2017 Season - National Perspective

[1970s NESCAC Player]

I'm more interested in the fact that this Final Four includes two schools that are located in the same town. I strongly doubt that any NCAA championship in any sport has ever had that happen in a Final Four. I certainly can't think of one.

BC and BU were in the D-1 Frozen Four (along with Wisconsin and Colgate).  Also, Yale and Quinnipiac, who met in the 2013 final, are only eight miles apart, which is closer than NP is to UC.

That's a good try, Buck O., but both attempts hit the post. Boston College isn't in Boston; it's in Chestnut Hill, a suburb of Boston, while Boston University is in the city itself.

I'd like to check with the VAR, because I think my first attempt hit the post ... and went in!  Chestnut Hill is not a suburb of Boston.  Part of it is in Newton, part is in Brookline, and part is in Boston.

My recollection, from when I used to drive around that area more often than I do now, is that the Boston-Newton town line more or less bisects BC's main campus, so that the eastern half is in Boston and the western half is in Newton.  And Google Maps seems to back that up.  (Type "Boston" or "Newton" into Google Maps and see where the boundary line falls.)

I very much support your cause Buck, but I grew up in Newton, and we always considered BC to be in Newton.

[Gregory Sager]

I'm more interested in the fact that this Final Four includes two schools that are located in the same town. I strongly doubt that any NCAA championship in any sport has ever had that happen in a Final Four. I certainly can't think of one.

BC and BU were in the D-1 Frozen Four (along with Wisconsin and Colgate).  Also, Yale and Quinnipiac, who met in the 2013 final, are only eight miles apart, which is closer than NP is to UC.

That's a good try, Buck O., but both attempts hit the post. Boston College isn't in Boston; it's in Chestnut Hill, a suburb of Boston, while Boston University is in the city itself.

I'd like to check with the VAR, because I think my first attempt hit the post ... and went in!  Chestnut Hill is not a suburb of Boston.  Part of it is in Newton, part is in Brookline, and part is in Boston.

My recollection, from when I used to drive around that area more often than I do now, is that the Boston-Newton town line more or less bisects BC's main campus, so that the eastern half is in Boston and the western half is in Newton.  And Google Maps seems to back that up.  (Type "Boston" or "Newton" into Google Maps and see where the boundary line falls.)

One more:  UCLA and USC seem to play in the water polo championship games most years (four out of the last six).

That one seems to be pretty cut-and-dried. Thanks for the research, Buck O.

Water polo. I had a feeling that if it was going to be anything, it'd be an obscure sport with a small participatory base.

[Gregory Sager]

Great stuff, Gregory Sager! +k for sure (adding to your massive total).  Thank you for the extensive overview of North Park.

Mr. Sager...wow!  You did your school proud.  An impressive and persuasive description/endorsement of NPU.

Thanks, both of you!

One further question, if you know.  All of the immigrant communities you cited as living in North Park and creating that impressively diverse zip code make sense intuitively, to me at least, except for Sweden.

Swedes don't really live there anymore, especially in working-class Albany Park south of campus. There are plenty of Swedish-Americans in the North Park neighborhood north of the campus, to be sure, but no Swedish immigrants. Sweden basically stopped losing its sons and daughters to the New World after World War One.

The children who attend the elementary school that borders NPU to the south speak 37 different languages in their various homes. Swedish isn't one of the 37.

What were Swedes in the 1890s fleeing?  I think of Sweden as a wealthy and very attractive country to live in, and in some ways perhaps preferable to our grand USA.  Maybe that was not the case in the 1890s as I know virtually nothing about the history of Sweden, or perhaps the affiliation with that specific religious faith was the key.

