Per usual, I’m all over the Beanpot like wanna-be rock stars up on MySpace. Catch my extensive overview of Beanpot Players to Watch on Beantown Athletic Supporters. Tonight, I’ll be live tweeting for BU Today along with several of my co-workers and students, and you’ll also be able to catch my reports direct from Twitter.

Later this week, I’ll be profiling the Charity Beanpot Challenge, a game featuring Beanpot alumni and supporting the Travis Roy and Mark Bavis Foundations.

Happy Beanpot Monday!

But tonight, they had finally changed them to this year’s captains. Or at least, who we had thought this year’s captains would be:

My screen capture of the official Beanpot website at 11:05pm, Sunday evening.

Did Brian Strait suddenly return from Wilkes-Barre Scranton to BU? Wow, he must have forgave all of those awful things Coach Parker said about him in that USCHO piece from the summer.

Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer.

This weekend, Agganis Arena kept running promotions for an event next weekend with Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer.” (Aka, a dog behavior expert that dog owners turn to once they realize that raising a dog may, in fact, take actual work.)

My immediate thought during the first ad Friday night was, “Gosh, Jack Parker could use a Dog Whisperer. He’s got a whole roster of Terriers that keep giving him trouble.”

What would happen if during his Agganis visit next weekend, Millan spent some time analyzing the problems of this year’s Terrier team? I think it might go something like this:

Parker: I can’t believe I’m turning to you.

Millan: Oprah does.

Parker: Fine. I guess I’m desperate. As I mentioned in my post-game comments after Friday’s tie to Vermont, “my team does not know how to get ready for a hockey game.” They then went on to emphasize that point with a 4-1 loss against BC on Saturday. What changed between my 2009 national champions and this team?

Millan: If you watch my television show, you’ll know I am all about owners quitting babying their dogs. If you baby your pets, they’ll walk all over you and develop behavior problems that you’ll end up paying me thousands to fix. I see you with somewhat of the same problem – this team is walking all over you.

As hard nosed as you are, you lost a huge part of your bite when a coach’s dream of a captain, Matt Gilroy, graduated. His age and superhuman-esque determination gave you an extra coach in the locker room. And let’s not forget about John McCarthy, a quiet, but impactful leader, especially among his classmates. Then you had that whole senior class – essentially, you had five or six captains.

According to many accounts (including a close reading of Burn the Boats), Gilroy and McCarthy did a lot of your coaching for you last season. They called out guys when they got lazy. They set the tone at practices. They instilled the goal-setting mindset of the team as a whole. You also allowed them much more reign than other captains had. And with this age group, acceptance by peers can be much more powerful than by authority figures, giving your captains that much more clout.

BU coach Jack Parker (Photo: College Hockey News)

Parker: But Shattenkirk has a lot of captaincy experience. He was captain of the USA Under-18 Team and the World Junior Team.

Millan: But there is only one of him, he’s a junior, and he thought he’d be assisting a captain Brian Strait this season. No doubt Shattenkirk is a good player and leader, but he now leads alone a team made up of a bunch of individuals who have been spoiled by a national championship.

Parker: A bunch of individuals?

Millan: Two glaring examples: On the ice, Colby Cohen always must take the slapshot instead of passing it to a more open or closer to the net teammate. It is as if he honestly believes his overtime winner in the national championship game will happen every time he shoots the puck. It won’t. It was a fluke play that bounced off a Miami player’s leg.

Then you have Vinny Saponari, who has decided that he wants to be the Southern Alex Ovechkin. His puck handling could win him points for presentation, but this isn’t figure skating – it’s hockey, and if he would stop his focus on being fancy, he could be a national leader in goal scoring.

Parker: Two out of twenty-six. Fine, I’ll figure out what to do with them, but something else has to be ailing us.

Millan: Speed. The North Dakota-like speed that signaled that this was a different team than usual during the October 2008 Icebreaker has vanished somewhat. Every team is now catching up in terms of speed, and while there have been games where you come out of the gate all speedy, you lose it much too quickly.

Secondly, the team needs to work on breakaways and rebounds. They are tending behind on both. They are not taking advantage of opportunities because they’re either focused on making the fancy play or thinking too much about what to do with the puck. There’s only one thing to do with the puck – get it somewhere where it can end up in the net. Is that a closer or open teammate? Is that the net? This thinking needs to be snappier.

Parker: What about my goalies?

Millan: Last year was like adopting a dog and having me with you for a year training it, then taking me away and expecting everything to be normal. You had two freshmen goaltenders in front of some of the most outstanding defensive players the program has ever had. You also had forwards who understood their defensive roles. This year, you still have massive, pounding defensemen, but you also have three of them thinking they are also forwards. Plus, your forwards are no longer defensively minded. No one is there to help the goalies, so you now see what they are really made of.

