Labor woes in the Twitter era
A GRIP ON SPORTS
It was a pretty slow Friday – unless you happen to be an Arena football fan. Then it got real exciting, real quick in the early afternoon. But the Spokane Shock don't play until Monday evening and the labor troubles that boiled over yesterday already seem to be getting resolved. Maybe it was good for Spokane to play the final game of the first weekend. Read on.
••••••••••
• The AFL news yesterday was interesting in a lot of respects – we have more on the Shock section below – but none more so than the idea a team, in this case Pittsburgh, could be fired during pregame meal. Which brings up the question. Did they get to finish? Or did they have to leave the room right away? But it's probably not a good idea to joke about such things, in that the players in this league do put their bodies on the line each week for very little in the way of renumeration. And the owners are trying to revive a league that went out of business once due to out-of-control costs.
•••
• Washington State: The Cougar women stayed with California until the second half yesterday, but a log stretch without scoring sealed their fate in a 64-49 loss. We have this story in the S-R, the Seattle Times has this story, there is this piece from the San Jose Mercury News and Christian Caple has more in his usual morning blog post. ... BYU moved on to the hitting phase of spring practice and tempers flared. ... ESPN.com's Ted Miller has his Friday mailbag. ... There is an interesting feature from the LA Times on UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero, whose background is a bit different than most ADs'.
• Whitworth: The Bucs traveled to Wisconsin to play a team from Virginia and, as Jim Allen's story relates, still couldn't get a call at the end of the game. Seems to be the consensus – other than from the Virginia Wesleyan coach – the jump-ball call near the end of the game came on a real quick whistle. The final result in the NCAA Division III Sweet Sixteen game? Whitworth lost 74-71.
• Idaho: The Vandal women's season came to a close with an 80-55 loss to top-seed Fresno State at the WAC tournament.
• Eastern Washington: We were able to find more on the Eagles enticing another SMU quarterback to transfer in.
• Shock: Jim Meehan was on top of the Arena Football League strike news from the beginning, tweeting about player firings and such. All that he found out is contained in this story in today's S-R along with Jim's blog post from last night. Though it looks as if the games are going on – and will be going on – the war of words continue. And it might be the first negotiations in professional sports history that are being played out on Twitter. The players union executive director Ivan Soto (@Luv2nvst) is all over the medium this morning telling the union's side of the story. Pretty interesting stuff.
• Chiefs: Tri-Cities came to town last night and though Spokane dominated the game, the Ams took the 4-2 win. Jess Brown has all the details. ... Here's another story from the Tri-City Herald.
• Preps: Washington's coaches are coming together to fight a rules change for offseason football.
• Mariners: Adam Moore got some good news that might turn out to be, in a way, bad news. The M's catcher found out he may not have a broken bone in his right hand after, it's not going to be put in a cast right now and, here's the bad news, he still can catch in the bullpen. ... Said bullpen is trying to add depth.
• Sounders: Though the MLS kicks off its season this weekend, the Sounders and coach Sigi Schmid aren't part of the festivities.
•••
• That's what we have this morning. We'll see you tomorrow when we'll have some information on the S-R's weekly news quiz. One of the prizes next week: Tickets to the NCAA women's tournament at Gonzaga. Until then ...