Sweden was still a poor country back in the late 1800s, although not Ethiopian-famine poor, and the modern democracy that now characterizes Sweden was only beginning to emerge from the oligarchy that had traditionally run the nation since it became a constitutional monarchy during the Napoleonic era. It was also a primarily agrarian country that had a burgeoning population and a limited amount of arable land, with a relatively short growing season (Sweden's pretty far north, as the main areas that sent immigrants to the U.S. were from the same latitude as Juneau, AK, the Canadian semi-province of Labrador, and Siberia's Kamchatka Peninsula). Once word started trickling back via letters home from the earliest immigrants to the U.S. that there was abundant land to be found over here that the Americans were practically giving away, the trickle began to turn into a flood. And once major Swedish immigrant settlements began to arise in big cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis, and Seattle, as well as such smaller cities as Jamestown, NY, Worcester, MA, and Rockford, IL, where laborers and skilled tradesmen could find good-paying work easily through the immigrant community, the prospect of moving to America became even more attractive. Sweden did have a state church (and continued to have one until 2000), and like all countries that had state churches it was at least inconvenient and uncomfortable to be a religious dissenter, although open persecution never really existed. So that was a contributing factor as well, although the main reasons behind Swedish immigration during the peak period (roughly 1870-1910) were economic.

Did you know former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was a Kenyon grad, overlapping with yours truly (re:  the real Paul Newman)?  He wrote a senior thesis about the United Auto Workers union.  He was assassinated in Sweden in 1986...."His murder by an unapprehended assailant on a street in Stockholm on 28 February 1986 was the first of its kind in modern Swedish history, and the first assassination of a national leader since Gustav III. It had a great impact across Scandinavia.[1] Local convict and addict Christer Pettersson was convicted of the murder in the first instance court tingsrätten, but was acquitted on appeal to the Svea hovrätt." (Wikipedia)

I didn't know that Palme was a Kenyon grad, although it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that he wrote his senior thesis about the UAW. His tenure as PM in Sweden was kind of a tense time for Swedish/American relations, which I saw firsthand at North Park. Several Swedes were pretty aggressive on campus in terms of pointing fingers at us Americans and telling us how rotten and corrupt we all were, and explaining to us in a very condescending fashion how we ought to run our country. That was a long time ago, though, and Sweden is a very different -- and far less homogenous -- country now than it used to be. The vast majority of the Swedes I've met over the years have been very polite and mild-mannered, which leads me to believe that the Palmeist period was kind of an aberration that brought out the militant side of certain college-age Swedes.

RE:  U Chicago and is reputation for brutal misery.....all the more impressive that such talented soccer players can manage the rigors of the school with the commitment necessary to compete at a high level.  I think of Swarthmore and Hopkins as perhaps similar for really smart kids with perhaps a bit of a masochistic streak.

One thing's for sure at the U of C -- you play sports there for your own satisfaction and for the sake of your teammates, not because there's any sort of campus glory in it. I've met several Maroons and ex-Maroons over the years, and there's a refreshing lack of ego about them with regard to their athletic accomplishments. I suspect that toiling in anonymity at sports on a campus where excellence is measured in brainpower rather than musclepower gives you that healthy perspective about yourself as a student-athlete.

[PaulNewman]

One thing's for sure at the U of C -- you play sports there for your own satisfaction and for the sake of your teammates, not because there's any sort of campus glory in it. I've met several Maroons and ex-Maroons over the years, and there's a refreshing lack of ego about them with regard to their athletic accomplishments. I suspect that toiling in anonymity at sports on a campus where excellence is measured in brainpower rather than musclepower gives you that healthy perspective about yourself as a student-athlete.

RE:  U Chicago students not caring a lick about the soccer teams or sports in general (or even having much awareness that there are sports teams).  While Chicago may be at the extreme end in this regard, I think the lack of general campus interest applies at many of these schools and perhaps with D3 overall other than the oft-mentioned exceptions like Messiah, OWU, etc where relatively large attendance is the norm.  My daughter played soccer in high school but she never cared to observe a single men's soccer match at Rochester in her 4 years.  She stopped by a women's match once for 15 minutes because a high school teammate/friend was there playing for a visiting school.

