.

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I know my field hockey

As I predicted weeks ago, Natalie Berrena was named first team All-American by the National Field Hockey Coaches Association. It caps a wonderful career for Natalie, moving up from a walk-on here at her hometown school to being named captain and All-American her senior season. To put in in perspective, Rudy had a movie made about him and he only got in for a play. 🙂

I’ve been keeping an eye on the NFHCA website because I knew they were overdue to announce the AA’s (their website said they were going to release it yesterday), so I was actually the first to find out. I texted Natalie on her phone to let her know and got this back from her “I can’t believe it! You called it back in sept and I laughed at you… Ha! Who would have thought! I’m seriously in shock.” Nat is truly very humble and doesn’t realize how gifted she is (both athletically and artistically) so her surprise is real.

While I recognized that she was playing good hockey, I also knew that her story would hit home with both the media and coaches. “Local kid walks on, leads home team to championship” just works on all fronts – it’s a great story lead for the press and coaches can hold it up as “you too can do this” example to recruits. Plus, I know her coach well – Char really likes Nat and I knew that Char would likely choose Nat to push for post season awards, so I’m not quite as clairvoyant as I might appear.