Brooke de Lench's blog

Everything I do today will be overshadowed by concern for a young raising star hockey player, Jack Jablonski, and the struggle he is going through days after suffering partial paralysis from a severed spinal cord when he slammed head first into the boards when he was illegally checked from behind by two opposing players during a holiday tournament in Minnesota.

I remember one time, when my kids were six, going ice skating at a new rink with my sister Drew, her daughter Courtney, and my triplet sons. The excitement of a new rink and lots of kids zipping around provided for a lot of great fun and laughs, but ended, unfortunately, in an accident and a terrifying trip to the hospital, the memory of which is still vivid.

This is a success story virtually without equal in women's sports in the post-Title IX era. A story not only about the success of one remarkable young woman, but about her parents and those, like me, who were privileged to watch her grow from a starry-eyed and talented teenager to the mature, self-assured woman she is today; a story which should serve, not only as an inspiration to any youth athlete who wants to reach the elite level in their sport, but for their parents as well.

Two days ago, Angela Ruggiero held a press conference to announce her retirement from women's ice hockey, two weeks after she told me of her decision.

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).

The alleged sexual abuse of boys by a longtime coach at Penn State* has focused media attention once again on the issue.  For the parents of the alleged victims, of course, their worst nightmares have come true. But what could have been done to prevent it? And is the culture of male sports itself at least partially to blame?

The sad fact, as noted in an article by Michael Hartill, a lecturer in the Department of Sport and Physical Activity at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, England who has studied sexual abuse of boys in sports extensively, is that "the largely unregulated world of children's sport has typically been slow to address the issue of sexual abuse of youth athletes."