Beyond those with an immediate connection to players on teams and former players and parents, the reach of interest is pretty narrow.  It's a big deal to me as a former parent (although I'm often wondering how long that will last as my narcissistic attachment and over-identification dissipate more and more over time), and the tournament especially as it is happening is huge (with some natural drop in interest once "my team" exits).  I don't sense that D1 soccer is that different, and I barely follow D1 soccer at all.

[Hopkins92]

Mr. Sager...wow!  You did your school proud.  An impressive and persuasive description/endorsement of NPU.

One further question, if you know.  All of the immigrant communities you cited as living in North Park and creating that impressively diverse zip code make sense intuitively, to me at least, except for Sweden.  What were Swedes in the 1890s fleeing?  I think of Sweden as a wealthy and very attractive country to live in, and in some ways perhaps preferable to our grand USA.  Maybe that was not the case in the 1890s as I know virtually nothing about the history of Sweden, or perhaps the affiliation with that specific religious faith was the key.

Did you know former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was a Kenyon grad, overlapping with yours truly (re:  the real Paul Newman)?  He wrote a senior thesis about the United Auto Workers union.  He was assassinated in Sweden in 1986...."His murder by an unapprehended assailant on a street in Stockholm on 28 February 1986 was the first of its kind in modern Swedish history, and the first assassination of a national leader since Gustav III. It had a great impact across Scandinavia.[1] Local convict and addict Christer Pettersson was convicted of the murder in the first instance court tingsrätten, but was acquitted on appeal to the Svea hovrätt." (Wikipedia)

RE:  U Chicago and is reputation for brutal misery.....all the more impressive that such talented soccer players can manage the rigors of the school with the commitment necessary to compete at a high level.  I think of Swarthmore and Hopkins as perhaps similar for really smart kids with perhaps a bit of a masochistic streak.

YUP!! Especially the engineering and pre-med kids at Hopkins. I was poli-sci and once you figured out how to write 25 page mid-term papers, it was fine. But those guys? Brutal. And while I suspect it was more myth than reality, there was a term called "throating" at Hopkins that was short for "cut throat." I guess for a time those classes were graded on a very strict curve system, so there were incentives to mess with people's lab results and to not share lecture notes and other stuff. Seemed to have been mostly rectified by the time I got there... But the culture was still VERY intense and stressful.

[PaulNewman]

YUP!! Especially the engineering and pre-med kids at Hopkins. I was poli-sci and once you figured out how to write 25 page mid-term papers, it was fine. But those guys? Brutal. And while I suspect it was more myth than reality, there was a term called "throating" at Hopkins that was short for "cut throat." I guess for a time those classes were graded on a very strict curve system, so there were incentives to mess with people's lab results and to not share lecture notes and other stuff. Seemed to have been mostly rectified by the time I got there... But the culture was still VERY intense and stressful.

Yeah, I've heard Hopkins is brutal for pre-meds so I don't think that's all myth.  My impression is that fellow pre-med mecca Wash U is a bit friendlier but the weed out is still pretty unforgiving.  The handful of kids who go to places like Hopkins, Wash U, Chicago, MIT, etc and play soccer (or any sport) AND pull 3.9+'s in pre-med are off the charts.  And, since some day they may be operating on your brain or heart, we of course want them to be off the charts.

[Mr.Right]

2017 Championship Odds:

Chicago   6-1
Messiah   8-1
Brandeis  14-1
North Park  35-1

[Mr.Right]

Do we have a link to the goal Brandeis scored on Tufts besides the one from the Brandeis bench of which you cannot see anything... I have still not see the goal

[Gregory Sager]

One thing's for sure at the U of C -- you play sports there for your own satisfaction and for the sake of your teammates, not because there's any sort of campus glory in it. I've met several Maroons and ex-Maroons over the years, and there's a refreshing lack of ego about them with regard to their athletic accomplishments. I suspect that toiling in anonymity at sports on a campus where excellence is measured in brainpower rather than musclepower gives you that healthy perspective about yourself as a student-athlete.

