Sports
Parker Thompson takes his first win in the Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge USA
Thompson Earns His First Sports Car Win in a Wet and Wild Weekend at Mid-Ohio
MID-OHIO SPORTS CAR COURSE, LEXINGTON, OHIO
In a weekend mired in rain and cool temperatures, Parker Thompson navigated treacherous conditions to win his first sports car race in Race 3 of the 2019 Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge USA at Mid-Ohio. For Race 4, the second of two races at the Acura Sport Car Challenge at Mid-Ohio, Thompson finished 2nd. That result put him on the podium four times in four races to kick off his career in sports cars.
Weather was a big factor for official practice sessions on Friday, where many cars did not even venture out on track. Thompson however, showed promising pace in the #3 JDX Racing / Hertz / Byers Porsche, eclipsing the fastest lap time of his competitors by nearly 3 seconds.
With wet conditions continuing into Saturdays qualifying session, there were high expectations for Thompson. Multiple incidents on track however, ended the session with no timed laps completed. As a result, the starting order for Race 3 was determined by driver championship points standings. Thompson would start in third position, on the inside of the second row.
In steady rain, Thompson cleanly piloted the #3 car past championship contenders Riley Dickinson and Roman DeAngelis, before pacing away from the pack. In an incident filled race, with eleven out of 22 laps driven under a yellow flag, all except for five cars would fall a lap down to Thompson. In only his third race in the car, Thompson showed a dominant victory and solidified the fact that he is a contender for the overall championship.
With clearer conditions on Sunday, Race 4 began with Thompson on pole position, and championship leader Roman DeAngelis immediately behind him on the second row. The two Canadian drivers battled hard for ten laps before DeAngelis squeezed by to take the lead position. Thompson held second for the remainder of the race. Four races into the 2019 Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge USA season, and Thompson’s sports car career, he has found the podium in each of four races.
“The results this weekend are truly exciting. With the help of Hertz and Byers Porsche, the JDX Racing crew has put together a great race car. While I was happy with my pace right from the start of the season, there is still room for improvement. This weekend was a great indicator of progress, and a sure sign that we can contend for the overall championship. I’m honoured to work with a great team of people, and so excited for what the future holds.” – Parker Thompson
Now sitting second in the Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge USA championship standings, Thompson finds himself vying for two unique racing championships. He is the current championship leader in Indy Pro 2000,where he will be competing May 10th –12th at the Grand Prix of Indianapolis. ThePorsche GT3 Cup Challenge USA season resumes June7th at the Montreal F1 Grand Prix.
Sports
Priming The NHL Coaching Carousel For Another Spin
“The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.” Carl Jung
We are about a month into the endless 2024-25 NHL schedule. There are good surprises. Winnipeg and Calgary are better than thought. There are bad surprises. Cup finalists in spring, Edmonton is 3-4-1. Vexing Toronto is at a mediocre 4-4-1.
It’s early. But not so early that several coaches are not feeling the heat already. We can expect that heads will soon roll if certain teams don’t find their mojo. It’s a sad but predictable result of a salary cap league where the most disposable item is a coach. As we wrote in May, don’t shed too many tears for the deposed coaches. Salvation is just a turn of the wheel away.
As long as you’re willing to re-locate frequently the job of NHL head coach has a fair degree of job security. Even when you get fired it seems there’s a ready appetite in some other town for a skill set you have just failed at.
Latest evidence that failure has an I and U in it: Having canned Sheldon Keefe after a lengthy (note: sarcasm) five years at the helm of the Toronto Maple Leafs, club management scoured the bushes to find former player Craig “Chief” Berube, who has previously hung his coaching shingle in Philadelphia and St. Louis, where he won a Stanley Cup as an interim coach.
Chief wasn’t the glamour name (we were praying for Bruce Boudreau.). If the idea is how do the Leafs motivate their four mega-millionaires, he’s more like Mike Babcock than Sheldon Keefe. He won’t look at players’ cell phones, but he will give them that old-time religion. Knowing Chief from his Calgary days we’d say he can probably take the Toronto fishbowl.
