Story By: Morning Edition
David Greene checks in with Tyler Saladino, a minor league baseball player for the Chicago White Sox organization. As he works his way up to the majors, Saladino is currently an infielder for the Birmingham Barons in Alabama.
Dubai: So it has been finally proved that Sourav Ganguly, known as the Prince of Kolkata, could not stage a victorious return to his city as the leader of Pune Warriors. Despite his captaincy skills and a determined knock, he had to bite the dust in front of his home crowd.
For someone who hates losing, this defeat must have been extremely painful, that too to a team led by Gautam Gambhir who made his international debut nearly 11 years after him.
Gambhir is nine years younger than Ganguly and to see someone who hasn’t seen or experienced as much cricket as him marshal his resources to victory and that too in front of his home crowd will hurt him forever.
Everyone knows that Ganguly did want to prove a point to Kolkata Knight Riders co-owner Shah Rukh Khan, who orchestrated his exit from his home team. Though he is a film star, Khan has correctly picked the right man in Gambhir to lead his team.
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Sharjah: The Indian High School, Dubai, have reached the final of the Under-17 Maxtalent Global Vision Cup inter-school cricket tournament by beating Cambridge International School by seven wickets.
Indian High School will meet Ibn Seena to decide the Under-17 winner, while Our Own English School will take on Delhi Private School, Sharjah, in the Under-13 final after beating Dubai Modern High School by 89 runs in the last four.
Cambridge got off to a good start through skipper Shohaib’s 31 off 29 balls, which included two sixes over long-off.
But his team were restricted by some fine bowling by Indian High School’s Arjun Manohar (three for 18) and Srijith Sivarams (three for 26).
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Indian High School opener Shaun Kachroo cracked 44 off 36 balls to ensure his team’s passage into the final.
In the Under-13s age-group, Our Own opener Mohammad Afsal hit 55 off 43 balls and Khilesh Mamtani 34 off 23 as they posted 139.
Dubai Modern collapsed under the pressure and were all out for 50. Mahdi Raza took five wickets for just eight runs.
Scores
Under-17 semi-final:
Indian High School, Dubai, bt Cambridge International by 7 wkts. Cambridge International School: 113 (Shohaib 31; Arjun Manohar 3 for 18, Srijith 3 for 26, Mohammad Sahil 2 for 15). Indian High School, Dubai: 115 for 3 (Shaun Kachroo 44; Sairaj 2 for 27). Player of the match: Shaun Kachroo.
Under-13 semi-final:
Our Own English School bt Dubai Modern High School by 7 wkts. Our Own English School 139 for 7: (Mohammad Afsal 55, Khilesh Mamtani 34; Taran Attavar 2 for 13, Shashank Gupta 2 for 25). Dubai Modern High School: 50 (Mahdi Raza 5 for 8). Player of the match: Mahdi Raza.
Abu Dhabi: Outgoing Al Wahda coach Josef Hickersberger has dubbed this season the "toughest year" in his career in football management, according to a recent interview given to Vienna-based daily Kurier.
With former Iran coach Branko Ivankovic among those lined up to replace the 64-year-old Austrian at the Al Nahyan Stadium in Abu Dhabi, Hickersberger has kept no secrets about his future plans in recent weeks.
Sixth in the league with six wins, nine draws and four losses from 19 games this season, with group phase elimination in the Etisalat Cup and President’s Cup semi-final defeat to Bani Yas, Hickersberger, will leave this summer after a five-year association with the club split in two spells.
With Al Wahda, the former Bahrain and Austria coach won the league in 2010 and super cup in 2011. But in 2012 he has won just three games.
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Bengaluru: Kings XI Punjab claimed a thrilling four-wicket victory over Royal Challengers Bangalore with just one ball to spare despite the hosts’ West Indian star Chris Gayle smashing 71 in the first innings.
Gayle’s scintillating knock was the highlight of Royal Challengers’ competitive 158 for five after being put in to bat. But Kings XI’s Australian kingpin David Hussey’s 45 helped his side make 163-6 to edge to victory, which was sealed with a magnificent six from Piyush Chawla.