Am I saying either Rollheiser or Millan (who must be a distant cousin of mine or something) are bad? No, but they need to adjust to the lack of help they have in front of them. Their own teammates are screening them. Defensemen seem to be maintaining some set distance from the net – did the two goalies put out a restraining order on the team or something?

Parker: The boys and I have a break coming up. What can I possibly do to turn this season around? I mean, I’m beginning to think I should have hung it up after last year.

Millan: First off, bench kids. Bench kids with names. Bench seniors. Bench juniors. You were never afraid of benching “stars” in the past – why are you now? Bonino wasn’t prolific until you benched him last November. Tough love – you’re not their mother. But you do demand great things from them, and you can’t do that if you are afraid of hurting their feelings or thinking they can fix themselves. Bench unproductive players. Bench selfish players. Tell them that they don’t play until they take the game and the team seriously.

We also know you’re stuck on this, “Let’s not mention the National Championship bit,” to the team, with the team not allowed to be announced as the defending national champions and all. But hockey players crave motivation, and maybe putting the title out there – hey, we’re defending national champions, but we aren’t going to be able to defend until we have non-selfish, consistent effort – could be just the motivation that will click.

Break out every single passing drill ever known to man. A team that can pass to each other can score. This team is dropping passes right and left.

And tell the team that if they can’t make fancy plays until they make some All-Stars skills competition in their pro careers. But if they can’t score on rebounds and breakaways, there will be no All-Star skills competitions.

Order Gilroy make a video where he threatens to make them run the Charles hungover at 4:30am if they don’t win a game. Or tell Shattenkirk to get amazingly angry, and let Gryba get mean with him, and then get Gryba involve his other seniors. If the balance of the team won’t listen to you, they should be listening to their angry, older peers.

Parker: Well, as much as I can’t believe I am accepting your opinion on this, some of it seems pretty legit. By the way, I hear you’re gonna have dogs in my arena. You leave my arena clean next week, you hear me? So help me if there is dog anything stuck to my ice…

Millan: Tsst. Tsst. Down.

You were quite the topic of conversation on Tuesday, appearing literally out of nowhere with the sudden morning announcement of the demise of WBCN. With your August 13th arrival, Boston will be home to four sports radio stations – fitting really, given that Boston is the capital of obsessive sport fandom.

Before you go around stealing talent from the existing three stations (which you are already rumoured to be doing), let’s talk about one aspect of Boston Sports Radio that no one ever mentions:

Where are the women?

Yes, there is a woman, Jayme Parker, who does WEEI’s Sports Flashes on occasion. And WEEI.com recently hired a recent BU grad to host it’s morning video clip segment and do brief sound bites. Yes, many of the upper administrators calling the shots on WEEI and ESPN890, like Julie Kahn (Vice President of Entercom Radio New England) and Jessamy Tang (General Manager of 890ESPN), are some strong-willed and successful females. But besides that, Boston sports radio is all male dominated.

In 2009, when one of the most consistent and coveted football analysts/hosts of the past decade is female (Suzy Kolber), and when the Red Sox beat writer for the largest newspaper in Boston is female (the Boston Globe’s Amalie Benjamin), and when our regional sports television network host is female (NESN’s Kathryn Tappen), why are females largely absent from manning the microphones in Boston’s sports radio scene?

Since I was twelve and would watch Fox NFL Sunday in amazement that a woman like Kolber was reporting on football, sports media has made significant strides in including intelligent and insightful women in television sports media and print work. It almost seems, however, that sports media is still reluctant to put women in a position where they can be heard, and not seen – the radio. It seems as if that unless you can visualize the female, have they Erin Andrews-like looks or otherwise, they do not have a place in sports media. Think about it – Boston.com pimps out photos of Benjamin throughout their sports section. Even as a print journalist, they have felt the need to create a visual presence for her more so than the men on their sports desk. Kolber has had to become more feminine looking as the years go by – her hair got longer, she started wearing heavier makeup when she switched to ESPN. Are we still at a point where women in sports media still have to be eye candy, and thus, can’t just appear as a voice through a radio?

This is Boston, Massachusetts, home to more female sports fans than probably any other city in the United States. A large majority of those female fans actually have an in-depth knowledge of their favorite teams, players and sports. Thus, excluding female voices on sports radio is ignoring a giant demographic, and is not reflective of the area in which we live. Instead of hiring a female or ten to add to insightful and legitimate sports commentary, WEEI and 890ESPN rely on idiotic, light-weight old-school radio guys to fill their programming hours. These are the men who debate politics instead of pitching rotations during their morning shows, who will publicly discount some sports over others, and admittedly know very little about some of the sports in which they are hired to report on. At least a woman’s voice could lend something new to these broadcast, and might even keep the broadcasts more on-topic than the meandering nonsense that fills some of the broadcast hours.

