Team USA might be on the sidelines, but there’s no shortage of soccer fans in uniform who’ll be dealing with a case of World Cup Fever over the next few weeks. For those who find themselves overseas during the 2018 tournament, there’s some good news: American Forces Network will show World Cup action, either live or on tape delay, to troops across the globe. That wasn’t always a sure thing: AFN Broadcast Center director Catina Barnes said last week that securing broadcast rights required two years of negotiations and sign-off from more than 30 broadcast entities, including American provider Fox Sports.…
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Three years ago, Katie McHugh — daughter of one soldier, sister of another — got a text from her younger sister. “Kelly,” it said, “you need to come home now.” Let McHugh tell you the rest of the story from that day in May 2010 — how she feared the worst for her brother, who’d deployed to Iraq, only to find out her father, Col. John M. McHugh, 46, had died in a suicide-bomb attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, on what was supposed to be a two-week visit. He left behind a wife, five children and, at the time, one grandchild.…
After the Naval Academy rescheduled a soccer game this week and the Air Force Academy announced it wouldn’t travel to Annapolis for this weekend’s big Navy-Air Force football game, it looked like the government shutdown had completely cast its shadow over service academy athletics. However, the Naval Academy announced late Wednesday that the game against Air Force and would go on. At the time, it was the only athletic contest that remained on Navy’s shutdown-shortened schedule, but the school announced Friday that some games were back on the docket. Even the women’s soccer game at American University, which had been…
A handful of quick military-sports hits for the middle of the week: Olympic fever. Want the basics on the military men and women who’ll compete in London beginning later this week? Click here for our OFFduty preview, including capsule profiles on all 16 of them, plus the dates they’ll compete. For a more complete view of the games, head to USA Today’s site here (and a full Olympic schedule here). The 2012 Summer Olympics kicked off today with women’s soccer contests — a perfect reason to catch this video Q-and-A with Navy women’s soccer coach Carin Gabarra, a member of…
A half-dozen quick hits for a Monday morning (non-wrestling news after the jump): 1. Big time for the little guy. Army Sgt. Spenser Mango recently had his turn as the feature subject of “100 Olympic Hopefuls in 100 Days,” a series put together by our good friends at USA Today. Click over to read about the Greco-Roman Olympian’s path into the Army World Class Athlete Program, his Army duties when he’s not wrestling or training, and how much weight he has to cut to make the 55-kilogram (121-pound) limit. 2. Lester’s homecoming. Mango may have received the national press, but…
A few academy-sports quick hits for a Wednesday afternoon: Army-Navy kickoff set. The Black Knights and Midshipmen will kick off at 3 p.m. Eastern on Dec. 8 at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field, according to a CBS news release. Times for the other Navy games on that release aren’t typos — the Mids will play Notre Dame at 9 a.m. Eastern on Sept. 1 in Dublin, and they will face the Air Force Falcons at 11:30 a.m. Eastern on Oct. 6 in Colorado Springs, Colo. — that’s a 9:30 a.m. local start. Hat tip on the Army-Navy news to the Times…
If you haven’t been following all the invites from the Marine Corps, it’s becoming a bit of a trend to ask out a celebrity on YouTube. Now the Army is getting into it. Meet U.S. Army Capt. Nassar Jabour. He would like U.S. Women’s National Team goalie Hope Solo to join him in Vienna, Austria for his officer’s ball in January. The video itself is a bit out-dated because it was filmed before the U.S. lost to Japan on Sunday, but he wishes the team luck before the biggest game of their careers. No word on whether Solo has accepted…
When the women’s U.S. Soccer Team arrived for the World Cup playoffs, they were quickly dismissed. Everyone knew who the real contenders were. The Americans didn’t have a chance. But every time Carin Gabarra walked out on the field, she didn’t fret the naysayers. She knew better. “We always expected to win. As a group, we never had doubt in each other,” she says. And they were right. She remembers it like was yesterday, but it was 20 years ago when the U.S. team won the very first World Cup championship against Norway before a crowd of 65,000 at Guangzhou’s…
A little blast from the past here — FOB Summerall in Bayji, Iraq on July 4, 2004. It was hot as hell. The wind was blowing, but it didn’t cool anyone down because it was hot wind filled with sand, which later stuck to all the food at the barbecue. The devilish weather didn’t keep the scheduled sports activities from taking place, though. For a while, I watched the Iraqi police with their high-waisted athletic pants and knee socks play enthusiastically against soldiers from 1st Battalion, 7th Field Artillery Regiment, the boys and girls from the Big Red One. But…
Yanks and Blokes alike have reason to be bummed this Monday morning after two very disappointing results for the U.S. and England over the weekend. The Americans blew a golden opportunity to advance to the quarterfinals for only the second time since 1930 and the English got trashed by their chief rival, the Germans. The epicenter for the pain may be a U.S. base in England. Tech Sgt. Kevin Wallace, who is stationed at RAF Mildenhall, wrote this last week about what it’s like to live in England during the World Cup so we wanted to turn the floor to…
