Why American college sports teams have all the luck

When I stepped into the Cameron Indoor Stadium (an odd name I thought but then it states its purpose) last week, it was the peak of my four days in North Carolina.

I was actually there to attend a conference on science and the web but two sidetrips to Durham and Chapel Hill being available, I wasn't going to pass up the chance to see the Cameron court at Duke University or the University of North Carolina football stadium (outdoor, in case you were wondering).
Look at the shine on the court, the electronic scoreboard, the TV camera-friendly lighting, 9300-seat capacity and potential for player sponsorshiop deals and then ask why getting a spot on a US sports team  is an internationally-respected achievement. While I wasn't able to catch a game due to tickets being sold out well before I planned the trip (except for the $5000 courtside package), just being in the stadium was enough inspiration for me.

Duke have 15 wins, 3 losses for the season after the 88-74 loss to NC State on Wednesday. Their 6'8" forward Kyle Singler's No 12 jersey can be seen on anyone from freshman to college professor to shopkeepers around parochial Durham (and London UK, now that I splashed out to buy the cheaper $60 away strip).

Glancing down the All-American wall of fame at Duke (small section pictured left) was like a trip back to my first days playing ball in high school, seeing names like Christian Laettner, Jason Williams and Grant Hill slotted in amongst players who may have been just as well known in their respective sports. Whether Singler follows these college legends to the NBA is another question but with the positive reception that greets his consistently high shooting stats, he will no doubt have had all the fame he can handle before he even turns 22 in May.

Play sport, make friends or vice versa

Discovered a great site in beta stage while perusing the Beyond Sport pages.
Sports Buddies brings together people from around the world to play whatever they choose, so they can make contact, meet, or create your own groups of mates.

Still in its early stages and it would benefit from having links to gmail or hotmail contact lists but looks good so far and worth a look

Nice plug from blog awards site

I've been featured as Blog of the Month on Football Jerseys in their Blog Awards section.

The site averages 200,000+ unique visitors per month and has featured more than 30,000 blogs from the world of football and sport in general.
Thanks for the mention guys

NBA UK gets their act together and Cash gets a serve

Well it only took a month for me to write another post and it took that long for whoever runs the NBA UK fan page on face book to upload photos and video from the Take to the Courts days in October.
I made the cut twice for their highlight video though in a watching not playing capacity.

As usual my full-time job and travel has allowed little time for blogging (I do enough of that at work) and there hasn't been much to say about basketball of late.

On the tennis front, whoever is handling the Lawn Tennis Association's PR account must have been saving a good news story for when someone attacked Roger Draper, as Pat Cash did in the now-heavily read London Evening Standard (because it's free).

Former Wimbledon champion Cash hammered Draper's LTA and the state of Brit tennis, sending the LTA PR machine into overdrive and resulting in a full-page tribute to the state of young British tennis the following day. How convenient.

Draper even had his say in a boring and dry column that did nothing to really tackle any of Cash's good points, and he had a few.

Cash may be a loudmouth but he's lived in London for a while now and could contribute a lot to attracting yougsters to tennis, if anyone bothered taking his advice. It's true that UK sports pages so often seems restricted to talking about football, despite what the rest of the country is doing.

In Australia it is a similar story: women's netball and soccer (ok, football) had dismal coverage despite being the top two sports played by teenagers in the whole country. That is now changing as both sports get more money, professionalism and international standing. Tennis doesn't suffer too much from all three but results by Brits seem to be the biggest block in its improvement here