Thus, Sports Hub, I expect you to consider some female voices when you begin hiring on-air talent. You want to win the quickly developing “sports radio wars” over WEEI? Hire a woman. WEEI and 890 ESPN, if you want to make a giant change to win over a new demographic and have a chance against the Sports Hub’s FM signal? Hire a woman. Because if Boston can entrust a woman with their Red Sox beat work, and entrust a woman with hosting Bruins and Red Sox post-game analysis, then you can certainly trust a woman to host a sports radio program. You have no excuse.

Sincerely,

Sports Girl Kat

P.S. If you need a woman to fill some of your late night or weekend programming, I might know a certain blogger who might be interested and would come cheap…

We all know I have a very weird taste in television programming.  Last September, I devoted an entire blog post to my favorite TV show of the moment, Connect with English.  Yes, ESL instructional programming.  But it involved Mark Consuelos (aka Kelly Ripa’s husband)! How could I not watch?

Well, dear readers, I’ll open up another page of my personal TV Guide and introduce you to another television show that you should be watching, because it brings me great joy:

Dollar Bill’s Discount World.

Every Saturday morning, at 8am, I drag myself out of bed – despite my pure inability to stand the mornings – to watch this show on MyTV New England.  It’s a program that consists of a man in his early fifties or so – Dollar Bill – literally racing through his giant warehouse of a bargain discount warehouse store in Derry, New Hampshire, telling his viewers all of the amazing deals he has that weekend. He wears a primary-colored umbrella hat with dollar bills strung from it’s ends, which dance around his head by the gale force of power he creates by running and jumping around his store, which appears to be roughly the size of a hockey arena.

Dollar Bill makes voices, gets out of breath and screams and yells.  He throws his products to the ground, usually for no apparent reason.  This morning, for instance, he through plastic plates on the ground to show that they don’t break, “unless you throw them really hard.”  He caresses teddy bears and stuffed animals on sale in an almost uncomfortable way.  During Valentine’s Day, he tried to convince the men of New England for three straight weeks that their significant others wanted a crystal rose in a satin box, which he had on sale for $3.99.  At Halloween time, he demonstrates every single Halloween decoration he has on sale, including Friday the 13th masks, goo, steaming punch bowls, and so on.  He oohs and fawns over picture frames and,the meat and potatoes of any dollar store, ceramic figurines of any animal or person known to man.  “Look at these.  These would be $20 in a regular store. They’d be great on a shelf in a living room or a bedroom, or a knick-knack stand.  Look at the detailing and the painting,” Dollar Bill explains breathlessly, like he’s a cheap phone sex operator. “Ooh, ooh, OOOOOHHHHH! They’re so pretty!!!” he then shrieks like said phone sex operator faking something for a client.

Dollar Bill occasionally has special deals, like his annual auction (from everything I’ve heard, he’s a legit auctioneer) and his “Deals of the Day” (like a pack of 4 light bulbs for a quarter.) Recently, he was taking the last five minutes of every show to shill a friend from New Jersey’s daughter’s 2003 Black Honda Civic, which he claimed he was selling to raise money to send his own daughter to college.  (I don’t know if I’d be mortified to be Dollar Bill’s daughter, or if I’d think it was awesome. I think personally I’d reach some sort of happy medium between mortification and awesomeness.)  It took him a few weeks to sell, but I think he eventually did sell the car, because it hasn’t been featured as of late.

And at the very end of every show, the camera gets a close up of Dollar Bill, who will then leave his viewers with some affirming or encouraging statement to tell us that despite the tough economic times, we are all going to be okay, especially if we do our shopping at his store. This morning he said something along the lines of, “Getting through tough times only makes us tougher, so we’ll make it through this, and you can still have everything you need if you shop here.”

I feel so much better about our current Great Depression now.  Thank you, Dollar Bill.

To watch an episode of Dollar Bill’s Discount World, click here, or tune into MyTV New England (Channel 18 on my Comcast down in Boston) Saturday mornings at 8am.

My favorite picture is of all the players picking up their equipment off the ice – I tried to get a few of these, but my camera is elderly and just isn’t getting all the shots it used to. I think it’s the last one in the slideshow.

Oh, and there is a Beanpot recap – including an inexplicable, “Your mom goes to college!” line from Scott Van Pelt – on ESPN’s Sportscenter tonight. Unlike last week, I was able to catch it on TV.