(For those with long Leafs’ memories Berube was part of a famous trade in 1992 to which we devote an entire chapter in our new book Deal With It. He went west to Calgary while Doug Gilmour headed east to Toronto in the massive 10-man trade. While the Leafs “won” the trade, only the maligned Gary Leeman and journeyman Jamie Macoun won Cups– for teams other than Calgary and Toronto.)
But we digress. Sometimes it seems that NHL teams would rather lose with a known commodity than win with someone bold and unconventional behind the bench. While almost 30 percent of NHL players are European there have only been two European heads coaches, none in the past 20 years. Why? NHL owners are risk averse. And the league is a fraternity of forgiveness for guys you played junior with.
A brief ramble through the 2023-24 coaching roster shows several peripatetic bench bosses, led by the inimitable John Tortorella, who wore out his welcome in Vancouver, Tampa Bay, NY Rangers and Columbus before Philly curiously decided he had something left to offer. Let’s also not forget Lindy Ruff, who was pink slipped in Buffalo, Dallas, New Jersey and the NY Rangers— and now has been resurrected in Buffalo as a “fresh voice”.
Some retreads are getting results. Peter Laviolette got the Rangers into the third-round of the 2024 postseason, after gigs in Carolina, Philadelphia, Nashville, Washington (pause for breath) and the NY Islanders. Paul Maurice, who guided Florida to the Cup, has had two stints with Carolina, plus Toronto and Winnipeg. Peter DeBoer, whose Dallas Stars were odd-on faves to with the 2024 Cup, has also coached Florida, San Jose, New Jersey and Vegas.
You want more? Rick Tocchet was head coach in Arizona and Tampa Bay before getting the perch in Vancouver. Travis Green, newly hired in Ottawa, has previously been found wanting in Vancouver and New Jersey. We could go on.
The king of the coach-for-life carousel is the just-retired Rick Bowness who finally called it a day in Winnipeg after the Jets were eliminated this spring. How long has Bones been knocking around? He was the coach of the expansion Ottawa Senators in 1992, one the worst five teams ever by NHL standards. Wonderful man who also spent stints as an assistant in cities in 30-plus years around the continent.
There are more. Sitting in the green room, polishing their pregame speeches are the well- travelled Boudreau, Dallas Eakins, Gerard Gallant, Todd McLellan, Claude Julien and Mike Yeo. Heaven forbid someone might still ask one of the Sutters to saddle up again. Brian (St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, Calgary), Darryl (Calgary, L.A., Anaheim, San Jose and Calgary again) and Brent (Calgary, New Jersey) have been perennial NHL coaching prospects for decades.
So take, heart, Sheldon Keefe. Joining Keefe in looking for a rebound job are Scott Arniel, Jeff Blashill, Jeremy Colliton, Kevin Dineen, Phil Housley, Kirk Muller, Davis Payne, Todd Reirden, Joe Sacco, Brad Shaw, Geoff Ward and Trent Yawney. Good company. [UPDATE: Sheldon didn’t have to wait long. The NJ Devils signed him as their new coach.]
Don’t cry too hard for these coaching candidates. Unless they have years left on contract (Keefe had two) most wait out the time between head-coaching stints by accepting assistant-coach positions. The ranks of assistants contain a second tier of talent, also ready to go at a moment’s notice.
There are a scant few who’ve hung on in one town. Jon Cooper has been in Tampa since 2013, a Methuselah stint in today’s terms. Rod Brind’Amour has managed to avoid the chop in Carolina since 2018. But the reality is that, since the start off the 2023-24 season alone, there have been 13 head-coaching changes in the NHL. Go back to January of 2023, and 19 of the league’s 32 teams have changed coaches.
Which brings us back to the original idea: “Is there no one in international hockey who knows anything?” We won’t profess to be coaching talent scouts, but the idea that no one working outside North America can meet the job description better than some— if not most—of the coaches mentioned above beggars the imagination.
One final note: If you’re looking for an explanation of the coaching carousel and its recent frequency, look no further than Gary Bettman and his salary cap obsession. By forcing a hard cap on teams he’s concentrated the money— and the power— on a few players per team. When a coach is pitted against his stars it’s a no-win proposition.
