HERE ARE SOME SPORTS YOU MISSED: It's gloating season

Our monthly roundup from the world of sports features a Northwestern national championshp and GLORY FOR SAN MARINO!

It’s time for another roundup from the… uh… broad globe of athletic competitions! (I’m not calling it “the w*** w**** of s******” because I believe I would get sued by Disney—the No. 1 organization you don’t want to get sued by.)

In case you missed it, I'm going to be doing a monthly post about sporting events that don’t get the shine, because so many of you signed up for this newsletter to get Olympics coverage and then got a million pounds of college football dumped into your inbox.

I try my best to keep track of everything that’s going on in the world, but if something awesome happens out there and you’re worried I’m not seeing it, let me know! Send me an email at roadrodge (at gmail dot com), write me a message on Substack, or DM me on Bluesky. I’ll probably get it in the next roundup. Maybe!

But in November, there was one event I absolutely wasn’t going to miss…

My team won a championship and yours didn’t

Look, I’m not here to gloat. BUT YOU LOSERS ARE ABOUT TO LEARN ABOUT THE GREATNESS THAT IS NORTHWESTERN FIELD HOCKEY.

Northwestern absolutely dunked on St. Joe’s in the national championship game, their second natty in four years. The Wildcats won the title game 5-0, tying the largest margin of victory in championship history… and that scoreline was an act of mercy, as Wildcats were up 5-0 at halftime and broadly chilled out after that. Because I’m doing my homer schtick, you’re getting the CINEMATIC RECAP. That’s right: DRAMATIC MUSIC. FANCY CAMERAS.

Northwestern can go And1 Mixtape: Field Hockey Edition on opponents and they can win ridiculously ugly 1-0 games with killer D. They have the best offensive player in the sport—Ashley Sessa, who managed to get a field hockey highlight into the SportsCenter Top 10 and ranked top-5 in both goals per game and assists per game this season—nobody else ranked in the top 15 in both categories. And they have the best goalie in the sport, Annabel Skubisz, the back-to-back national leader in save percentage.

This happened out of nowhere: When I was a Northwestern freshman in 2008, Northwestern field hockey was forgettable even at a school full of forgettable programs. But it turns out the rest of the country was too dumb to hire Tracey Fuchs, the all-time most-capped player in USA Field Hockey history, who got her first head coaching job at Northwestern and has turned the program into a powerhouse. 4 straight national title games, two national championships.

Now they’re basically a training camp for the USA National Team, where Fuchs is an assistant coach. All-American Maddie Zimmer took the 2023 season off to help Team USA qualify for the Olympics. So did Sessa, who was in the process of transferring from North Carolina, and picked Northwestern… perhaps with a push from Fuchs and Zimmer. Northwestern was still good enough to make the national championship game without either them, losing in a penalty shootout, while Sessa and Zimmer got Team USA to Paris, where Sessa scored Team USA’s first goal of the tournament. Now three other active Wildcats are listed in the player pool that will play over the next few international cycles and try to peak for the 2028 Olympics in LA.

So look. I’m sorry about the brief dip into homerism. This post is about spreading awareness of awesome sporting performances, and is not supposed to be a platform for me to brag. But I don’t want this post just to be something you read once a month and move on: I want it to remind you that you can go out and find your own sport to fall in love with out there.

It happened to me with Northwestern field hockey. I’ve found so much joy watching resounding ass-kickings by the best damn team in this sport I never paid attention to before. Go find your team to brag about—and let me know when they win a title.

Banda Express

If you read my daily Olympic newsletters, you’d know that I stan Zambian superstriker Barbra Banda. I spent most of the Olympics yelling WILL SOMEBODY GET BARBRA SOME DEFENSE as she scored hat tricks in 6-5 losses. (This actually happened!)

All I wanted was what happened in the NWSL Final. Barbra scored the lone goal in the Orlando Pride’s 1-0 victory over the Washington Spirit, capping off an absolutely brilliant debut season:

Until this year, Barbra had been playing her club soccer in China. Then she joined the best league in the world¹ and dominated. The Pride paired her with Marta, the women’s soccer GOAT. More importantly, they paired her with several players who could prevent the opponent from scoring six goals per game. The result was arguably the best season in the short history of the NWSL.

The Pride won the NWSL’s regular season title, with Banda leading the team in goals and assists. Then Banda scored in every single playoff game–two in the first round against the Chicago Red Stars, the go-ahead goal in the semis against the KC Current, then the only goal in the championship. (Marta also did some awesome stuff, to be clear.) And then Banda was named BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year.

Now let’s get Zambia’s Copper Queens some defenders and goalkeepers. I can’t do a 9-8 loss at the 2027 World Cup.