Also, if you didn’t read it while the game was ongoing, my live coverage live from the Garden is available here (select play on the Cover It Live video.)

More Beanpot recap will be forthcoming.

The rest of Boston is off to inexplicably jump on the Northeastern University bandwagon – which makes me angry, because if the Beanpot is quintessentially Boston, why are Bostonians openly rooting against a team with 10 players with Boston ties, including 4 on the top line alone? Does that make any sense? You want to openly root against guys who have dreamed of Beanpot glory since they knew what ice skates were?

I’ll be live tweeting from the Garden again, and I promise to do a far better job than last weeks debacle, where I spent most of the third period covering my face. I’ll start with the Boston College – Harvard University matchup at 5pm because I’ll use any excuse to spend more time in the TDBanknorth Garden (I have a thing for arenas) and because I want to see Harvard freshman goalie Matt Hoyle again in an unbiased atmosphere. Hoyle faced 50 shots and saved 45 of them against Yale on Friday night, and Harvard still lost 5-1. I think Hoyle might be the real deal for Harvard, yet unfortunately, the rest of his team can’t get things together.

If you enjoy hockey of any kind, I implore you to follow the Northeastern – BU game. This is arguably the biggest game in college hockey yet this year, and already is the most highly anticipated college hockey game I have ever experienced.

But I digress. What is more important is that according to this NHL.com article, Northeastern University and Boston University are separated by the Charles River. Really? Let’s take a look.

View Larger Map

That’s an oops for them. Oh well. They tried.

“Kat thinks the only things on TV worth watching are on her digital sports tier. Who needs CNN and MTV when you can have Fox College Sports Central and the like?”

That may be the truest Facebook status message in the history of status messages.

I adore my digital sports package like my cat adores shiny objects. I took the plunge a year ago and subscribed to a Comcast digital sports tier. I don’t have Netflix, I don’t go to movies, I rarely go out to bars, and one of my hobbies involves rolling every penny I ever find, so I felt I could handle the expense within my student-loan-repayment-consumed budget.

The digital sports tier I am a proud subscriber of is the Comcast “Sports Entertainment Pack.”  Here are the channels:

The Speed Channel
Outdoor Channel
Fox Soccer Network
NBA TV
NHL Network
MLB Network
TV Games
CBS College Sports (the late CSTV)
Fox College Sports (FCS) Atlantic
Fox College Sports (FCS)  Central
Fox College Sports (FCS) Pacific
NFL Network
Tennis Channel

Steve Young likes TV, just like me! (gratutous Steve Young mention of the post)

Out of these channels, I watch NHL Network and NFL Network the most, followed by the FCS channels and CBS College Sports. The FCS channels are great in the variety of sports they cover -last evening, I fell asleep watching Division II women’s basketball from Wisconsin.  Sure, the camera work was out of the Blair Witch Project, but heck – the fact that it was an option for me to watch? That was kind of cool.

The “Sports Entertainment Pack” is severely lacking when compared to other sports channel packages offered by the likes of Direct TV and Dish Network. Call me a geek, but I would love the regional Comcast Sports Networks and/or Fox Sports Networks.  I also would like MSG and Time Warner Sports so that I can keep up with the sports of Western New York. I know some other cable/satellite companies offer these channels – just not Comcast. Maybe the market isn’t there for them up here in Boston.

Besides my “Sports Entertainment Pack,” I have the normal sports channels interspersed throughout my cable: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN News, ESPN Classic, Comcast Sports Network (CSN), NESN, and Versus.  I don’t get to watch a ton of television because of the long hours I tend to keep at work, but when I do, 97.5% of the time it is one of the sports channels I have. The other 2.5% consists of my weekly viewing of “The Office,” my weekly viewing of a show on E! that I will not mention, and the morning news.  What makes up that 2.5% of my viewing could easily be watched online. I really don’t need the rest of the 200 channels I have.

Given all of that, here is my proposal to Comcast – let me have “Cable A La Carte.” I get to select 20-30 channels I actually want. No MTV, no Lifetime, no Military Channel. I don’t watch them, thus I don’t need them. Let me have all the sports channels I want, and none of the WE, Oxygen, Bravo, Fuse channels I don’t. None of this Current TV – what the heck is that anyway?  No more QVC, HSN or ShopNBC – I don’t need any Marie Osmond dolls.  Just give me my sports and my local channels. That’s all I need.

In today’s advanced technological age – one in which I can text or Twitter a Comcast Representative to fix a problem or subscribe to my “Sports Entertainment Pack” – why can’t I have a la carte cable?

So, my dear readers, tell me: If  “a la carte cable” was possible, what 15, 20, or 30 channels (including local channels) would you pick? They don’t have to be all sports – I’m just interested in what others would choose.