RE:  U Chicago students not caring a lick about the soccer teams or sports in general (or even having much awareness that there are sports teams).  While Chicago may be at the extreme end in this regard, I think the lack of general campus interest applies at many of these schools and perhaps with D3 overall other than the oft-mentioned exceptions like Messiah, OWU, etc where relatively large attendance is the norm.  My daughter played soccer in high school but she never cared to observe a single men's soccer match at Rochester in her 4 years.  She stopped by a women's match once for 15 minutes because a high school teammate/friend was there playing for a visiting school.

Oh, I absolutely agree. It's just more noticeable at a place like the U of C that has 6,000 undergraduates and an overall community (undergrads, grad students, faculty, and staff) that is bigger than any three other Illinois-based D3 schools combined. While I've only been down to Hyde Park to see three sports played there (men's soccer, men's basketball, and women's basketball), the number of Chicago students who attend those contests is roughly the same as the typical number you'd find at a CCIW school in those sports -- and CCIW schools have one-third the number of undergraduates as does the U of C. That's a striking difference.

Beyond those with an immediate connection to players on teams and former players and parents, the reach of interest is pretty narrow.  It's a big deal to me as a former parent (although I'm often wondering how long that will last as my narcissistic attachment and over-identification dissipate more and more over time), and the tournament especially as it is happening is huge (with some natural drop in interest once "my team" exits).  I don't sense that D1 soccer is that different, and I barely follow D1 soccer at all.

Soccer is a little different than other major sports in that it's still an acquired taste for Americans in terms of spectating and viewership. (Of course, it's far more popular as a participatory sport, especially among young people, which is why the future is bright as far as D3 men's soccer attendance numbers are concerned.) I can name plenty of D3 schools here in the midwest that have great attendance for football, men's basketball, and even baseball that can't draw squat in terms of men's soccer. It's generally only the schools that have long traditions of soccer excellence (NPU, Wheaton, and Loras, for example) that draw well, and even having a well-established program is no guarantee in that regard; UW-Whitewater, which has been really solid for ages under Tony Guinn's leadership (13 tourney appearances in the last 19 seasons), barely averages 100 fans per match. And that's a school of about 11,000 undergraduate students.

[blooter442]

Do we have a link to the goal Brandeis scored on Tufts besides the one from the Brandeis bench of which you cannot see anything... I have still not see the goal

I put an inquiry out to the Brandeis SID as well -- I didn't even get to see the JumboCast which missed the goal! He said that he'd try to get a snip, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Regardless, I suppose the Brandeis bench video is better than nothing.

[Mr.Right]

Do we have a link to the goal Brandeis scored on Tufts besides the one from the Brandeis bench of which you cannot see anything... I have still not see the goal

I put an inquiry out to the Brandeis SID as well -- I didn't even get to see the JumboCast which missed the goal! He said that he'd try to get a snip, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Regardless, I suppose the Brandeis bench video is better than nothing.

Not really...It is basically nothing because you cannot see the goal at all and all you get is the Brandeis players running onto the field...It is maybe 1/2 of nothing

[casualfan]

One thing's for sure at the U of C -- you play sports there for your own satisfaction and for the sake of your teammates, not because there's any sort of campus glory in it. I've met several Maroons and ex-Maroons over the years, and there's a refreshing lack of ego about them with regard to their athletic accomplishments. I suspect that toiling in anonymity at sports on a campus where excellence is measured in brainpower rather than musclepower gives you that healthy perspective about yourself as a student-athlete.

RE:  U Chicago students not caring a lick about the soccer teams or sports in general (or even having much awareness that there are sports teams).  While Chicago may be at the extreme end in this regard, I think the lack of general campus interest applies at many of these schools and perhaps with D3 overall other than the oft-mentioned exceptions like Messiah, OWU, etc where relatively large attendance is the norm.  My daughter played soccer in high school but she never cared to observe a single men's soccer match at Rochester in her 4 years.  She stopped by a women's match once for 15 minutes because a high school teammate/friend was there playing for a visiting school.

