Patti's Blog - Advocate for Elders, People with Disabilities and Their Families

Tigers will play World Series champ Yankees six times in spring training

Excerpt from mlive.com: (click for entire article)

 The Detroit Tigers announced their 2010 spring training schedule Tuesday, and it includes seven games with the Toronto Blue Jays and six with the World Series champion New York Yankees.

Detroit plays 16 of its 33 Grapefruit League games at Marchant Stadium in Lakeland, Fla., where it will train for the 74th year.

The Tigers will play an exhibition against Florida Southern on March 2 before opening Grapefruit League play with the Blue Jays on March 3 (at Dunedin) and March 4 (at Lakeland). They will play four split-squad games during the schedule, concluding April 1 with day games at Lakeland against Atlanta and at Kissimmee against Houston.

Yzerman hailed for class, skill, remembering his roots

Patti's Comments:  I could not agree more - one of the classiest acts from Detroit – ever!

Excerpt from Freep.com: (click for entire article)

The morning after Steve Yzerman’s induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame, we thought it would be interesting to see how scribes from the Captain’s native Canada and other NHL insiders described the event and the man.

Peter James, Canwest News Service:

“The Hockey Hall of Fame received an injection of scoring, leadership and class Monday in Toronto. “In what has been called one of the strongest classes in the history of the organization, the Hall opened its doors to players Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull, Brian Leetch and Luc Robitaille plus one builder, Lou Lamoriello.”

Yzerman, Hull, Robitaille ring in Hall of Fame day

Patti's Comments:  Congratulations to them all!!

Excerpt from Freep.com: (click for entire article)

Memories of the 2002 Stanley Cup championship team remain fresh for the three Detroit Red Wings teammates who tonight will be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull and Luc Robitaille appeared this morning at a news conference at the Hall to talk about their pending enshrinement -- and reminisce about old times.

Quidditch casts spell on Spartans

Patti's Comments:  You have to love a MSU Quidditch team!!

Excerpt from Lansing State Journal: (click for entire article)
 
The Rampaging Pygmy Puffs were doing warm ups, running back and forth across Michigan State University's Adams Field, brooms between their legs.  "I think anyone that's on this team isn't afraid to make a fool out of themself," said team captain Ali Warr.  This was Quidditch, the game played on flying broomsticks in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter book series.  Or, rather, this was Muggle (non-magical folks) Quidditch, a version of the game adapted from the books four years ago by two students at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Olympian speaks on disabilities

Patti's Comments:  Great and inspiring article. Enjoy!

Excerpt from The Daily Texan: (click for entire article)

Olympic swimmer and Texas Ex Garrett Weber-Gale was the keynote speaker at a dinner Thursday night to recognize the Lee Bagan Endowment, a fund for economically disadvantaged students facing cognitive disabilities.

Bagan, a 2007 UT graduate, is the former director of Student Government’s Services for Students with Disabilities Agency. During his time as director, he established a fund to provide diagnostic testing for students who struggled financially. Bagan began raising money for the fund by collecting donations in a cup on the Drag. He eventually recruited help from fraternities and other organizations on campus.

Last year, the endowment was created along with a constitution and a committee to formalize the process of determining who will receive the scholarships, said Liam O’Rourke, Student Government president and co-founder of the endowment. Two students have received scholarships for testing.

“Lee and I had envisioned not just the creation of the endowment, but to have an annual celebration dinner as well,” said O’Rourke. “It is not enough for the scholarship. We want to raise awareness.”

The NFL’s tobacco moment

Patti's Comments:  I agree but I am not surprised by this.  Baseball has not handled their moment with steroids any better.

Excerpt from MarcGunther.com: (click for entire article)

If you are looking for a case study on how not to manage a corporate crisis, you could do worse than consider the way the National Football League is dealing with the mounting controversy over head injuries and their long-term impact on the health of its  players.

The league has denied the problem. It has stonewalled the press. It has ducked responsibility. It has acted arrogantly. It has come across as more concerned about the owners’ bottom line that the well-being of its players—likely because it is.

The league, it seems, has learned nothing from corporate America, where companies that are responsible and responsive, transparent and accountable do well in the long run.

