Last spring, the band released their first album without co-founder Steven Page. The second song on the album, “Summertime,” is an ode to Western New York-Southern Ontario weather; a response to those not from the area who ask, “How do you put up with all the lake effect snow, wind and cold?” The answer? “We’re all pushing through till summertime.”

I have been fielding many questions in the same vein lately now that Greater Boston has been hit with three snowstorms in a month’s time. “How did you put up with weather like this?! How does your family back there handle it?” So, Bostonians, my answer and advice to you in song form. “Keep on pushing through for summertime.” May it become your winter 2011 anthem.

Summertime – Barenaked Ladies (YouTube)

We had penalty shots, penalties that made no sense, goals scored mere seconds apart from each other, a change in goaltender for BU, BU players diving, BC players elbowing, shorthanded goals, power play goals – at one point, my husband said, “I think CBS College Sports ordered a smorgasbord of hockey activity for tonight’s game.”

And yes, BC’s Patch Alber has an old-timey physician’s name, BU needs to shoot the puck and realize that goals aren’t scored unless the puck physically enters the net, and BC’s goalie John Muse resembles a penguin attempting to launch off the ground when he’s making a save or counting off the last seconds of a penalty.

So if you’re BU, what do you do for Saturday night’s game at BC? What do you do for next week’s games against Northeastern and RPI? Who do you start at goaltender? Who is your first line? There is bound to be shake ups – and if there were not, fans would have the right to be livid – but how exactly does one reassemble this Terrier team?

Since I don’t even know where to begin, I leave it to you – if you were Jack Parker and Mike Bavis, what would you do?

Dodging downpours while leaping from exhibit to exhibit, I came across a vegetable display that any Boston sports fan has to give major props to: The Boston Celtics in Gourd Form.

The Gourd Celtics (Photo by me)

A local Cub Scout troop submitted their autumn gourd Boston Celtics display to the vegetable diorama competition, and obviously won first prize. What better way to celebrate your defending Eastern Conference Champions than to make semblances of them in gourds?

Oh no! Kendrick Perkins is down. Out three weeks with a bruised pumpkin. (I don’t know how well you can see the writing on the “jersey,” but it did read Kendrick Perkins.)

Oops. Kendrick Perkins Gourd is down. (Photo by me)

Major kudos to this Cub Scout troop for giving us a great example of Sports in Unexplained Places. Congratulations on winning first place.

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.