Oh, I absolutely agree. It's just more noticeable at a place like the U of C that has 6,000 undergraduates and an overall community (undergrads, grad students, faculty, and staff) that is bigger than any three other Illinois-based D3 schools combined. While I've only been down to Hyde Park to see three sports played there (men's soccer, men's basketball, and women's basketball), the number of Chicago students who attend those contests is roughly the same as the typical number you'd find at a CCIW school in those sports -- and CCIW schools have one-third the number of undergraduates as does the U of C. That's a striking difference.

Beyond those with an immediate connection to players on teams and former players and parents, the reach of interest is pretty narrow.  It's a big deal to me as a former parent (although I'm often wondering how long that will last as my narcissistic attachment and over-identification dissipate more and more over time), and the tournament especially as it is happening is huge (with some natural drop in interest once "my team" exits).  I don't sense that D1 soccer is that different, and I barely follow D1 soccer at all.

Soccer is a little different than other major sports in that it's still an acquired taste for Americans in terms of spectating and viewership. (Of course, it's far more popular as a participatory sport, especially among young people, which is why the future is bright as far as D3 men's soccer attendance numbers are concerned.) I can name plenty of D3 schools here in the midwest that have great attendance for football, men's basketball, and even baseball that can't draw squat in terms of men's soccer. It's generally only the schools that have long traditions of soccer excellence (NPU, Wheaton, and Loras, for example) that draw well, and even having a well-established program is no guarantee in that regard; UW-Whitewater, which has been really solid for ages under Tony Guinn's leadership (13 tourney appearances in the last 19 seasons), barely averages 100 fans per match. And that's a school of about 11,000 undergraduate students.

Regarding UW-Whitewater... UWW football tends to the lead the country in football attendance year after year (though that may not be the case as of late due to their recent decline).

One small note: Tony Guinn has only been leading the Warhawks since 2012. Guinn has 3 NCAA appearances in 6 seasons. Greg Henschel was the head man from 1999-2011 and he was in charge for 9 NCAA appearances in 13 seasons while also serving as Head Coach for the women from 2000-2011 and helping that program reach national prominence. He then accepted a Division I job with UW-Milwaukee Women but didn't last long there though and has not coached in college soccer since the 2014 season.

[blooter442]

Not really...It is basically nothing because you cannot see the goal at all and all you get is the Brandeis players running onto the field...It is maybe 1/2 of nothing

Well I was working off of absolutely nothing in missing the broadcast...so the glass of nothing is half full for me!

[Mr.Right]

It's fine we all understand where your heart is....Still it would be nice to see the goal. I suppose I would have been more pissed if I happened to be watching the stream during the actual goal and the camera missed it..

[Gregory Sager]

Regarding UW-Whitewater... UWW football tends to the lead the country in football attendance year after year (though that may not be the case as of late due to their recent decline).

Yep, and the Warhawks also draw really well for men's basketball, too. It's quite remarkable how much student support they get, considering that UWW is regarded as a "suitcase school". Nevertheless, this makes the lack of support for men's soccer even more glaring.

One small note: Tony Guinn has only been leading the Warhawks since 2012. Guinn has 3 NCAA appearances in 6 seasons. Greg Henschel was the head man from 1999-2011 and he was in charge for 9 NCAA appearances in 13 seasons while also serving as Head Coach for the women from 2000-2011 and helping that program reach national prominence. He then accepted a Division I job with UW-Milwaukee Women but didn't last long there though and has not coached in college soccer since the 2014 season.

Yes, I know (although I wasn't aware of what happened to Henschel). That's my bad for typing up the stuff about UWW and including Guinn's name, and then deciding to stick in the UWW tourney-appearance factoid without editing the post.