Felt the Lightning, and Waited On The Thunder...

Reports were out as early as Sunday that the former Seattle Supersonics had chosen their new moniker - say hello to the Oklahoma City Thunder. Honestly, I don't think it's all that bad a name (this guy does, but anyone from Seattle will have a problem no matter what the name is), though my gut reaction was if they were going the extreme weather route, one would think that Cyclones would be a) more indicative of the region's climate, and b) more in keeping with the alliterative history of the franchise... whatever, anything's better than the Outlaws. Every time I heard that suggestion, I was horrified at the thought of what that logo might've looked like.

But if the consensus is that the name is finalized, why hasn't an official announcement made? It could be because T-shirts bearing the generic OKC NBA logo went on sale this week. That's right, the plain black jerseys the team debuted at a Summer League game in Orlando on July 7th, days after the team reached a settlement with the City of Seattle. The shirts are flying off the shelves - that report says it's because the shirts are a "collectors item," but I think it's more than that (more on that in a minute). The point is - why would you reveal the official name, logo and colors right now? You've got plenty of time to sell those jerseys and hats. People will only buy the generic t-shirts until they see the real logo. Clay Bennett and friends are showing once again that they know a thing or two about running a business. Whether you like him or not, Bennett proved in Seattle that he can talk the talk, and now there's no denying that these guys can walk the walk as well.

So that is why, to borrow from Bob Seger, we're waiting on the Thunder. Expect to see these shirts at OKC games for years to come - fans will wear them proudly as a symbol of being with the team since the very beginning. These, and the NO/OKC Hornets jerseys, and even old Sonics jerseys - every chapter of the city's NBA history will make its way into the seats of the Ford Center, regardless who the League and the courts think owns the franchise's history. I look over at my Beat LA t-shirt - I know I'm gonna be wearing that to Celtics events until it has wholes in it because of what it represents to me and to other fans. So sure, it's a business move for Bennett and friends - that $75 million for the City of Seattle has to come from somewhere - but I like the move from a fan standpoint as well. People of Oklahoma - go pick up one of those generic shirts while you can. In a couple of years, it'll be the ultimate throwback.

Year 1 of US Development Academy Comes to a Close

Why was this weekend so big for American soccer? It had nothing to do with next week's MLS All-Star Game, or anything else going on at the MLS. It had nothing to do with the fast-approaching Olympic Games. And it certainly had nothing to do with SuperLiga, the exhibition/tournament with nothing at stake except an inconclusive amount of prize money.

The big event of this past weekend was the finals of the inaugural year of the US Soccer Development Academy. Last summer, the United States Soccer Federation decided to create the Development Academy to try and change the face of youth soccer in this country, which for years consisted of independent "club teams" competing in as many leagues and holiday tournaments as possible.

Over in England (and other footballing nations), the norm is the "youth academy" - players to an academy run by a professional club as early as 8 years old. The young player gets to benefit from the professional clubs resources and coaching, and the club has first dibs on the kids when they’re ready for the big time. While they make headlines for the players they transfer in from other clubs, Liverpool and Manchester United always have a handful of homegrown players on the roster. They invest a great deal in training and coaching talented players from a very young age because they reap the benefits when a player has been trained in Man U football from Day 1.

I’m a huge fan of American soccer, but even I’ll admit that our version of the beautiful game is less beautiful than the version played in England, Spain, Brazil, etc. And the biggest reason for that is that our players are less technically sound – we’re athletic, but even at the NCAA level you’ll see a lot of “tunnel vision” and not a lot of passing around the field. USSF decided that this is because of the results-oriented scheduling of the country’s top “club soccer” teams. Until this year, those teams were playing in tournaments every holiday weekend on top of their usual schedules, and the kids often played for both a club team and a high school team – meaning year-round games. With this many games, practices were minimal. Maybe American sporting culture doesn’t think very highly of practice, but when competing at that top level, the big difference is made at the training facility. Not a game, not a game… not a game. We talkin’ ‘bout practice.

Until this year, there were very few options with that kind of training focus. USSF would pick out 20 players a year for the Olympic Residency program at the IMG Soccer Academy in Bradenton, FL. Then Brad Friedel started his Premier Soccer Academies in Ohio (with the hilariously pompous mailing address 2101 Brad Friedel's Avenue of Future Stars). Then MLS started to get into the act, with Chivas USA and Red Bull New York starting up Academy teams.

