The summer sports scene is making my head spin and hum

My head is rotating like planet Earth; sometimes the light of sports knowledge is shining brightly inside my dome, but other times it’s dark with nobody home. The summer sports scene is humming with all the travel and AAU tournaments, triathlons, biathlons, duathlons, long-distance bike events, Lifeguard Olympics, major league all-stars, minor league all-stars, tournaments for almost all-stars, throw in some Ultimate Frisbee and Frisbee golf and low gross to really gross to best ball celebrity golf tournaments, Atlantic Rugby, summer adult YMCA soccer, Henlopen Soccer Club select soccer, AAU basketball, Cadet Duals National wrestling championships, Delmarva Swim Association meets that take an accounting firm to calculate and tabulate results, Pop Warner football, cheerleaders competitions and a barrage of camps that proliferate the local landscape. Just a heads up! Don’t send me charts or fliers with the suggestion to “put this in the paper,” but rather paragraphs because “Homey don’t rewrite charts!”

Team Delaware - Max Euler, a 13-year-old soccer player entering his ninth grade year at Cape, scored the game-winning goal against Pennsylvania from 30 yards out in the closing minutes for a 2-1 Delaware victory. It was part of the East Coast Region tournament for the Olympic Development program. Delaware also defeated Maine 5-0 before losing a game to top-ranked Maryland. Griffin Kammerer had 10 saves in the win over Pennsylvania. Elliot Young, Billy Swontek and Josh Leshar, all freshman soccer guys heading to Cape, were also on the team.

Relaxation of Rules - Twenty-two years ago a certain Cape football coach of high integrity was suspended for a sports season because a handful of players from Cape and other schools got together on Monday nights to play throw and catch and receive instruction on how to run routes and take handoffs with additional assertion that actual plays were run, for example, 2 back through the 4 hole, which football guys cleverly call 2-4. But in 2003, the rules were relaxed, so now after the spring sports season and through Aug. 1 coaches can have contact with their athletes in the sports they coach, and most do. The key here is that the student athlete cannot be required to show up to any organized or disorganized activity as a condition to making a school sports team. That rule doesn’t apply inside households where parents often insist that their kids go to every activity offered and play in two-day summer tournaments 100 miles away from the beach causing some kids to complain, “It’s stupid to leave the beach to go play lacrosse around some hot beltway, and anyway what’s a beltway, just some stupid road to circle around some ugly place no one wants to go anyway.” Parent response: “Shut up and get in the van.”

Action Everywhere - The Cape campus is a bustling place this June from the ball diamond to the turf field and outdoor basketball courts to the weight rooms and the Not So Little Big House that can be broken down into four comfortable activity centers. I call it “blood in the water” as Cape athletics is ready to snap back to old school across the board with top-flight programs. The campus from outside to inside is just a place you want to be, beautifully sprawling yet cozy and friendly, a place to get fit and get work done and to socialize and see friends. The site work, as we construction guys like to say, is just about ready for the carpet to be rolled onto turf field two, so someone out there please figure out how we get big old handicapped-accessible bleachers like Milford or Tower Hill and a scoreboard.

Snippets - I sit on a boardwalk bench alone in big loser boy moments of solitude dropping in on snippets of conversations from complete strangers. I remember University of Delaware professor James Keegan going off about the overuse and misuse of the word ironic and he’s right, but I believe this qualifies, as a boy whined to his mother, “So, your grandfather’s not supposed to call you a tattletale.”

Busting Gramps for busting him has a touch of irony, I think. I have been all over World Cup soccer and love the United States team and all the cultures and pageantry and by the way “Go home Algeria!”

That’s what you get for not playing to win.

The World Cup announcers are the best and if you pay attention you will realize that those doing professional football and basketball color commentary in the United States are not smart enough to be total morons because that takes self-awareness, like I’m a mechanical moron who would change a fan belt with the car running so I don’t do it if the fan is whirling or idle.