Upon Further Review

Sports blogger and columnist Jim Sacco is joined by sports editor Robert Sisk to chat about the Cougars’ big baseball win Tuesday over R.E. Lee and Jeremy Hahn’s no-hitter Friday for Waynesboro.

Once or twice throughout her 12-year soccer career, Waynesboro senior Kristin Berrang admitted she may have longed to be injured, you know, so she wouldn’t have to do the work. Sitting on the sidelines and being another coach on the bench is easier than running up and down a pitch for over an hour and a half. You don’t sweat and you’re never sore after coaching.

“I think, long ago, I wished that,“ Berrang said Tuesday before she took the field against Stuarts Draft. “Probably because I was lazy. But once you get injured and you’re not able to play and do something you love, you figure out how much it’s not fun to be on the sidelines.“

So that’s why she was so happy. Happy enough to smile the whole time, and flail her arms around as she talked about finally, after three months of healing from a broken ankle that sidelined her the week before the Group AA indoor track meet, being back on the pitch. She’s a player, not a coach, and while screaming “man on, man on” from the sidelines might be all fine and dandy for Robin Hersey, it’s not for a girl he named captain during her sophomore season.

Sure, by playing Riverheads to a draw and losing to Buffalo Gap 1-0, the Wilson Memorial girls soccer team is raising eyebrows.

So leave it to the Green Hornet girls JV team to raise expectations. While the varsity girls are taking their lumps on the steady climb to respectability, it’s the JV team, along with the young guns on the varsity, that have people in Fishersville excited about what is to come on the pitch.

After its win over Waynesboro on Friday, the JV team sits with an 8-0 record and, despite the anticipation of losing a few players to the varsity team in the coming year, that team looks to reload as well in 2009.
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So Jeremy Hahn has himself a rough second inning. He walks two Cougars and, after a fielder’s choice, it’s suddenly bases loaded with nobody out for the Little Giants’ ace southpaw. Now you’re wondering if the senior could find the strike zone if he had Google Earth

downloaded to his glove.

But, hey man, this is a big game, like all Southern Valley District contests are (duh, of course), and Hahn is doing everything he can to become that big-time pitcher the Giants are going to need if they hope to get a sniff of a deep postseason run. So, what does he do? Well, he turns it around and strikes out the next three batters.

No runs that inning for the Cougars.

Does the city of Waynesboro have something against lights? Seriously, someone answer this question for me.

And let’s keep the answers serious, OK. Leave the smart-aleck stuff to me. I want to know why it is that a town (is it even a town?) like Fort Defiance (a town? Really?) can have lighted tennis courts for its high school but Waynesboro, with the nicest soccer pitch and track in the area, can’t slap a couple of lights up a few feet away (where the tennis courts are located) so the Little Giants tennis teams don’t have to stop matches on account of darkness.
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