One last climb up Dick Mountain

International sports tournaments are supposed to crown the best team in the world, but that requires the best players in the world, and, that’s sorta impossible to pull off in a baseball tournament. The best pitchers in the world are all playing in the major leagues, and their arms are extremely valuable and extremely likely to go kaboom at any moment, so they simply can’t do extra work for national pride.

MLB Dot Com used a clip showing Shohei Ohtani striking out Mike Trout in the World Baseball Classic final to explain why fans should be interested in last month’s Premier12², a tournament with a totally normal name held every four years by the World Baseball-Softball Confederation, which also has a totally normal name. But of course, neither Ohtani nor Trout was participating³: Players on MLB 40-man rosters are ineligible to play in the Premier12, although players from Japan’s NPB and Korea’s KBO powered those countries to wins in the first two tournaments in 2015 and 2019.

Since MLB players were out, the Team USA roster was split between young guys who haven’t made The Show and old guys who probably aren’t making it back. And the star was the oldest guy possible: Rich Hill, the 44-year old former Cubs, Orioles, Red Sox, Guardians, Angels, Yankees, A’s, Dodgers, Twins, Rays, Mets, Pirates, and Padres pitcher who made his MLB debut in 2005. Hill committed to playing in the Premier12 last offseason, but almost messed things up when he signed with the Red Sox in August. But he only played four games for the Red Sox before they cut him¸—great news! He was once again Team USA-eligible.

Hill was more than twice as old as some of his Team USA teammates—the youngest, Termarr Johnson, is just 20—but Hill was unhittable. He pitched 10.1 scoreless innings, “befuddling hitters with his array of mid-70s breaking balls,” and was named the best starting pitcher in the tournament. You can briefly see him going Sweaty Dad Mode on a Japanese hitter here, although Team USA would end up losing this game 9-1 due to a terrible bullpen performance.

Team USA won bronze, and Hill was named the best starting pitcher in the tournament. Japan was clearly the best team–but ended up getting silver due to the tournament’s dumb format. Japan went 8-0 in group stages, outscoring opponents by 34 runs, but the championship was decided by a single gold medal game against Taiwan, which had already lost twice to Japan and advanced to the gold medal game on a tiebreaker. Of course, the Taiwanese shut out Japan 4-0, shocking 40,000 fans at the Tokyo Dome, and winning the title–by far the biggest senior-level victory for the baseball-mad island.

Hill would clearly like to keep playing baseball, but he hasn’t been particularly effective at the MLB level in recent years. He seems genuinely chuffed by the experience of representing Team USA. And it’s hard to think of a better way to go out than a tournament where you showed that you’re the best pitcher in the world—or at least the best pitcher in a tournament involving players from all over the world.

The stormin’ Mormons

The NCAA cross country championships were dominated by speedy Mormons. (Not to be confused with the greatest interviewer of the social media era, Speedy Morman.)

I want to call attention to second-place men’s finisher Habtom Samuel from New Mexico. Back in May he won the NCAA 10,000 outdoor championship after tripping and falling with two laps to go; in the cross country race, he lost a shoe halfway through and still managed to finish just a few seconds behind Harvard’s Graham Blanks.

But there’s also a team competition, and BYU won both the men’s and women’s national championships, the first clean sweep by any school since Stanford won both in 2003⁴. I generally try to avoid stereotyping based on religion, but isn’t it OK when they’re nice stereotypes? LDS folks simply love distance running and other outdoor athletic activities. It’s how they’re they all manage to stay in shape despite washing down Crumbl Cookies with dirty sodas.

As a result, BYU cross country is a pipeline to the USA Olympic team. Six Cougar runners represented Team USA in distance running, and a seventh ran for Canada. Both American Olympic marathon men were BYU grads, including Conner Mantz, who won back-to-back individual cross country titles in 2021 and 2022. Whittni Morgan, who won the women’s individual cross country championship in 2021, was one of Team USA’s runners in the Olympic 5k. And steeplechaser James Corrigan is still in school and actually competed on the national championship-winning team⁵.

All BYU needs to do to totally dominate this sport is send a few of the guys from this year’s national championship team on missions in the Horn of Africa. If they can convert or recruit some future Olympic medalists from Kenya and Eritrea and pair them up with the American Mormon cross country machine, they’re gonna have to build bigger trophy cases in Provo.

PARKOUR!!!!

The key to being an international sports federation is Sports Colonizing. Let’s say you’re the association in charge of competitive international hopscotch. (Your organization was founded in 1907 as the Federation International du Jeu de Hopping-Écossais or FIJHE, pronounced “fy-juh” in conversations, but you rebranded to World Hopscotch in 2017.) But there’s only so much money you can generate from hopscotch, so you’re going to go out there and say that a bunch of other things are also hopscotch. You’ll host world championships in speed hopping and freestyle hopping, because hopping is such a critical element of hopscotch. And you’re going to put together a big event called the World Playground Games, featuring four-square and double dutch, and you’re going to say they’re culturally linked to hopscotch, and therefore under the auspices of World Hopscotch.

