Brooke de Lench

It seems as if a week doesn't go by these days without a story coming across my desk about money being embezzled from the coffers of local sports teams or lack oversight by a board of directors.

On Friday, it was the case of $4,176 in gate receipts that mysteriously disappeared after a September 2011 high school football game in Huber Heights, Ohio. 

We at MomsTeam are deeply saddened by the passing of Sarah Burke, Canadian freestyle skier and a pioneer of the superpipe event, who died January 19th from injuries she received in an accident nine days earlier while training for the upcoming Winter X Games at Park City Mountain, Utah.

Sarah was a freeskiing pioneer, six-time X Games gold medalist and beloved wife, daughter, sister and friend; an athlete whose star shone brightly well beyond her sport; a star whose light has now, tragically, been extinguished, forever.  We join in expressing our condolences to her family and at the loss of such a remarkable young woman. 

The inaugural Winter Youth Olympics began a ten-day run last night in Innsbruck, Austria. The opening ceremony featured classic and modern dance, and video flashbacks to 1964 and 1976, when Innsbruck hosted the Winter Olympics.

Every day at MomsTeam the staff talks about the best and worst youth sports stories of the day. Each year we vow to post a Top Ten list, as do our friends at the Positive Coaching Alliance, with their "Top 10 Responsible Sports Moments," or, select the top youth athlete, as the folks do at Sports Illustrated for Kids.

But we realized that selecting ten stories or one kid to highlightt when there are over 50 million kids playing sports in fifty states just isn't possible. The simple fact is that there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of "responsible moments" and millions of great young athletes whose spirit, desire to excel, and sportsmanship deserve to be recognized.

Last week I was having lunch with a group of national journalists while on a trip to Wahington, when one of them wondered out loud why I didn't do a blog entry every day, especially, she said, since they were so great.

It was nice, of course, to have my blog praised by such a well-known and respected journalist, but more to the point: why don't I write a daily blog?

The answer, I told her, was that I actually do: I spend at least two hours in an average day responding to questions from MomsTeam readers, enough to probably fill three blog posts; but, because I send them via e-mail, they don't technically qualify as blogs (web-log).