Monthly Archives: March 2011

State Championship Hockey Game Marred by Brawl, Broken Jaw – Video

Video of Texas high school hockey brawlWhere does the “sport” part of fighting in hockey end, and thuggish brawling (and arrests for assault) begin? The NHL has been dealing with a barrage of cheap shots and unnecessary fighting lately, and now it looks like that attitude has migrated down to even high school teams. The most recent example at the Texas State Championship game which ended with a nasty brawl and one player getting a broken jaw in an obvious cheap shot (watch the video).

Details from the Dallas Morning News, video below:

Local amateur hockey officials will meet to determine the punishment for players involved in a nasty brawl that marred the end of a state championship game and hospitalized one player with serious injuries.

The game was played in Farmers Branch on Sunday afternoon between the club teams representing Keller and Arlington Martin high schools. Keller won the Silver League state title 9-3.  But it was the chaos that erupted in the final seconds that made news. It was captured in at least two videos that are circulating on YouTube.

One video shows Martin players slamming a pair of Keller players hard into the corner boards from behind during a scrum for the puck. A referee has his arm up to call the penalty, but a fight ensues before he has a chance. Martin senior Jeff SoRelle, who had been in the penalty box when the fight started, is then seen skating full speed into view and launching himself into Keller’s Travis Hall.

As SoRelle skates slowly away, he is leveled by a blindside hit from Keller’s Braxton Mills. Mills had been off the ice, in the spectator area, because of a penalty but returned to the ice during the brawl. In one video, he appears to leave the ice while launching into SoRelle, apparently hitting him in the head.

SoRelle was sent sprawling to the ice as officials and others rushed in to break up the brawl.

UK Soccer Cheerleaders Accused of Distracting Players on Losing Team – The Crystals

Soccer cheerleaders must goWhat’s the best solution if you local soccer team isn’t bringing in the fans like it used to? Hire a bunch of scantily clad women as cheerleaders, that’s what you do. Until, of course, the team–in this case Crystal Palace in the UK–continues to lose, then some of the fans will blame these hotties for “distracting the players” as if grown men have never seen a woman dancing like . . . just a minute . . . we lost our train of thought there for a second. It has something to do with sports, we think, uh . . . was there a HS coach sex scandal involved here?

Oh, never mind, there’s a video of The Crystals dancing at halftime or period break or whatever they call it in soccer. Do they seem like a distraction to you?

First, some more on this breaking sports story from The Metro:

But with the team falling to just above the bottom three, fans say the cheerleaders – called The Crystals – are a ‘waste of time’ because they are distracting the team.  Online forum users have slagged them off for ‘looking silly’.

‘They are just pole dancers on grass and they should be stopped – they are not doing the team any favours,’ said one internet blogger.  Gareth Pollock, 24, said: ‘When they come out waving their pom-poms I just hang my head.’

He added: ‘They put everyone off the game – you see the players eyeing them up when they should be focusing on the game. The sooner they go the better.’ But The Crystals have hit back, saying the fans should ‘grow up’.  ‘The comments are quite nasty,’ said cheerleader Amie Latter, 23, who is a season ticket holder at Selhurst Park in south London and works in investment management.

College Hockey Game Turns Into Brawl, Ends With Referee Slashed in Face w. Skate

St. Olaf College logoSomehow, we missed the infamous “St. Olaf College vs Carleton College Club Hockey Brawl” earlier this month, but thanks to a loyal reader, we were alerted to this incident.  Basically, it sounds like the Oles (nickname for St. Olaf fans) started it off with the usual verbal abuse of their opponents. Nothing unusual in college sports there. But then they progressed to throwing bottles and cans onto the ice. That, of course, is also not THAT unusual in college sports, but it tends to happen in large football stadiums where the cans and bottle tend to make it only down to the unfortunate spectators in the front row.  That hardly ever stops football games.

But when you throw something on the ice, they kinda have to stop the game.

Of course, St. Olaf was penalized for that, but it didn’t quiet the fans down.  Shortly thereafter, additional cans and bottle hit the ice along with–wait for it!–TIRES FROM THE ZAMBONI.  The article in the school newspaper, The Daily Oloafer, does not say if these were spare tires, Zamboni tires the students snuck in under their winter coats, or if the crowd ripped them from the ice cleaning machine, but essentially things were pretty much over at that point.

Hockey players, seeing the dismantled Zamboni as a sign of the Apocalypse, starting brawling like it was the end of the world and eventually a referee was somehow slashed in the face with a skate and lay on the ice with blood spurting from his head.

Naturally, the game was called a draw and the police spend hours afterwords clearing up the brawls OUTSIDE the arena.  And people wonder why hockey just hasn’t caught on in the US as a major sport?  Could it be the on-ice fighting? Or maybe the lack of proper Zamboni protection? We may never know.

The stands were packed with students, predominantly Oles, many of whom began the evening shouting profanities and other negative cheers, including the standard “Carleton sucks!”

The St. Olaf players were just as rambunctious as the fans. “St. Olaf had about as many penalty minutes as they had game minutes,” spectator Thomas Hegland ’13 said. When the crowd threw soda cans and bottles onto the ice, St. Olaf was penalized, and additional bottles and cans along with zamboni tires were thrown onto the ice in retaliation.

With all of the St. Olaf penalty minutes, Carleton was able to achieve a sizeable three-point lead.  In the final period, a commotion near the hash marks caught the attention of Ole player Austin Bly ’12, who had just seized the puck.

Players exchanged words and threw punches, with an Ole instigating the battle. Ryan Campbell ’11 was among the first Oles to enter the fight.  Though the referees tried to stop the madness, both Carleton and St. Olaf benches quickly cleared, escalating the incident from hockey squabble to full-fledged brawl.

At some point, through the chaos, Christophe Porot ’12 announced that a referee had been injured and was bleeding profusely after taking a skate to the face. The game ended in a draw.  Multiple squad cars arrived to break up fights outside the arena.