Something terrible is about to happen to football. The Lingerie Football League is inaugurating its 2012 “all-fantasy” tour schedule with some kind of filthy pay-per-view event in Mexico City. Don’t act too relieved, however. My sources tell me at some point in the near future, this roving horror show will be returning to our illustrious shores, and for the third year in a row, it will be bringing new expansion teams with it.
OK, Timbers fans. You can release that breath you’ve been holding in. After a full month of consecutive losses, the Timbers, in their sophomore season in Major League Soccer, finally scraped together a win. Though they still find themselves in the basement of the Western Conference, Timbers fans can start thinking positively about the season again.
You might have noticed a new banner is decorating the front page of Portland State’s website. It’s a an advertisement for 2012’s incarnation of the Bike to PSU challenge, an event that runs the course of May and includes numerous events aimed to get students to give up their cars and commute to school by bike.
After a season of ups and downs, the women’s golf team is coming to the end of their 2011–12 campaign. This weekend they will travel to Chandler, Ariz., to compete against eight other teams in the Big Sky Conference Championship. The Vikings come to the championship after a year of mixed results. Before last week, the team hadn’t walked away from a tournament with better than an eighth-place finish since September. They are the defending champions, however, and junior Britney Yada is the defending individual champion.
You might be tempted to write the Viking tennis teams off after this season’s results. The women went 4-15 and the men 2-17, with a total of one conference win for the year. It would be a mistake to underestimate them, though. Things may not have looked so sunny from the outside, but the match-side tale tells a different story. These teams are more than capable of coming back next year and reversing their 2012 results.
It’s only been a few months since Portland State football wrapped up its 2011 campaign, but the Vikings are already revving back up for 2012. The team got a chance to shake out the winter cobwebs last week, as they opened their spring practices. Senior running back Justin Monahan was just happy to be back in uniform.
Have you ever noticed women’s sports at PSU have a lot more variety? It isn’t your imagination. Men and women share most sports but there are a few exceptions. Women get softball, soccer, golf and volleyball. On the other hand, men get football.
Hockey may not be the first sport fans associate with Portland, but the Winterhawks are quietly making a case for themselves as Portland’s most successful sporting franchise. While the Timbers have stumbled out of the gate and the Blazers sink into mid-table mediocrity, the Winterhawks are looking to make what is becoming an annual deep run into the playoffs.
Every weekend, the Willamette River is filled with boaters who come out to enjoy the spring weather. Portland State’s Green Dragons club has gotten into the swing of the tradition too, offering students a chance to try the unique sport of dragon boat racing out for themselves.
Portland State has hosted some incredible athletes recently. Women’s golf phenom Britney Yada, for instance, led the Vikings to two conference championships before her junior year, ranked in the Big Sky All-Conference first team and took home a medal from last year’s conference championship. Men’s tennis player Chris Rice was the first Viking in Portland State history to get selected to the first team in the Big Sky Conference. And this year, the university has hosted two of the best sprinters in its history, both of whom smashed conference records: Geronne Black and Karene King.
Since taking over the position in 2010, head football coach Nigel Burton has worked to build the Vikings, who had been in a half-decade long slump, into a competetive force in the Big Sky Conference. Late last month another piece to the puzzle was added when the Vikings named former University of Alabama assistant defensive coach Lester Towns as their new linebackers coach.