Brief scores: Royal Challengers Bangalore 158-5 in 20 overs (C Gayle 71, V Kohli 45). King’s XI Punjab 163-6 in 19.5 overs (N Saini 50, DJ Hussey 45).
King’s XI Punjab won by four wickets.
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One of my favorite Title IX stories isn’t about me or about my daughter. Or even about the famous women athletes I’ve covered, like Jennie Finch or Julie Foudy.
It’s about my son.
My children happen to attend the same California high school that I did. Back in my day, in the years after the passage of Title IX, a few of my friends started the girls’ soccer team. Since they couldn’t get access to any of the high school fields, they had to trek across town to the local middle school to practice. No one knew or cared that they were there, so sometimes the sprinklers went off in the middle of practice. They wore old volleyball uniforms and boys’ cleats that didn’t fit right.
No one paid any attention to them — including, sadly, me. And I was the sports editor of the high school paper.
Fast forward a quarter century and the Tamalpais High girls’ soccer team had evolved into something of a powerhouse. The players were among the school’s elite athletes, playing for traveling club teams and in Olympic Development Programs and wooed by college coaches.
I went to one of their playoff games, on my alma mater’s football field, and the stands were packed with adults and students. There was my teenage son, with his shirt off and torso painted red and blue, cheering loudly for the team and his friends who played on it.
When Tamalpais won the game and the league championship, the students — my son included — leapt over the railing of the stands and rushed the field in celebration.
Sitting up in the bleachers, I felt my eyes well with unexpected tears.
Though I had spent a career covering sports, including the most dominant female athletes of our times, it was this scene on my own high school field where the full impact of Title IX hit me. On the same field where I once was a lousy cheerleader, because I realized I’d rather be writing about the players than shaking pom-poms for them, on the same field where my husband played football and my son played lacrosse, the soccer girls were conquering heroes.
Ranking the 40 greatest female athletes of the Title IX era
Somewhere on my path between exiting childhood and raising my own children to teenage years, our culture changed. Title IX didn’t just provide athletic opportunities to girls, it created a fundamental shift in society, changing perceptions and attitudes and boundaries.
Thanks to Title IX the world became a place where my daughter never once doubted her ability to compete in sports, and where I could write about sports for a living; a place where my son didn’t think twice about celebrating for his female classmates, any more than I had questioned cheering (ineptly) for my male friends.
The shift wasn’t just confined to sports. By 1972, a quarter century after Jackie Robinson debuted with the Dodgers, we’d already learned that sports can be a bellwether for change and acceptance. There was never going to be an Equal Rights Amendment (as a kid it took me some time to figure out that ERA wasn’t the same as Catfish Hunter’s key statistic). Title IX was as close as we got, and it helped change all of society, starting on the fields and courts and reverberating outward into all of society.
That first decade was one of fits and starts and battles, when girls found old volleyball uniforms and were relegated to out-of-the-way fields and gyms, willing their way into becoming teams. By 1983, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women was dissolved and women’s collegiate sports were absorbed by the NCAA, which had originally opposed Title IX. In that second decade, women’s sports and championships became established and ingrained.
Still, as a young reporter, when I was asked to do a 20-year anniversary series on Title IX, I was shocked to discover how far there was yet to go. All the Jackie Joyner-Kersees and Jennifer Azzis of the world didn’t create anything close to equality. Around that 20th anniversary, after years of patiently waiting for schools to do the right thing, more and more women started to use the power of the federal law. And lawyers. And lawsuits.
The decade between the 20th and 30th anniversary was one of exponential change. Not only were women fighting aggressively for their rights, but also the first generation to grow up with Title IX came of age and changed perceptions. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics — the "Women’s Games" — Title IX babies won trunkloads of gold medals. Three years later, the Women’s World Cup turned expectations about what women’s athletic events could be upside down.
Next month is the 40th anniversary of the law. The past decade has been tumultuous. As budgets have been squeezed and programs slashed, athletic directors and school presidents have seemed perfectly happy to fuel gender wars, blaming Title IX and female athletes for their institutions’ own poor decisions and lack of planning. No one, least of not women who fought for years for opportunity, wanted to see another athlete’s opportunity taken away. Meanwhile football — a men’s sport — grew obese, sucking away resources from other programs; despite perceptions most football programs fail to break even.
