99 Friendship Episode 65

99 Friendship

I’d say I was sorry for missing you guys last week. But, well, if you’d heard what Carolyn and I actually recorded, you wouldn’t believe me.

Anyway, just to kill the suspense for you, this is not the episode where we ramble at length about the Olympic curling trials. That’ll be episode 66, which will be released in the next few days. This week’s show has some soccer in it! An episode which discussed the trials properly would have made that impossible.

Don’t worry, there’s not too much.

On episode 65 of 99 Friendship:

• The College Cup ended, like, two weeks ago. We are professionals.

  Anyway, after all this long there can’t possibly be all that much to say about it. But we try our best. Carolyn goes all the way back to the Duke – Stanford semi-final to discuss an interesting piece of strategy tactics tactrategy that both teams employed to amusing results.

• Having shut down the College Desk for another year, we roll over to the College Desk for award season. The grotesquely-named NCAA All-American teams, and the probably even-more-grotesquely-named Scholar All-Americans, were announced by various authorities, so we talk about that. Cynics will suggest that I mention the Scholar All-Americans, who have some thoroughly token Canadian content, as an excuse to make fun of the incredibly soft majors that apparently qualify athletes as “scholars” these days. This is a ridiculous thing to say.

  Maybe most importantly, the Canadian Soccer Association named its U-17 and U-20 lady players of the year. The winners were truly shocking. We discuss them at the ten minute mark and I advise that you be seated and have a stiff drink to hand.

• As indicated in the little picture we put on the podcast, Kadeisha Buchanan is Canadian soccer player of the year. Both Carolyn and I are broadly fine with this.

• This came out too late for recording, but as you might have predicted Jessie Fleming was named UCLA women’s soccer most valuable player. The UCLA Twitter shows us various award recipients coming out in various states of dress-wearing for the occasion, except Jessie, who is apparently off to maintain a database server. I think she might be over winning awards.

• At the fifteen minute mark we start talking about curling. (But not the Olympic trials, because that’s next week.) Apparently Glenn Howard is Canada now? You see, every year-ish a bunch of Brazilians from Quebec try to qualify for the World Men’s Curling Championships, and they’re in the same zone as the United States so they play the Americans for the qualifying spot and the Americans kill them. But this year the Americans are hosting the tournament in Las Vegas, so Canada is the team that has to beat Brazil to qualify, and we sent something like our twelfth-best men’s team, Glenn Howard, to London, Ontario to do it. I want to make it clear that not a single word in that sentence is made up.

• Also, Michelle Englot is now Canada, at least at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts. If you remember Michelle Englot from doing a Rocky Balboa-versus-Apollo-Creed with Rachel Homan at last year’s Scotties, you should know that she has really really really not been playing that well at all.

• Last, but not at all least, Jeff Stoughton named the teams that will compete for Canada in the Canadian mixed doubles trials, or as I prefer to call it in spite of the fact that it’s not sponsor, the Tim Horton’s Double-Double. Because not all the top mixed dubz players are available on account of winning real trials (omg spoiler), some of these teams get pretty funny. But not enough of them.

Stay tuned for the upcoming all-Olympic-Trials-retrospective episode that’s entirely me screaming at that Kevin Koe draw attempt.