BR Capitals and other stuff

I haven't done much lately but contribute articles to this new independent paper in Baton Rouge, the CCLagniappe. If you ever find yourself on government street or the mid city area, I recommend you take a look at the paper (I know they're available at Colandro's and the Ice Cream Shoppe). For the first issue, I did two articles and a column; one article on the LSU Tiger's run in the College World Series, another article on the excessive length of the NBA season, and a column on the need for minority hiring in NCAA sports (particularly college football).

First, a word on the state of minority hiring in college football.

I'm a huge college football fan, and I find it offensive that in a sport where the vast majority of the athletes are minorities, only 7.5 percent of the coaches are. I can only imagine how disappointed all the qualified minority candidates were when Auburn hired Gene Chizik, formerly with Iowa State where he had a vaunted 5-19 record!

Today, I met and interviewed the Baton Rouge Capitals, a soccer team. The people I talked to were extremely courteous and open with me. Almost half of the team is actually foreign... something like eight of them are specifically from Brazil. I basically asked one of them how it felt to play soccer in Louisiana, where no one particularly cares for it, compared to Brazil, where it is fanatically popular (although I tried not to phrase the question in such "are you sure your life is worth living" kind of way). The player was very honest about it and admited that the United States' enthusiasm for soccer is less than in other places, but he was still encouraged by recent trends in soccer's popularity in the states.

Anyway... other than that interview, I also did some legwork on other articles at the paper's office on government street. The Editor in Chief of the paper is a really cool person, who recently graduated from LSU with a degree in journalism. I think she's a great editor and she has infectious personal energy. Although I have to admit, I almost laughed earlier today when my editor's boyfriend came in and introduced himself to me as... 'Colorado'. He was a perfectly nice guy, but as I was talking to him though, in my head I was going, "note to self: don't name any of my children after states".