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I’m guessing last week was the most popular week of the whole year for sportswriters and sportscasters to go on vacation.
Why? Because last week was just different than any other on the sports calendar.
It was the week where the fewest sporting events were going on of any week of the year.
Major League Baseball celebrated its All-Star Break, and so did the minor league teams like the Fort Wayne Tin Caps and South Bend Cubs.
Hockey is enjoying its summer, and the NBA was also on summer vacation.
Locally, high schools were doing some summer conditioning and prep, but they don’t start officially practicing until August 3.
And college football teams have been participating in their conference media days, but they still have a few weeks until practices start.
To be real, the only major sporting events league in action have been the World Cup and the WNBA.
FIFA gets a lot wrong, but how they schedule out a tournament to maximize the excitement and drama of the largest sporting event in the world is perfect. The breaks between matches are just long enough to make us miss it without letting us forget about it.
The WNBA, however, is a full-blown mess of their own making and there is no sign of it getting any better.
It all centers around our girl Caitlin Clark.
The league—from the commissioner’s office all the way down to the rank and file players—have decided that the player who brought them all the greatest exposure, brightest lights and most money-making potential must be stopped. For a multitude of reasons that are beyond baffling, they have deemed Clark as being all wrong for being the face of women’s basketball in America.
Maybe it’s because of the hype and attention she got when she was in college.
Maybe it’s because she had more endorsement deals than anyone in the “W” before she was drafted.
Maybe it’s because she has a boyfriend. That might seem like a silly thing to say, but not a lot of players in the WNBA have boy friends…and we’ll leave it at that.
The way Clark gets officiated makes the product of WNBA basketball unwatchable.
And let’s be perfectly honest, is having a week in the summer where there is literally nothing going on in sports the worse thing in the world? Not at all.
But for people who are information-based people like I am, it makes for a significant challenge. There have been many years where I struggled to find enough to talk about to fill two minutes on the radio during All-Star Break Week.
It’s one of the side benefits of taking that week off for the family vacation.
Truth is, there is an opportunity to seize the spotlight for a few days during that week.
We know, because the ratings tell us so, that fewer and fewer people are watching or paying any attention to baseball’s Mid-Summer Classic, and they change the rules of Home Run Derby every year to try to get more eyeballs on Monday’s festivities…but it is what it is.
So, who could help draw attention to their sport by adjusting their calendar a little?
The most obvious sport that could benefit from this open week on the sports calendar is the NBA.
The NBA should move its draft to this week. If they had their draft on Monday night, they could sign their players to contracts by Wednesday and then start the summer league over the weekend. It wouldn’t hurt any player’s development, and it would give teams plenty of time to watch their new acquisitions and form a vision of how to meld them into the plan for the start of the season.
It would also give the teams that played deep in the playoffs, especially the two teams that made it to The Finals, a few extra weeks to catch their breath and turn their focus toward the next season.
Who else?
Why wouldn’t baseball move its draft to Wednesday and Thursday of this week?
These two days are the only two days from April to October when no MLB teams play games.
Front offices will have two days to focus on their team’s future needs while not worrying about new injuries and the need to toggle players from their Triple-A team to the big club.
No, this week is reserved for piling friends into a pontoon boat and cruising around our local lakes and having serious discussions about how to convene meetings with panfish, using red worms and bee moths as “mediators”.
Maybe you’d prefer to hit the links and chase the little white ball around. It’s a great week to meet friends at the first tee to do just that.
Or maybe pluck some veggies or corn from your garden or get a bowl filled with berries at an area farm and put some sugar and crème in it to make it taste like summer.
Whatever it is, go do that!
I hope you enjoyed that peace and quiet, because we ramp up with speculation and discussion about baseball trades, football camps will be opening and high school fall sports teams will start practicing soon.
