Karl Lindholm: Men’s basketball: Grieving a lost season

Tara Parker-Pope is the editor of “Well,” the New York Times consumer health site. On March 15, she wrote a piece titled “It’s OK to Grieve the Small Losses of a Lost Year.” Citing mental health experts, she discusses “disenfranchised grief,” that is, grieving those “smaller losses that don’t involve loss of human life, or the loss of a job,” or other losses on that scale: “There is a kind of grief,” she wrote, “that isn’t routinely acknowledged. From lost time with grandchildren to canceled vacations, we n … (read more)

This three-part series on Women in Baseball was supposed to be just a two-parter: one on women in the front offices of Major League Baseball and another on women actually on the field playing baseball. In the baseball course I taught at Middlebury College … (read more)

Second in a series Just a few weeks after Kim Ng was hired by the Miami Marlins to run their team as the general manager, the Red Sox hired Bianca Smith to be the first Black woman to coach in the major leagues and the second woman overall: Yes, those Red … (read more)

The first in a series. This has been a good year for women in baseball. That’s a sentence that could not have been written before this year. This year is different and may mark a turning point in women’s participation in the Grand Old Game. The hiring of … (read more)

I am not a winter person. I don’t like winter. Never have. I have lived in Maine or Vermont nearly my whole life. That’s probably why I don’t like it: pure Yankee obstinacy. I don’t want to live anywhere else though, even in winter. Winter is winter in Ve … (read more)

Driving down Route 125, College Street, as I do most days, I noticed a temporary structure had gone up in the middle of the Middlebury College campus. It’s a “winterized tent” where “students can hang out” in this pandemic-compromised winter, with an adja … (read more)

I have attended, in person, thousands of baseball games, many thousands, but one stands out in high relief: This game was the most dramatic I have witnessed in any sport ever. As I mentioned in this space a couple months ago, my wife Brett worked for the … (read more)

This is the story of Nancy Gaden, basketball player extraordinaire. Before we tell of Nancy’s accomplishments, let’s set the context: if you look at the record book in women’s basketball at Middlebury College, one woman dominates: Sladja Kovijanic, ’93. S … (read more)

Donald “Dee” Rowe, Middlebury College, class of 1952, died at age 91 on January 10. Dee was a major figure in basketball circles in New England and nationally: his obituary in the Boston Globe called him “the ebullient lodestar to a constellation of New E … (read more)

“The Yankees cannot lose.” “But I fear the Indians of Cleveland.”                                 (“The Old Man and the Sea,” Ernest Hemingway, 1956)   The Indians are my second favorite baseball team — and have been since I was a baseball-obsessed kid. I … (read more)

The best uniform number in sports is 42, Jackie Robinson’s number. It’s been retired by Major League Baseball — no MLB player will ever wear it again. That’s a high honor, the highest. The Jackie Robinson movie was simply titled “42.” If you reverse 42 yo … (read more)

The latest in a series of columns inspired by the centennial of baseball’s Negro Leagues. In any discussion of race and baseball, Red Sox don’t fare very well — that is, the Boston Red Sox. We all know by now that the Red Sox were the last Major League te … (read more)

Editor’s note: This Thanksgiving column by popular columnist Karl Lindholm is an oldie but a goodie. Originally published in 2001 (all the ages are almost two decades out of date) and then again in 2007. It evokes what is in some ways a bygone era, and ye … (read more)

Katharine DeLorenzo’s Middlebury College field hockey team has won three NCAA Division III championships in a row with an overall won-loss record in that time of 62-4. This fall season, however, they didn’t win a single game! The Middlebury football team, … (read more)

I was hoping to get my pals together for one last round of golf before we shut it down for the winter. Monday night last week, Election Eve, was cold with snow on the way, and, sure enough, the next morning, we were greeted with three inches of heavy snow … (read more)