Relevant Article

Deadlines are not friendly to headline writers. Current events can impart unintended meaning and emotions to an unlucky choice of words.

The Yale Alumni Magazine (YAM) cover story is a cheery one.

The women's ice hockey team made it to the NCAA Final Four ("Frozen Four"), where the Bulldogs lost to the eventual champion, Ohio State, 2-1.

Speaking of current events, YAM also has a relevant article on research into the effect of trauma on children's brains.

Children who have endured chronic stress, such as living in a violent neighborhood or within an unstable home life, tend to have thick branches near the brain’s alarm system (the amygdala) and weaker ones near its off switches (the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex). The alarm system blares and there’s nothing to stop it...

(Wiley Online Library)

For children who have endured severe trauma, one option is Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT). Dylan Gee is involved in a study designed to assess TF-CBT. Previous studies have shown that it works very well for about half to two-thirds of those who go through it, but less well for others. Her goal is to figure out which children are most likely to benefit from TF-CBT and what might improve the process for those who don’t.

Gee is assessing volunteers, aged 10 to 17, before and after therapy. The theory is that the reason many children show fewer symptoms of trauma after TF-CBT is because the therapy strengthened their regulatory centers. In other words, the children have better control over their brain’s alarm center than they had before.

Children exposed to traumatic events, especially those involving extreme violence, will, of course, need therapy ("TF-CBT").

The Yale study indicates that physical intervention in the development of children's brains at the cellular level is also necessary to right the ship.

Although we are years, if not decades, away from devising the methodology, at least we know the direction in which we're headed.

I Went to a Fight Tahoe the Other Night and a Hockey Game Broke Out

Vegas and Colorado practiced on Saturday (Guardian photo)

Making Lemonade Dept:
The pandemic has afforded a unique opportunity for the National Hockey League to stage outdoor hockey games in venues that could not accommodate thousands of fans. This weekend the NHL scheduled two games at Lake Tahoe.

The Edgewood Tahoe Resort will become its own bubble. Only those credentialed will be permitted through the gates.

Everyone will be tested and adhere to strict protocols. Teams and staff members will not be permitted to leave the grounds during their stay...

The NHL will build everything needed for an NHL game but, by design, little else. It will create locker rooms that feel like wooden cabins; the players will shower at the hotel. The scoreboard will be retro.

While most of us want to go back to the way things were just before COVID-19, the coronavirus has reminded us that the back-to-basics life can be beautiful.

Journalist in the Wings

Little Peyton Burns interviews NHL All Stars, including her Dad Brent Burns:

Peak Bay Area Sports

Signing autographs at Lefty's in 2012.

Our young Giants fan got his autograph in 2012.

We watched him hit his first grand slam home run in 2014. (He hit two in 2014, more grand slams than Yankee future Hall-of-Fame shortstop Derek Jeter hit in his entire career.)

Before last night's Wild Card single-elimination game against the Mets, Madison Bumgarner was already one of the best postseason pitchers in baseball history.

After he completed the shut out against the Mets, baseball observers could only marvel:

Bumgarner showed again that he absolutely owns the postseason. This four-hitter was not even his first in a wild-card game; he also did it in 2014 in Pittsburgh....In his last nine postseason games, Bumgarner is 6-0 with a 0.79 E.R.A., and that very big [five-inning save against the Royals in Game 7 of the 2014 World Series].

With the Warriors and Sharks about to begin a season where both teams are expected to be championship contenders, with the Giants entering a playoff run, and with all-time great players like Madison Bumgarner and Stephen Curry playing for home teams, Bay Area sports fans have never had more to look forward to (and please, don't let's talk about the 49ers).

An Exciting Winter

A few months ago we noted how Bay Area fans are lucky to have contending teams in all major professional sports. We're doubly lucky in that the teams have exciting young players whose talents have attracted national attention: Giants catcher Buster Posey, Warriors shooting guard Stephen Curry, and 49ers running quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

From seemingly nowhere (actually, the Czech Republic) now comes 19-year-old rookie forward Tomas Hertl to lead not only the undefeated San Jose Sharks but also the entire National Hockey League in scoring in the young season. But what got everyone talking was his four-goal night, the last being a spectacular between-the-legs shot that flummoxed the Rangers goalie.



It's going to be an exciting winter.

