Go Vikings!

Congratulations to the women's lacrosse team at Cape Henlopen High School for winning their seventh straight state championship. That is an amazing feat! They defeated Polytech High, another downstate team,16 to 6 this past Tuesday. It was a somewhat close game at halftime with a score of 8 to 5, but Cape came back with a vengeance for the second half.

The only streak that is truly comparable to what the Cape Girls team is doing, was Salesianum boy's soccer in the early 2000s. The Sallies program has a significant advantage being a private school that is able to recruit and attract players from different states, so for a public school to achieve this is saying something!

But the excitement for Cape does not end there. It's time to be cheering for both the Men's lacrosse team and the Men's baseball team to bring home state championships as well! The Men's lacrosse team will play in the state finals against non other than Salesianum. The men's team will be fighting for back to back Championships in Saturday's game.

And Cape baseball, coached by a 1990's Cape Grad Ben Evick, will go up against Appoquinimink for a first ever state championship title in Baseball for Cape. This will be a great matchup too because former Cape student Billy Cunningham is the coach for Appoquinimink and was just voted Delaware State Coach of the Year! Doesn't get much better than this!

I was tempted to just do local sports and keep it upbeat, but there was crazy news in soccer this week! Fourteen people, who are involved in FIFA (the governing body of international soccer) were arrested this week. They were accused of, among other things, receiving bribes for awarding certain tournaments to countries in exchange for large sums of money. Some of the tournaments supposedly included the awards for the location of the next two World Cup Championships. There have been rumors about this type of conduct in FIFA for a long time. For our federal government to get involved, it has to be pretty darn bad. I have a feeling I will be talking about this for a while.

Thanks to having cousins who are great college players, I have been watching college-level women's lacrosse for a while. Because you can't body check or easily cause a turnover in the women's game (as it should be), at this level it can be very hard to get the ball from the other team. They really need to change their stalling rules and develop a shot clock or some other device to cause the ball to be turned over more easily in order to make the games more competitive and fun to watch.

Last Friday, I was watching the second half of the NCAA Division 1 semi-final game between Maryland and Syracuse, two great teams. Maryland had a two goal lead and held the ball for the last seven minutes of the game without taking a shot. It was like watching paint dry. This was incredibly boring to watch and far less competitive an ending than it should have been!

The rules committee meets in June and I hope the coaches and refs can persuade them to adopt a 90 second shot clock to give the team who is behind a chance to gain possession as the game goes into its final minutes. By the way, Maryland won it's second straight National Championship on Sunday with a one goal win over North Carolina. Guess who had the ball and didn't take a shot for the last two minutes?!