In recent years, there has been a groundswell to pay athletes who play in revenue generating programs (football and men’s basketball), though such a plan would appear to directly violate Title IX. Aside from the difficulty of implementing a program when only half of the revenue producing programs at FBS schools actually cover their own expenses, such a proposal has a gender-nullifying affect. It puts female athletes and male athletes in nonrevenue producing sports on the same side of the battle: trying to salvage a system that can make room for them.
The debate is no longer about finding value in women’s sports. Instead it has become whether or not we value athletic participation among students who don’t bring cash to the coffers. Though there are still plenty of critics who try to belittle women’s sports, they seem like remnants of an ancient time.
To them, I offer my favorite Geno Auriemma quote. When the UConn basketball coach received an e-mail from a man telling him how terrible women’s basketball is, he wrote back: ""Where do you live? I’m coming to your house to see what you do that’s so f — ing great."
At the 40th anniversary of Title IX a few truths exist. The federal law remains overwhelmingly popular. And there’s no turning back.
The law has changed the world we live in. My son has moved on from his body-painting high school years but my daughter now plays soccer for the same high school, feeling the pressure to live up to the legacy of the players who came before her — something inconceivable a generation ago.
She currently has staples in her scalp from a collision on a header and turf burns on her legs and wants to make sure neither interferes with her look for prom. She inherited her warrior mentality from her football- and rugby-playing father and maybe some of her unwillingness to be relegated to the sidelines from her mother.
She couldn’t imagine her life without being able to compete at sports. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever even question it.
Sharjah: The battle to clinch a place in the boys Under-17 and Under-13 final of the Maxtalent Global Vision Cup inter school tournament to be held on Friday has intensified with teams lifting their standards.
Speaking to Gulf News, Sudhakar Shetty the chief coach of the Maxtalent cricket academy, which is staging the tournament for the sixth year, said: "The competition has been intense and we find players giving their best to stun their opponents. We have decided to stage the final at the historic Sharjah Cricket Stadium and have invited UAE coach and former Pakistan Test star Aaqib Javed as the chief guest to give away the prizes to inspire the players."
The Under-13 tournament produced a spectacular match with Sharjah Indian School, participating for the first time in an inter school cricket match, almost shocking the experienced Delhi Private School (DPS), Dubai team. Chasing DPS’s total of 120 for 2, Sharjah Indian School fell short of the target by just two runs. If not for Vivek Aditya’s 51 runs for DPS, Sharjah Indian School would have pulled off a victory.
"The Under-17 final will be a 25-over match starting from 8.30am and Under-13 final will be a T20 match commencing at 1.15pm. As in the past, we are expecting a large turn out from all the schools in the final," added Shetty.
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Dubai: Godolphin duo Discourse and Lyric Of Light have continued their smooth preparation for Sunday’s Qipco 1000 Guineas at Newmarket.
Both unbeaten fillies are saddled by Emirati trainer Mahmoud Al Zarouni who bids for a repeat win in the fillies’ Classic following Blue Bunting’s victory in the race 12 months ago.
Discourse won the Sweet Solera Stakes (G3) on the second of her two starts while Lyric Of Light’s three successes include the May Hill Stakes (G2) at Doncaster and the Shadwell Fillies’ Mile (G1) at Newmarket
As part of the build-up Lyric Of Light completed a racecourse gallop under regular rider Willie Rovetto while apprentice jockey Antioco Murgia was delighted with Discourse’s racecourse gallop at Newmarket.
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After this week there will be a new notch at the top of the Anticipation Scale. Yes, above even No. 10: Awaiting the new series of The Kardashians. If the needle gets anywhere near No. 11: April 2012 Manchester Derby again, bystanders will have to be doused with cold water for their own safety.
Three points separate Manchester City and Manchester United with three games of the season remaining: a win on home turf will put City top on goal difference, while any other result will leave United in the box seat. Sir Alex Ferguson says you have to be a masochist to enjoy this late season tension; join me on Monday for live coverage from 2.30 p.m. ET, and I promise we’ll have a safeword.