Not Easily Replicable

The 49ers' Stadium will open in 2014

When people think of sports towns, the San Francisco Bay Area is not the first metropolis that comes to mind. However, the simultaneous success of its franchises in the four major professional sports is a rare occurrence that may change that impression. The Warriors and Sharks have rightly captured all the recent headlines because of their basketball and hockey playoff runs, and the Giants and Athletics are fielding competitive teams in a still-young baseball season.

Sketch of the Warriors' new arena

Earlier today the 49ers briefly knocked the other teams off the local front page when the Bay Area was awarded Super Bowl L (that's number 50 for the Roman innumerate), which will kick off in February, 2016. The bid would not have been successful if the new Santa Clara Stadium had not been on track for completion in 2014. And the $1.2 billion project would probably not have even started without the 49ers' seemingly miraculous turnaround in 2011 and 2012.

AT&T Park is comparatively austere

Not to be left out of the party, the Warriors announced last year that they will be moving back to San Francisco and constructing a waterfront arena that will cost $875 to $975 million. While such an expense at one time seemed mind-bogglingly risky, investors were comforted by the decade-long success of the $358 million Giants' AT&T Park and the successful trajectory of the Santa Clara 49ers stadium construction.

It was a moribund sports backwater a few years ago, but the Bay Area will shortly be home to one of the top two or three stadia in each of the professional sports. Like Silicon Valley, the reasons are explainable---a virtuous circle of wealth, entrepreneurial risk-taking, technology, talent, and, of course, capable organizations---but they are not easily replicable. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

The Excitement is Justified

The never-ceasing din of 24/7 sports has led some to plea for an off-season for fans. The worst transgressor is football, formerly a September-December activity (or November---in postwar Hawaii the king of sports was high school football, which ended the day after Thanksgiving). Now NFL fans can get their fix throughout the year, from the draft to minicamp to pre-season to the regular season, playoffs, and Super Bowl, after which the cycle starts all over. The cacophony never ceases as basketball, baseball, hockey, racing, golf, and tennis, as well as biennial to quadrennial events such as the America's Cup and the Olympics blare for attention.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, however, the current year-round excitement is justified. Both the hockey (San Jose Sharks) and the basketball (Golden State Warriors) teams have overachieved by making the playoffs and defeated favored opponents in the first round. The San Francisco Giants have won two of the last three World Series, while the Oakland Athletics surprised everyone by winning the American League West Division in 2012. The San Francisco 49ers lost to the Ravens in the Super Bowl and are one of the early favorites to win it next year. Only the long-suffering fans of the Oakland Raiders have nothing to look forward to.

FYI, per Wikipedia's entry on Multiple Major Sports Championship Seasons the most recent metropolitan areas to be home to two champions were Boston in 2004 (Red Sox and Patriots) and Los Angeles in 2002 (Angels and Lakers). Only once--Detroit in 1935--did three champions (Tigers, Lions, Red Wings) hail from the same city.

Videogame on Ice

Yesterday we deposited the college student at San Jose International for his return to San Diego and headed for HP Pavilion to attend our first and probably only NHL hockey game of the season. The Sharks are a Stanley Cup contender, and the tickets were expensive. (I rationalized the purchase at a charity auction in September—and no, I can’t claim the tax deduction because I received value, i.e., the tickets, in return.)

Because we had some latitude in choosing which game we would see, and because the youngster is an avid Sharks fan---he occasionally wears the jersey to school, we selected last night’s contest because the Sharks had a good chance of prevailing. The Columbus Blue Jackets were a sub-.500 team, and we weren’t disappointed. The Sharks won, 5-2, with all goals being scored on power plays (when a team is a man short due to penalties).

In a professional hockey game, it’s easy to experience sensory overload. The action is non-stop, and one has to shout at seat-mates in order to make oneself heard over the arena music and noise. The puck quickly moves from one end of the ice to the other, and with twelve players whirling like dervishes (between fistfights), NHL hockey resembles the final round of the old Asteroids videogame in which asteroid chunks are flying all over the screen.

The youngster and his friend were wide awake through the end of the game, although it was 10:30, an hour past their normal bedtime. Well, they’re still on winter break, and school, discipline, and New Year’s resolutions—theirs and ours—can wait until next week. © 2007 Stephen Yuen

The goalie blocked this shot, but the Sharks scored a few seconds later.

[Note: I saw my first professional hockey game in 2004.]