• The Northern AAA Subway Selects female midget hockey team might not win another provincial championship this weekend, but they probably will.
They’re up two games to none in a best-of-five Nova Scotia championship series against a team from Metro and need just one more win to make a trip Atlantics for the third straight year.
The Midget AAAs won Atlantics a year ago and went on to the ESSO Cup, where they played well and didn’t get embarrassed on the national stage.
It’s been said before, but bears repeating: the female hockey program in Pictou County is the envy of many regions in Atlantic Canada, after more than a decade of careful nurturing.
Good coaching, sound organizational structure and good players lead to success, and success breeds even more success.
• Apparently, because our prime minister wants to please everybody, those pushing for a football stadium in HRM are formally going to begin lobbying the federal government for money to help finance the home of the Atlantic Schooners, the proposed Canadian Football League franchise that hopes to start playing in 2020.
When you have a health care system in Nova Scotia that’s struggling to find cash, it’s understandable that there would be fierce opposition to taxpayers funding a sports facility that will cost close to $200 million – if not more – so it would be unreasonable to expect the province to pay for the whole thing.
A CFL team in Halifax Regional Municipality would give us a reason to go there, other than for the occasional concert or shopping trip.
Picture it: you and your buddies get dropped off at the game, the wives go shopping and to a wine-tasting event for a few hours, if they aren’t into football (maybe they are, some women love it).
You and your friends spend too long at the tailgate party, the wives are buzzed on wine, everyone’s drunk and you have to get taxis to the motel rooms, which you now have to splurge for. That’s solid money going right into the HRM economy (the only thing I know about economics is the spelling of the word).
How they make it happen is not my concern, they just need to get this stadium thing done so we can have professional football in Nova Scotia.
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Non-Sports Thought of the Week:
• I see that some radio stations around the planet have banned Michael Jackson from their playlists after the controversial ‘Leaving Neverland’ documentary aired last month.
I’m not even a fan of his music, but when he’s actually proven guilty of child molestation in a court of law – which will never happen – that’s the point you consider shutting down his music for good.
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Other Random Sports Thoughts:
• This is going to sound delusional, at least to those who aren’t paying attention to what’s been going on, but don’t be completely surprised if the Cleveland Browns are playing in the Super Bowl next February.
For real.
• You know things are going bad for the Toronto Maple Leafs when fans start longing for the return of Jake Gardiner.
• Not only does the girls basketball team at West Pictou have a name that sounds cool when you say it (the West Pictou Wolverines), they also won the elementary school district championship a couple weeks ago with a gutsy come-from-behind win.
As you might find elsewhere in these pages, the Wolverines trailed the A.G. Baillie Bears by 17 points at half-time and never held a lead at any point in the game until there were two seconds left on the clock, which is (almost) the perfect time to hit the go-ahead basket.
Kevin Adshade is a writer with The News. His column appears each week.
