Just because you can watch some type of competitive activity on ESPN does not mean that what you are watching is a SPORT.

ESPN, for those of you who either don’t know, or forget, stands for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. They can get away with showing the "World Series of Poker", for example, because it would fall into the Entertainment category. But it does NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT, fall into the Sports category.

In a sports section, such as this, we will not cover Poker, because it is not a sport.

I may have gone over some of this stuff before, but I’ll do it again mainly because I am having memory problems over the last year and I may just need to recall something myself here.

Horseracing is not a sport. It is entertaining, but jockeys are not athletes. They are short little dudes who sit on the horsey and go "giddy up horsey" while smacking the horsey with a whip. This just does not compare with running a mile on ones own two feet. It does not even compare with bowling, which is also not a sport. Bowling is a game, like golf and tiddlywinks. All of them take some practice to master and people can certainly compete in them, but they are not sports.
I can get away with putting Bowling and Disc Golf (also a non-sport) into the Diamond State Games because they are GAMES.

NASCAR is not a sport. If the drivers were to run around the track for 500 miles, it would be a sport, but they DRIVE around for 500 miles, therefore it is not a sport.
Professional wrestling as in the WWE, is not a sport. It is fake. Sorry to burst some bubbles out there, but it is fake and even these days the performers themselves admit that they are performers. Now, if each match weren’t choreographed, it would be a sport, but as it is, can not be one.

Showing dogs is not a sport. While many people care about the Westminster Kennel Club's dog show of the year, or whatever it is called, it is NOT A SPORT!

Well now that those things are off of my chest I’d like to say hello to everyone and hope that the summer is going well so far for you.

For me, everything is relatively calm now. I won’t rehash the DSG since the results are on the site other than to say that we drew over 2200 competitors to this year’s event. Most of them were actually athletes. And most of them went unnoticed since people now like to cover poker, horseracing, and golf as "sports". Meanwhile we had a six-time world champion from Brazil come to our Submission Grappling event out of the clear blue. Robson Moura is the guys’ name who has now opened a studio in Hockessin. Moura is about 135 pounds and I watched him make a heavyweight submit in less than 15 seconds. He only stuck around for two matches since he was tuning up for the world championships in Japan to defend his title. In both matches combined he spent 30 seconds on the mat. Not much of a tune-up, but what kind of competition is he going to find that can help him improve?

We are going to run a few more Sub-G matches during the course of the year. Our next one will be either 11-5 or 11-12 depending on how successful I am getting a facility.
At that particular event, two former St. Marks wrestlers won gold medals – Justin Jackson and Brian Collins. Collins was competing in his first event and Jackson was in the Advanced competition.
I did say that I wasn’t going to rehash stuff didn’t I? Oh well, there is that memory problem again.

I have never heard more complaints about local sport coverage than I have over the past two months. My answer is just to say that people can send information here and I’ll happily post it. I don’t have a staff of 12 people to cover anything so it’s a little tricky for me. I think that during the year, however, I do a decent job with the limited resources here. If only someone would back us financially the sky would be the limit. But…no one wants to put their money where their mouths are. I had three conversations in June alone with people who were complaining about coverage who were all millionaires. I asked all three to back me in a project that would help bring the type of coverage they were looking for to hundreds of thousands of information starved local sports fans, but as soon as the request came out of my mouth…all three times…the subject changed. Funny how that is, isn’t it?

The other frustrating thing for me is watching 50 other websites launch that all try to cover something about local sports. None of them will ever make money and therefore all will eventually shut down and its simply because there needs to be a central and large spot for it all.

Everyone who starts a site thinks that they can do it better than the next guy who thinks he can do it better than the guy before him who thinks he can do it better than ME, who was FIRST with a local sports site in Delaware. I beat everyone to the punch yet despite begging people to help along the way in a way that would have been competitive in many ways – even financially – they all had to try to blaze a trail that was already blazed. Very frustrating stuff yet I will stay around forever because I am stupid that way. Readers will come and go and then come and go and then come and go again, but I will stay here and keep this site up and running until the time someone wants to buy it all from me. I’ve had two halfway decent offers but since they were only halfway decent, NO SALE.

Anyone else notice that there were 23 girls on the first-team All-Henlopen softball conference? Huh? Need I expand about that lunacy any further? No…I’ve complained far too much already in this section and I won’t do it unless I forget not to in a few paragraphs from now.

Two great kids were named the Delaware Sports Athletes of the Year this year, as you have no doubt noticed if you got this far on the website. Sarah Williams was as close to a unanimous choice as there has been in the 8 years that the award has now been given. She has been a star at Ursuline in two sports for all four years and she will no doubt also excel at Richmond, where she will play basketball this winter.
Blair Newman from Caesar Rodney was one of the few male athletes to win first-team all-state honors in two sports that were not related – baseball and football. He is headed to Delaware to play football after some heavy decision making choosing between the two sports. He also had an offer to play baseball at DE State, as an example.

Both athletes were surprised that they were winners of the award. That is the ultimate goal for me – surprising the winner. Only once out the 16 presentations has someone suspected that the award was coming and that was Alison Stewart from Mt. Pleasant. Leave it to a group of administrators to botch a secret.

Am I making any sense at all? Do I write the same thing every time I write something in here?

Let me thank some people and places off the top of my head for helping make the DSG a success this year. I know I will forget some people (see memory troubles above) so please forgive me when I do so.
I’ll just make a list…
Caravel Academy, the Kirkwood Soccer Club, Joe Mills, St. Elizabeth’s High School, Joe Hemphill, Tom Beddow, Cape Henlopen State Park, Joyce LaFemina, Red Clay School District, Steve Kuhls, Tim Wampler, Harry James and his sons, Joanne Hunt, Katie Cramer, Gary Stewart, Joe Archangelo, Heather Archangelo, Kevin Kelly, Bill Yelsh, Cindy Deprisco, John Deprisco and all the other Deprisco’s running around out there, Steve Lenderman, Sheila DiNardo, Drew Holtz, Bob Smith, Michael Kennedy, Wayne Kursh, Kelly Parsley, Michelle Campbell, the Trenton Track Club, Rob Campbell, Andrew Smith, Brian McLaughlin, red number 40, Artificial Reason, Trail of Temper, The Control Freaks, All Your Might, Semiblind, Kristen DeMesse, the Delaware Griffins, Val Whiting, Dave Tiberi, Ashley Fletcher, Sheena Benton, Ralph McKinney, Brad Lane, Dave Gertler, and Brian Fraticelli.
Also Michelle Garvey, Blue Diamond Park, Rich Thomas, Jim Soutar, Jesse Parsley, all of the referees including coordinators Ross Thomas, Holly Groff, Robert Schweitzer, Tom Fort and the Delaware Sports Club, Vic Leonard, the over 100 volunteers who never even let us know who they were (what a phenomenon that was this year) and of course the most dangerous volunteer in Delaware, Mr. Dee Meyer.

I know that list only scratches the surface but I can add more names later as they come to me.

I have finally rested up after this year’s DSG and have felt like writing some more finally. But don’t get spoiled now and think that tomorrow or next week some more new brilliance will fill this space. Genius cannot simply be rushed like that…BAHAHAHA.