The US Soccer Development Academy invited the elite club teams from around the country to buy into the sort of system and regimen laid out by the IMG Academy. Approximately 30 games a year, minimum three days of practice and one day of rest every week. No extra tournaments – just the regularly-scheduled games and tournaments with the other Academy teams. Critics are bemoaning the death of high school soccer, but the level of play on the field this past weekend showed what a focus on practice can do. The Baltimore Bays took down the surprise-finalists LAFC 4-2 in extra time in Friday’s U-17/18 Final, and Baltimore’s Chris Agorsor is being called the next great American striker. Check out highlights of the various teams on USSoccer's YouTube Page.

Congratulations are in order for all the teams who participated, and let’s look forward to big things out of Agorsor and all his teammates. I look forward to the Development Academy continuing into the future – I think it can only be positive for MLS. Even the NCAA should benefit, as many of these well-trained players may still look for a college education. Besides, college athletics will always continue to play a prominent role in our national sporting landscape… won’t they?

Time to Rethink Tagging Music

I try to take pretty good care of my music collection. I've got 7,220 files in my iTunes library, which is just barely too much for my 30 gig iPod. No "Unknown Artist - Track 1" for me; I do a pretty good job tagging my songs. I may be a little lax on album titles (or take some liberties with Greatest Hits albums for the sake of organization), but I'll usually hit up MusicBrainz to double check track number, song titles and artist, etc.

I'm not the best or most thorough, nor do I have the biggest collection out there, but I like what I have, and I like being able to find songs in a way that makes sense to me and hopefully makes sense to whoever's controlling my iPod in the passenger seat of my car. It's imperfect, though; my biggest complaint is that I can only file songs under one artists' name. Usually, I'll defer to MusicBrainz, but consider the "Sum 41 Rock Remix" of Ludacris' "Get Back." I want that song to come up alongside my other Sum 41 songs, so it's filed with Sum 41 as the artist instead of Ludacris. And I think of "Under Pressure" as being by "Queen & David Bowie," not one or the other (and for once MusicBrainz agrees), so I have an Artist listing for "Queen & David Bowie" that contains only that song.

When looking for a solution to this problem, the closest I could find was over at the excellent site LifeHacker. A few months back there was a discussion of tag-cloud-style music tags, but specifically in the sense of sorting songs by the moods and emotions they evoke. The best solution offered for that problem was what I do anyway - I make a lot of playlists, and they're usually several hundred songs long. I use playlists to function as a "controlled random" - making sure I don't get any Dropkick Murphys when I'm trying to sleep, or any Mozart while I'm driving. Effectively, I'm tagging my music almost like I tag my emails in Gmail, with playlists serving the same purpose as labels. The only thing I took away from the discussion at LifeHacker was the idea of adding codewords to the "Comment" field of the ID3 tag, so that the playlist sorting would stay with the song.

For those who've never really looked into it, ID3 tags are a bit of information (actually, up to 256MB of information) contained in the MP3 file. According to Wikipedia, the concept of ID3 was born in 1996, a year after the first MP3 encoding software went public (the letters .mp3 were chosen to be the file extension 13 years ago today (July 14, 1995)). The first version of the tags, ID3v1, used a limited character set and couldn't even handle some songs' full titles if they were too long or used certain punctuation marks or foreign characters. ID3v2 tags have increased character limits, as well as new fields to hold album art, bitrate, and other pieces of information about the song. A lot of music organizers advertise themselves as "ID3v3" but according to ID3.org, there hasn't been a new standard since ID3v2.4 was proposed in November of 2000 (and even that hasn't fully taken hold due to "some disagreements on some of the revisions and the tremendous inertia present in the software and hardware marketplace.").

But I think it's time for a new version of ID3. ID3 is still stuck in a "Windows 98"-era mindset of folder-organization. That era has passed, and Flickr/del.icio.us/Gmail-style tagging is the way we now need to sort our information. I shouldn't have to attribute a song to one artist when 3 or 4 artists contribute to the track. I should be able to select an artist from the Artists list and see every song they've performed on, as a headliner or in a featuring role. And a playlist should be a list of songs to be played in order, not a workaround for music sorting.

Of course, I don't know if that's feasible practically. And I don't know how to program it. My plea to those who are better with computers than I am - give us an ID3v3 for the Web 2.0 crowd and a media player that can read it. Don't do it for me; do it for Lil Wayne and the 77 tracks he appeared on in 2007.

...and while we're at it, who else thinks that alphabetical order might be obsolete in a digital world?