Category: Schools

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Had to root against my old high school (sort of)

Now that Central Bucks is split into three school districts, does anyone know where Chalfont kids go?

Tuesday night, the State College high school girls soccer team met Central Bucks South in the state soccer playoffs. State High’s goalie is my buddy Randy Woolridge’s youngest daughter Ginger. The game was played at Central Mountain HS which is about 40 miles from here so I headed over to watch it.

Ginger had a great game including a spectacular save with just minutes to go that preserved a 1-0 win for State High. It was her seventh straight shutout. They will now face a Pittsburgh area school in the state quarterfinals at 1 pm on Saturday. The game is in Hollidaysburg PA about 45 miles from here at 1 pm and I’m going to try to squeeze it in.

I say squeeze it in because the day is a very full one. Penn State hosts #4 Syracuse at 11:30 am Saturday in the opening round of the NCAA Field Hockey Championships. Barring OT, the game will end about 1 PM and I’ll be able to rush to Hollidaysburg for the State High game. That game should end about 3 PM, which will give me just enough time to get home to watch the Penn State at Ohio State football game (I’ll miss the first 15 minutes but that just means I’ll be able to skip all the commercials during the first half as I use TiVo to catch up). Then I’ll rush over to Rec Hall to catch the PSU women’s volleyball team taking on Illinois in a huge match (Illinois defeated Penn State in a match earlier this year – PSU needs the win to reclaim first place in the Big Ten). I absolutely love the opportunity to catch all these sporting events.

Note to Gary and Charlotte: The Big Ten Network will have the PSU/Illinois match on live at 6PM Saturday. Should be a good one.

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“Unstoppable”

Just saw this movie trailer and it reminded me of something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM-0Ywc7wNY

Last year, Penn State opened their basketball season up with a home game against Penn. As usual, I was at the game. My seats are located behind the visitors bench and just across the aisle from the visiting teams section (visitors get about five rows of tickets immediately behind the team bench.

During one of the timeouts, there was a Subway promotion. For the promotion the cheerleaders encourage fans to stand and cheer while they throw wrapped subs into the stands. For some reason I must have been particularly hungry that night because I was up cheering for a sub and I don’t even like Subway. As I’m standing there, one cheerleader breaks away from the bunch and comes running up my aisle. She stops a couple of rows in front of me and actually hands her sub to a guy sitting on the end of the row in the visitor’s section.

When I see this I start half complaining to my buddy in the seat next to me saying “you know, it’s bad enough that sometimes, when they have promotions like these, they wind up throwing the item into the visitor’s section, but it’s downright stupid of them to actually hand something to a visitor; I really would have liked that sub”.

A minute or two later, my buddy nudges me and says “I think I know why that guy got the sub.” “Why?” I ask. “Take a close look” he says, “I think it’s Denzel Washington”.

Sure enough, it was. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel so bad that the cheerleader chose Denzel over me. 🙂

It turns out that Denzel’s son, Malcolm (guess who he was named after), was a reserve on the Penn basketball team. Denzel was actually in the State College area filming the above “Unstoppable” and took time out from the movie to come over and watch the game. FTR, Penn State won and Malcolm didn’t play (he did get some time the rest of the year averaging 4 mpg).

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THON 2010 – $7,838,054.36

My annual post in support of THON, Penn State’s student run Dance Marathon that raises money to fight pediatric cancer.

History of THON

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N58ZnuXQwl4

2010 Promo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykgilcll4cg

Love Belongs Here Promo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKVa6UngyfQ

2010 THON Logo – Love Belongs Here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WibrrZRydUI

Here’s an absolutely cute video of Tucker Haas, a former Four Diamonds kid who has been cancer free for a couple of yars now, doing the Black Eyed Peas “Boom Boom Pow” before 10,000 or so kids at THON earlier this afternoon.

They just announced this year’s amount raised: $7,838,054.36

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102 and counting

The Penn State women’s volleyball team racked up their record setting 102nd straight win and third straight national championship with an absolutely thrilling 5 set win over Texas in the title game on Saturday night. I also heard a rumor that they gained a new young fan from Montclair NJ.

Their championship match was one of the most compelling sporting events that I have ever watched. The girls started slow and dropped the first two sets of the match, marking the first time in the 100+ win streak that they had ever fallen behind 0-2. But they fought they way back, eventually winning the fifth set 15-13 in a set that had both teams trading points back and forth. I’ve heard from a bunch of people who just turned the game on for the novelty of the championship but were overwhelmed with the athleticism of the participants. They’re real believers now.

The match has become an instant ESPN classic and was already rebroadcast three times yesterday. It will also be shown again on Saturday at 10 pm EST Saturday (9 pm CST). It’s worth a view even though you know who won.

It’s hard to appreciate how tall and good these athletes are. I shared this photo with Gary yesterday. It shows PSU coach (and Fremd High grad) Russ Rose with his four first team All-Americans, from left to right Ariel Wilson, Megan Hodge, Coach Rose, Blair Brown, and Alisha Glass, at their All American Awards banquet Friday night. Russ is my size but he looks like a shrimp in this photo. The girls heights in order are: 6’3″, 6’3″, 6’5″, 6’0″.

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Anybody know Russian?

This is a photo of a friend of mine shaking hands with the President. It comes from a Russian site and I don’t know what the caption says.

Barry and Obama

You may have heard that Obama was in Russia early this week. One of the things that he did there was speak at the graduation of group of students at the Russian New Economics School.

One of the founders of the school is Barry Ickes, who is an econ professor at Penn State and one of my golfing buddies. Barry and I played golf Friday a week ago, then he left the next day for Russia (he heads over there about once a month) for the school graduation and to meet with Obama. Kind of funny that he has to go all the way to Moscow to meet our President.

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Props to Talor Battle…

Who you ask?

Talor is Penn State’s sophomore point guard. He was an unherald recruit (at least on the national scene) but, before he’s done, might go down as Penn State’s best ever basketball player (heck, some think he already is).

Halfway through the Big Ten season, Talor was the odds on favorite to be named the Big Ten Player of the Year. He faltered a little coming down the stretch (quite possibly due to worrying about his mom who suffered a mild heart attach right at the point that Talor began to struggle) but still managed to make first team all Big Ten.

Unfortunately, PSU came up just short of getting an invite to the NCAAs (despite finishing fourth in the conference and just missing a win in our last game at Iowa, two OTs and we had shots at the end of regulation and the first OT to win it, which would have put us in second place in the Big Ten and locked up a bid for sure).

We did, however, receive a bid to the NIT and the first game was last night. In the game, Talor came up with one his miraculous finishes that he’s starting to become famous for on campus. First, to set the stage, here’s what he did at the end of our game with Illinois when we were down one with seconds to go. He dribbled the length of the court, passed all five Illinois defenders and scored the winning bucket with .3 seconds left.

Here’s a fans video from the upper deck.

In the aforementioned Iowa game, Battle almost topped that. We were down nine points with 2:23 to play. Over the next two minutes Battle scored 12 straight points to tie the game up, then just missed a three point at the buzzer that would have won it (sorry no video).

But he did top it last night. We were down three with 4.8 second left when the following happened.

We went on to win it in overtime.

The kid is just amazing and we get to watch him for two more years.

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THON on NBC’s Today Show

The Today Show did a nice story on THON.

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