This happens all the time, sometimes with big payoffs. The FIS, the organization in charge of skiing, successfully convinced the Olympics in the 1990s that they should be in charge of snowboarding, boxing out and eventually killing off the International Snowboarding Federation. FIS gets millions every Olympic cycle featuring snowboarding; the ISF had to fold⁶.

And so, FIG—the international federation in charge of gymnastics—has begun hosting the Parkour World Championships. The FIG already controls artistic gymnastics (Simone Biles, etc.), rhythmic gymnastics (the one with the hoops and the ribbons), acrobatic gymnastics (I really like the Balancing competitions) aerobic gymnastics (yup, it’s Competitive Exercise Classes Your Aunt Did In 1983), and tumbling (like the vault, but without the vault.) Somehow, they missed out on breakdancing… but they’ve got parkour.

Is parkour gymnastics? Is parkour even a sport? Doesn’t matter, they’re doing it. The second World Champs were held in November in Japan. To be fair, the freestyle portion is pretty gymnastics-y. And can tell it’s really gymnastics because there’s a convoluted scoring system with difficulty scores for all the potential tricks.

And as Jessie pointed out in the comments, the women’s freestyle champion was Shang Chunsong—a bronze medal winner in the team gymnastics event at the 2016 Olympics.

I’m not quite as sold on the speed contest. “Trying to go as fast as possible around a purpose-constructed course” does not seem like gymnastics , since gymnastics has no other racing elements. And parkour people hate this. They’re all about chasing freedom in the stifling midst of our concrete cityscapes, and other stuff like that. And that ethos doesn’t really have anything to do with timed contests held on purpose-built courses for financial gain.

FIG already got this into the 2022 World Games, so expect it around the 2036 Olympics or so. Luckily, Team USA is getting good at this—American Audrey Johnson won the silver in the speed contest and bronze in the freestyle.

The Most Serene Boys have done it

If you’re a fan of obscure international sports, there’s a 97.3 percent chance your favorite soccer team is the national team representing San Marino, the little dot on the map that forgot to become a part of Italy when “Italy” became a thing in the 1800s. Independence means San Marino gets to do things like sign treaties, hire Flo Rida to perform at Eurovision, and play international soccer. Unfortunately, the Sanmarinese are generally considered the worst soccer team in the world. They’re rarely competitive against Andorra and other microstates—let alone countries like Germany and England who they often have to play in various continental qualification bids. They’re often considered the worst national team in the world, which is probably not strictly accurate—they’d probably beat most of the Oceania island nations, but nobody is flying Vanuatu to San Marino to settle the score and with zero wins, three draws, and 159 losses combined between FIFA and UEFA qualifying, it just feels right to call them the worst⁷.

But they’ve done it! They’ve broken through! The Sanmarinese have topped their table table in UEFA Nations League D. In September, they scored a 1-0 win at home against Liechtenstein:

But they sealed the top spot through back-to-back results: They scored a 93rd minute penalty to tie Gibraltar, preventing The Rock from getting three points. Then they came back from 1-0 against Liechtenstein to win 3-1—their first road victory ever, their first come-from-behind victory ever, and their highest-scoring game ever:

That puts them in League C, when they’ll play slightly larger countries like Armenia, Latvia and Slovakia. Will they beat those teams? That’s a question for two years from now. PLAY THE NATIONAL ANTHEM:

1. BIG matter of debate here, but broadly, the European leagues probably have the best teams, but NWSL has more parity.

2. The WBSC loves the “WordDigit” naming format, as evidenced by last month’s blurb about Baseball5.

3. Ohtani did play in the 2015 Premier12, pitching 13 scoreless innings and earning WBSC’s player of the year honors.

4. BYU came really close to doing this in 2019, winning the men’s competition and coming second in the women’s.

5. Corrigan is much better at the 3k steeplechase than the 10k cross country race–he finished sixth among BYU’s runners, and only the top five runners per team score points.

6. Other Sports Colonization superstars: the swimming organization getting water polo, World Skate being in charge of basically any event with wheels from skateboarding to scootering to roller hockey.

7. If I had to pick, I’d probably choose the Turks and Caicos, which was outscored 22-0 in three games in 2022 World Cup Qualifying, or American Samoa which lost 2-0 to a Samoan team that got outscored 16-1 in the second round of Oceania qualifying. And if you’re reading this footnote, you’ll probably enjoy the Taika Waititi-Michael Fassbender collab Next Goal Wins about the American Samoa team.