By Adam Siegel

Shhh….don’t tell Gov. Carcieri but: La copa de futbol de Ingles en Accion es este sabado, 10 de mayo.

The all-day festival starts at 9am, and features 10 soccer teams playing for the cup, food and art from more than 10 different countries, the What Cheer? Brigade and other musical acts, kids’ activities, and even a mini-health fair!

As they say, come for the soccer– stay for the mini-health fair.

The EFA Cup will be at Donigian Park on Valley Street in Olneyville. All are welcome to play or watch…if you can pull yourself away from the mini-health fair!

TONIGHT – William C. Rhoden, of the New York Times and that ESPN snoozefest Sports Reporters fame, is appearing tonight at Brown for a discussion regarding race and sport in America. He will appear alongside former Bears and current Oregon State University (way to mess that one up, PC) men’s basketball coach and certifiable “next-big-thing” Craig Robinson, as well as Brown junior student-athlete Nicole Burns.

The panel discussion will be moderated by Brown prof Jim Campbell and begins at 7 p.m. in the Andrews Dining Hall. The talk is free and open to the Brown community, as well as communities of other colors (that is, the general public).

If you have at least a passing interest in both sports and race relations, you should probably go… who knows, there may even be snacks.

They won today, but need to beat Charlotte next weekend just to get back to .500 in the A-10, even after starting 19-3. And it seems like they need to make it to the conf championship game to have a real shot at the tourney.

Cornell clinched the Ivies, and PC is at 4-11 in the Big East. So it looks like there won’t be much post-season for RI schools this year.

Lost to Temple last night. Lost to Mass, and barely beat Fordham. And only 6-4 in the Atlantic 10. They’re still 20-5 over-all, but uh-ohs…

PC is miserable. But Brown’s second in the Ivies, and within striking distance. Are they the dark-horse RI candidate to make the tourney?

Also, what’s with Cornell leading at 6-0, with Penn and Princeton in the middle of the pack? The last time neither Penn nor Princeton won the conference was 1988. And the last time before that was 1961.

Looks like they’re inching back towards a top-25 spot:

The Rams improved to 18-3 (4-2 A-10), equaling their best start since the 1987-88 season when they went 18-3 through their first 21 games.

ESPN is hosting an online chat with URI’s guard Parfait Bitee today at 1pm.

  We should all take a field trip to South Kingstown for a game one of these days.

Jimmy Baron finished with 17 points and Parfait Bitee added 14 points and seven assists to lead Rhode Island past George Washington 81-70 on Wednesday night.

The Wild Colonial
South Water Street

Doors open early today — 2:30 PM — for the Patriots/Chargers game, followed immediately by the Giants/Packers contest. Watch the games on a color television set!

Just moved up in the rankings and beat Farleigh Dickinson. And this one’s from the AP:

No. 23 Rhode Island (14-1) is off to the program’s best start since 1946-47 heading into conference play at 20th-ranked Dayton on Wednesday. The Rams cracked the national rankings for the first time since November 1998, and could climb in the polls following a 94-63 demolition of Fairleigh Dickinson on Wednesday that extended their winning streak to nine games and kept them undefeated at home this season.

Rhode Island and Dayton (12-1) have raised the profile of the Atlantic 10 conference, which last season sent just two schools to the NCAA tournament. The early success could bode well for the Rams to get their first NCAA bid in nine years.

Besting Georgia Southern tonight, 85-80.

I did it! Patriots/Giants Game on Channel 10!

The NFL Network has seen the writing on the wall. An agreement has been reached, and the final game of the regular season will be carried over-the-air on NBC Channel 10. Once they saw that the Dose was on their case they totally caved. (There will be no living with me now.)

Blindly following the crowd, I’ve decided that I’m foremost an Atlantic 10 fan this year, for the first time since the 7-foot-1 Yinka Dare — who sadly died of a heart attack a few years ago — wowed the crowds at George Washington’s Smith Center in the early 1990s. (I think Dare’s what first turned me into a college bball fan.)

Jim Baron and the URI Rams make the Washington Post today, in an article mostly about the surprising strength of the A-10:

“I think the league is as strong as it has ever been,” Rhode Island Coach Jim Baron said. “What it has done during the nonconference season really speaks for itself. We have definitely earned what we have done. Everyone is really taking a strong stance on strengthening their schedules.”

With Oregon and Xavier losing this week, it’s lookin like there’s a damn good chance the URI men’s basketball team will make the ESPN/USA Today top 25 today for the first time in, like, a while. (Not sure how long exactly, but no NCAA tourney since 1999.) The 11-1 Rams have already beaten four teams from the Big East and ACC, and look like they have potential to rock the A-10 in the vein of George Washington from a couple of years back. Pretty exciting, and doubley so, since the team of my childhood is the pits.I could say all kindsa snarky stuff about the namesake of URI’s home court, the Ryan Center — say, about his relationship to some of the pols who’ve gone down in Operation Dollar Bill, or his advocacy for the capital gains tax cut that’s helping to drive the state’s budget crunch, or CVS’s frequently shoddy treatment of service workers at its Woonsocket HQ. But I’ve got a little too much Christmas cheer inside of me.

Dave Zirin is a great radical sportswriter, with whom I don’t always agree. But yesterday he had this dead-on excoriation of George Mitchell, which includes a tidbit that I’ve been unaware of:

In a report that excoriates a “steroid era” in the sport, there is no recommendation for Selig to resign. This shouldn’t surprise because Mitchell is part of ownership, sitting on the board of the Boston Red Sox. The report seems more aimed to head off congressional action than deal with how and why steroids make their way into Major League muscles. The problem with the Mitchell Report - the reason why it is so deeply flawed - is the man himself. In the end, the flaws of the messenger have terribly disfigured to the message.

Mitchell’s selection was definitely intended to create a veneer of objectivity about the whole investigation — and I was duped by it. Zirin also notes Mitchell’s service to the tobacco industry, GE in its battles against the Environmental Protection Agency, and the candy industry’s attempt to cover up child- and slave-labor.

I moved to Providence in part BECAUSE OF the snow — mixed with the hills. I was a passionate sledder in my youth, having grown up in a particularly hilly corner of the Maryland suburbs of DC. I have great memories of snow-days past: The 9th-grade ice-storm that had school closed for a whole week, and finals postponed. The bootstrap snow-shoveling racket my best friend and I pushed on all our parents’ friends. The dried-up creek beds that we used to fancy as bobsled tracks — you’d actually go horizontal on their walls if you had enough momentum.

But for its climate, the city of seven hills doesn’t have much great sledding. Moses Brown is decent, but staid and overrun. (Though the perfect slope and length for a sled-jump.)

The ideal scenario is to sled down the sidewalks of College Hill — when the snow is plowed up against the street side, and what snow was on the sidewalk proper has been shoveled towards the property line, and the concrete’s all iced up. (You need a good look-out.) It captures some of that bobsled effect.

But you can’t wander through life longing for perfection.

So what are your sledding mainstays? I’ll understand if you don’t want to share, and risk their commercialization.