The cream and crimson!

Congratulations to the Indiana Hoosiers men's soccer team who won the NCAA D1 title this past Sunday.

That makes an even eight titles for Indiana, more than every team but St Louis U. The Billikens, however, haven't won since 1973 - when they won their tenth title in the first fifteen titles that the NCAA awarded.

Princeton grad does good

Major congrats to Kevin Donnelly (#4 in that picture there, the one who looks kinda special).  He's a PHS grad from the class of 2008 and a great guy.

He's also - as of Saturday evening - an NCAA champion as his Northern Kentucky University soccer team won the NCAA Div II championship in a driving snowstorm.

Donnelly's a junior at NKU who started 21 of the team's 25 games this year.  And I'm thinking a couple of you folks just might remember him.

Check out

• his roster page on NKU's website...
• NKU's story about the game...
• NKU's photo gallery...
• Cincinnati Enquirer's story about the game (from which the photos I'm using came)...

Interestingly, the game was in Louisville, hosted by Bellarmine University (employer or CoachSullivan) as part of the NCAA Div II Championships Festival.  The men's and women's soccer, women's volleyball, women's field hockey, & men's and women's cross country championships (and semifinals and even some quarterfinals) were all hosted by Bellarmine this past weekend.  Sounds like an awesome idea - bringing everybody together to have all the finals in one place as well as a coup and a pain in the backside for Bellarmine.

A scary memory - or lack thereof

I taught at Mount Healthy High School before coming to PHS and became good friends with Terry Kiger, phys ed teacher there. A couple of years after I left Mt Healthy, Terry's family went through a pretty scary ordeal when their daughter got injured playing soccer on PHS's football/soccer field. She hit her head and lost her memory of everything from birth until that moment - everything.

She didn't know who her family were. Her first trip to a buffet - a few days later - was a revelation because she didn't know what any of the foods were. She had lost her memory of everything from algebra to the family trip to Disney World.

Her memories have never come back, but she is doing well now. As a freshman at Slippery Rock University, Dana is starting on their soccer team and was featured in the following video story from CSTV.



Sorry, by the way, for the auto play on the embed. No option to not autoplay this time.

It often amazes me how very little we really understand about the brain.

The BBC rocks...further...

Ok, I was trying to hunt down video of the Beckham goal against Paraguay on Sunday (eventually found via YouTube, thank you, internet community). In the process I found the BBC's virtual highlights of the match.

They apparently don't have the rights to put the actual highlights online, but they've gotten somebody to make animations of all the shots (just the shooter and the goalie in the nicely rendered stadium), any cards (just ref and offender), and of one or two key plays in each game. For the key plays (click on Highlights in Detail) you can see every player on the field, what he did during the play, where the ref was, and it can all be done from any of dozens of different camera angles. You've got the ability to zoom in and out and to speed up and slow down the virtual highlights.

Fabulous stuff...