The Leafs stars used their power to get Babcock fired. And it’s been repeated on other teams. While Keefe didn’t lose his Core Four he also couldn’t get them to win in the postseason. For that he got the chop— and a premium place in the next coaching carousel.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Sports
Hundreds of women golfers call on LPGA to ban ‘transgender’ male player, protect women’s sports
From LifeSiteNews
275 female golfers are demanding that the LPGA and other governing bodies of golf revoke policies that allow men to compete in women’s golf events and protect female golfers’ right to compete only against ‘members of the female sex.’
Hundreds of women golfers have signed a letter calling for a “transgender” player – a male claiming to be a female – to be removed from Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) competitions.
The August 19 letter, signed by 275 female golfers expressing their concerns over a gender-confused male competing in women’s golf to the LPGA, was also sent to the United States Golf Association (USGA) and the International Golf Federation (IGF).
While self-professed “transgender” golfer “Hailey” Davidson comports with the LPGA’s current pro-transgender qualifying guidelines, hundreds of women in the LPGA’s ranks have stepped forward to object to him competing in their professional sport.
The letter makes two demands of the LPGA and the other governing organizations in the world of professional golf: “Repeal all policies and rules that allow male golfers to participate in women’s golf events” and “establish and enforce the right of female professional golfers to participate in women’s golf based on sex-eligibilty [which] must be limited to members of the female sex.”
Lauren Miller, who has competed against Davidson and is leading the charge against males competing in her sport, spoke out in a recent interview with OutKick’s Dan Dakich.
“There is no world where I ever thought this would be the case,” Miller told Dakich. “I’ve been talking to my parents about it, and they can’t believe they have a daughter who is having to go through this. It’s truly shocking to realize kind of where we are today and that this is the state of the world.”
Miller said in another interview published by Independent Women’s Forum, Davidson “would hit the ball 10 or 20 yards past me, and sometimes 50 to 60 yards past me.” She added that “distance is one advantage… but there’s a lot more to it than that.”
She also noted there was also the question of “superior upper body strength,” which can give “greater clubhead speed, and allows the ball to come out higher and with more spin,” according to a Newsweek report.
“We all know there can be no equal athletic opportunity for women without a separate female golf category. Yet, the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) continues to propagate a policy that allows male athletes to qualify, compete and win in women’s golf, even as several national and international governing bodies of sport and state legislatures increasingly reject these unjust and inequitable policies that harm female athletes,” states the letter, reviewed by OutKick.
LPGA policy does not explicitly state eligibility based on sex. It is essential for the integrity and fairness of women’s golf to have a clear and consistent participation policy in place based on a player’s immutable sex. There are differences between the sexes—female and male—that specifically affect our sport of golf.
The male advantage in driving the ball is estimated around a 30% performance advantage; this is an enormous difference in the context of sport. Anatomical differences between males and females affect clubhead speed and regulating consistency at ball contact.
Females have higher mean heart rates and encounter greater physiological demands while playing, especially at high altitudes. The anatomical differences are not removed with male testosterone suppression. There is no way to turn a male into a female. Being female is not equated to being male with a reduction in strength.
“Someone needs to do an investigation into the LPGA — and all other sports organizations that are allowing men to play women’s sports,” Family Research Council’s Mary Szoch told The Washington Stand.
“They must be receiving massive amounts of funds from somewhere,” Szoch added. “Why else would a sports organization [repeatedly] destroy fair play and jeopardize the safety of women?”
“We cannot give up the fight for women’s sports,” said Szoch because, “doing so would be giving up on truth — something that our society cannot function without.”
The LPGA needs to “immediately change their policy. Second place to a man isn’t good enough for women in sports,” insisted Szoch.
Davidson, who was born in Scotland but now lives in Florida, played college golf on the men’s team at Virginia’s Christopher Newport University.
In 2015, he began hormone drugs and had transgender surgery in 2021, a requirement to compete under the LPGA’s gender policy, according to Golfweek.
“We have to protect young girls and their opportunities and their dreams,” said Miller.
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