I write this as an NFL fan who wrote a book about the league’s preeminent television showcase, Monday Night Football, many years ago. I’ve been following the emerging NFL head-injury scandal since blogging about it back on Super Bowl Sunday in 2007. It was clear by then–actually, long before–that the NFL didn’t take concussions seriously enough, that players were routinely sent back into games after being knocked out and, more generally, encouraged to suck it up and play hurt. My brother Noel Gunther has followed the story for years on the excellent Brainline.org website, about preventing, treating and living with traumatic brain injuries, that he runs for the public television station WETA. In fact, he tried years ago to film a story about concussions in the NFL, got permission from the Chicago Bears and its sympathetic team doctor but was then stymied by the league office–which appears to be typical of the way the NFL has responded legitimate inquiries into its conduct.

Even today–after years of accumulated evidence that concussions caused by the hard hits that are part of football have taken a long-term toll on NFL players, in the form of dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, suicides and the like– a pamphlet that the league gives to every player about head injuries says: “Research is currently under way to determine if there are any long-term effects of concussion in N.F.L. athletes.”

The 9 best NHL teams of the last decade

Excerpt from Yahoo Sports: (click for entire article)

Puck Daddy's Best & Worst of the Decade lists will run on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday through the end of 2009. (Yes, that includes holidays; cynical appraisal never sleeps.)

First off, know this: Immortality in the National Hockey League is not measured by the Prince of Wales or Clarence Campbell trophies for conference champions. We'll have a separate entry in our End-of-Decade Rankings for those elite teams that fell short of the ultimate prize.

But to determine the best NHL team of the 2000s, the field must be narrowed to the nine squads that had their names etched on the Stanley Cup during that time.

Yes, "Top 9," thanks to the lockout that killed the 2004-05 season. In fact, hockey is unlike any other sport that will be covered in Yahoo! Sports' "Best of the Decade" projects: The NHL was literally two different leagues before and after the work stoppage, from parity to economics to the very philosophy of how to build a winning team. That's reflected on several of our lists, including this one.

Top 2011 basketball recruit picks MSU

Excerpt from Green and White: (click for entire article)

Five days after Michigan State coach Tom Izzo capped his 2010 recruiting class with a verbal commitment from center Adreian Payne of Dayton, Ohio, he got his first piece for 2011 -- 6-foot-5 guard Brandan Kearney of Detroit Southeastern High.

A few minutes before making it official at a press conference at his high school this morning, Kearney told the State Journal that MSU has "everything I wanted in a program."

"Coach Izzo is one of the top coaches around, and Michigan State has one of the top programs in the country over the past 10 years," he said. "I knew this was the place for me, so I wanted to make my decision early and move on with the rest of my high school career."

Tigers' Curtis Granderson recognized for volunteer work

Excerpt from The Detroit News: (click for entire article)

Tigers center fielder Curtis Granderson has been named Marvin Miller Man of the Year by the MLB Players Association.

The award is given to the player whose "on-field and off-field performance most inspires others to higher levels of achievement, by displaying as much passion to give back to others as he shows between the lines on the baseball diamond," according to the Players Association.

The award is named for the founding executive director of the Players Association.

Granderson is founder of the Grand Kids Foundation, which works to improve opportunities for inner-city youth in the areas of education and youth baseball.

Yzerman's still got game -- to scout

Excerpt from Freep.com: (click for entire article)

What is Steve Yzerman doing on the back roads of Canada, driving off to Calgary one night and then back to Edmonton the next?

An episode of "Ice Road Truckers"?

"This is a Team Canada mission," he told ESPN.com's Pierre LeBrun.

So it was the Avs-Flames on Wednesday and then the Red Wings-Oilers on Thursday to do a little Olympic scouting.

"You write down some names on paper and you realize, whoa, there's going to be some difficult decisions between very, very good players and guys that (are) playing very well," Yzerman said. "But it's starting to shape up a little bit."

He said he has caught about a dozen games in October and more on TV -- "I'll watch one at night on TV and then TiVo another and watch it on the bike in the morning" -- and gets input from Ken Holland and Scotty Bowman.

"I've got people everywhere," Yzerman said.

Stevie Y also has plans in Canada in about a week and a half away: He's being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.