Sports

Coverage of Hoya sports.



Sports

Home opener looms for undefeated Hoyas

The men’s soccer team practiced to an interesting soundtrack yesterday afternoon—sporadic blasts of mediocre southern rock played through the recently added speakers on Kehoe Field. While the discord wasn’t exactly conducive to instruction, head coach Brian Wiese was more than happy to make concessions for the sake of the venue.

Sports

Sports Sermon: ACC Woes

When the Atlantic Coast Conference lured the University of Miami, Virginia Tech, and later Boston College out of the Big East in 2004, the goal was clear: turn the basketball-crazy ACC into a football powerhouse. The cross-conference exodus seemed to be just the right move to jumpstart such an evolution—Miami had made it to BCS bowl games in each of the last four years and Virginia Tech and Boston College were known heavyweights.

Sports

Fantasy Fetish

The NFL’s regular season starts on Thursday, which means that enthusiasts all over campus and the country will have finished drafting their fantasy teams and are now waiting to see how those investments will pay off. A 2006 study by outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. estimated that over the next seventeen weeks, thirty-seven million fantasy footballers will spend an average of fifty minutes a week tinkering with their accounts, costing employers nearly $18 billion in lost productivity. According to the same study, the average fantasy owner spends an additional thirty-four minutes a day thinking about his team and as much as $500 on software to give him an edge over his former friends.

Sports

Perfect record put to test

The Georgetown women’s soccer team might have hoped to start the season strong despite the absence of star sophomore Ingrid Wells, but at 3-0-0, the team has performed above and beyond preseason hopes with the best start in program history. The Hoyas’ perfect record will be on the line this weekend as they take on both Mississippi State and Hartford in the George Mason Tournament.

Sports

Everything to gain for Hoyas in first D.C. Cup

Despite winning only three games in the past two years, the Georgetown football team is looking to the 2008 season with unabashed optimism. They open their season this Saturday in an historic match-up called the D.C. Cup against Howard University, the first ever meeting of the two teams.

Sports

Hoyas ride a bounty of goals to Hollywood

This won’t be a relaxing three-day weekend for the members of the Georgetown men’s soccer team. With just a single day of school behind them, the team boarded a plane early this morning to participate in the Cal State Northridge Tournament in Los Angeles. The Hoyas will open up regular season play against their hosts—who knocked off the University of California 1-0 in an exhibition last week—before taking on Cal State Fullerton on Sunday and boarding the red eye back to D.C.

Sports

Sports Sermon: First Annual D.C. Cup

As a freshman in Harbin Hall who couldn’t see anything but the football field outside of my dorm room window, I would probably have been considered a shoe-in to attend the 2006/2007 season opener against Holy Cross. I didn’t—I slept in. For me, a football fan with familial claims to powerhouse programs like West Virginia and Tennessee, Holy Cross was just another name in our outdated fight song and Georgetown football barely even existed at all.

Sports

Field hockey rebuilds

Despite the fact that more than half the team is new to college, Georgetown field hockey has high hopes for the 2009 season. The squad welcomes eight freshmen to its ranks, as well as new head coach Tiffany Marsh and assistant coach Emily Beach. Both joined the team as interim coaches during the first week of August last season.

Sports

Little big league

While Lebron James and Carmelo Anthony led fans in a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” after Sunday’s gold medal game in Beijing, a far more unlikely group of heroes were treated to the same cheer half a world away. After flirting with elimination a day earlier in the semifinals of this year’s Little League World Series, the team of seventh-graders from Waipahu, Hawaii emerged triumphant in the title game, beating the opposing squad from Matamoros, Mexico, 12-3. Hours after China sent off the world’s athletes with an ambitious closing ceremony, the fans in Williamsport, Pennyslvania—most of them face-painted parents or sunburned little sisters—departed as well. There were no fireworks or lip-synching nine-year-olds, only tired dads loading poster-boards bearing messages of good luck and empty coolers into their RVs.

Sports

Women’s volleyball looks to bounce back

The Georgetown volleyball team is anxious to improve after a disappointing, injury ridden 5-27 season last year.

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Sports Sermon

Few things are as comforting or nerve-wracking as a clean slate. Just ask this year’s horde of new students, whose current list of collegiate accomplishments is nothing but a rough outline written in the faint ink of ambition and expectation. Three incoming freshmen, though, have been busy making an early mark on the Hilltop this summer.

Sports

Georgetown soccer’s lofty expectations

The Georgetown men’s soccer team’s regular season opener is exactly one week away, and head coach Brian Wiese has a problem. But unlike most preseason problems—injuries, inconsistency, confusion—Wiese isn’t particularly worried about his. In fact, his problem may be the envy of the Big East. That’s because the third-year coach’s most pressing issue is what to do with the 10 starters, 19 letter winners and four talented, fast-learning freshmen that make up this year’s team.

Sports

Different paths to Beijing `08

Former Georgetown University sailing team member Chris Behm (MSB ‘08) was almost giddy when the Beijing Olympics began this summer. His old teammate, Andrew Campbell (SFS ‘06), was one of two Georgetown graduates to make the U.S. Olympic team, and Behm was more than willing to stay up as late as three in the morning to watch him sail.

Sports

Hoyas have holes to fill

The Georgetown Women’s soccer team finished last season with a program record fourteen wins and earned the team’s first ever NCAA tournament berth. This year’s women’s soccer team features some new components but maintains the same lofty goals.

Sports

Court Troubles

After America’s third place finish in the 2006 World Championships, the international basketball community couldn’t help but wonder how far Team USA would fall and how long their shameful plummet would take. The answer came to me in the past week and a half as I begrudgingly dragged myself out of bed to watch the “Redeem Team” trounce its various opponents. We have already hit rock bottom.

Sports

No “I” in team

Has anyone ever wondered how illogical professional sports drafts are? It is the only time when the most qualified applicants for a job hope to get hired by the dregs of their field. If any reader finds me a Harvard Business School student who falls asleep at night praying to be hired by the now-defunct Bear Stearns or any one of its fellow sinking ships of the investment world, I would be impressed. It exposes something uniquely selfish about professional sports: first, how the individual has essentially come to define the team, and second, how mediocrity and failure are, in a sense, rewarded.

Sports

UVA upsets Hoyas

After breaking an eight game Big East losing streak on Sunday against Cincinnati, the Georgetown baseball team faced off against non-conference opponent University of Virginia on Tuesday evening. The Hoyas fell 9-1 against the 16th ranked Cavaliers.

Sports

Hoyas add on the wins

The Georgetown softball team gave the Coppin State Eagles a two-part thrashing on Tuesday at Guy Mason Field. Thirty-two runs were scored in the double-header, all by the Hoyas, and each game was called on the mercy rule after the fifth inning as Georgetown sent the Eagles packing with 12-0 and 20-0 victories.

Sports

The Sports Sermon

Union of European Football Associations Champion’s League games are the soccer fan’s gold. For a few weeks out of the year, the obligatory perusal of television’s daytime doldrums brings the welcome surprise of the world’s greenest pitches and greatest players. The soccer-loving minority in this country has beaten the argument over the sport’s relevance in the States to death, and although I am not ready to concede to the country’s soccer apathy, I have a less conventional argument in mind.