I became a twuncle on Wednesday. What a world to be born into.
People often ask me if I have some sort of twin telepathy and I’ve always been annoyed by the absurd assertion. We occasionally displayed an uncanny awareness of one another as teammates on the soccer pitch growing up, but there was never any psychic link; it’s simply not a real thing. (That’s us in the photo above, sitting on our soccer balls.)
Professional team sports return to America beginning Saturday, June 27 with the start of the NWSL’s Challenge Cup in Herriman, Utah. The NWSL Challenge Cup schedule was unveiled Monday, and the tournament will feature 25 extremely meaningful matches over the course of a month.
Things begin with an 18-game preliminary round that takes place between June 27 and July 13. Each of the league’s nine teams will play four games and those results will be used to determine the seedings in the quarterfinal knockout round with the last-place squad being eliminated.
Looking back, it doesn’t feel like willful ignorance so much as a conditioned belief in the unstoppable machinations of American life. The stories from Northern Italy painted a more dramatic and horrific picture than the morbid curiosity we’d afforded Wuhan, but even as the coronavirus infiltrated America and began to make its presence felt in New York City and Seattle, the existential threat to our day-to-day life, especially here in Middle America, remained non-existent.
While many professional athletes have used this recent downtime from sports to relax, hang out with family and stay out of the limelight, one soccer star is doing just the opposite. More than perhaps any athlete over the last two months, Megan Rapinoe has been raising her profile in nearly every way possible.
At this rate, she might just become the next Oprah.
Salons and barbershops are closed across the country. We’ve reached a month-long impasse: Do we opt for the quarantine cut, or do we grow it out?
I hope that you’re doing the righteous thing and adding more volume to that vinaigrette. Don't go this route:
gave my man a quarantine fade pic.twitter.com/bHi6O7msOD
— badgirlkiki (@badgirIkiki) April 8, 2020
Day 1 of the FIFA Stay and Play Cup is in the books, and while at times it was just ridiculous (an 8-2 scoreline, Twitch host Jimmy Conrad disappearing, people forgetting to unmute their mics), it was an entirely welcome and enjoyable afternoon after over a month of sporting radio silence and the total absence of communal events (competitive toilet paper hoarding aside).
With social distancing coming to the fore, many are turning to video games to pass the time. In turn, many are realizing — or just remembering — how aggravating the FIFA 20 experience can be. After almost 20 years of the game myself, I can hardly look at it without feeling like Roy Keane at a convention of TikTok influencers.
Major League Soccer: suspended. NBA and NHL: suspended. NCAA March Madness: canceled. Broadway: going dark. Disneyland: shutting its doors. Champions League, Premier League, LaLiga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and countless more leagues: suspended, delayed or canceled.
But what about youth soccer?
One of the best parts about attending a sporting event in the U.S. is the food. Unlike Europe, where they serve shit no one actually likes (prove I’m wrong), American stadiums are a Mecca of gluttonous foods and drinks. MLS stadium food is no different.
The best way to learn a city is through its food. One of the best ways to learn a city’s food is through the sporting arenas where thousands of fans gather every week. Nowhere is this more evident than at MLS stadiums, where food ranges from two-foot-long nachos in Texas to roasted cauliflower nachos in California.