Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

Greetings from unemployed/freelance life!

I am looking around for full-time work. If you like this newsletter or my work, maybe pass it along to someone who could be hiring.

I have some great reporting and pictures for you from North Carolina, where I covered the Washington Spirit on the road against the Courage in their 2-0 win on Saturday night.

There are also takes on the Courage’s future of scoring goals, VAR going too far and ruining great World Cup moments, and my curiosity about how to fix Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game and Home Run Derby.

As always, feel free to either read through or flip around as you see fit!

Here’s the Table of Contents.

Table of Contents

• Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

  • The Most Curious Thing This Week: The Photo Bay

    • “¡Vaya Golazo!”: Leicy Santos and Her Chart-Topping Goal

    • A Surprise Save on Sanchez?: Sandy MacIver Makes A Stop

    • Over the Shoulder: Deb Abiodun in Warmups

    • A Bundle of Laughts: Haley Wickenheiser

    • Kate Wiesner Calls for It

    • Hal Hershfelt Yells at the Ball

    • Action Jackson: Riley Jackson Busts Through Traffic

    • Ally Schlegel: Pink Warrior

  • My Reporting

    • The IX: Game Recap

    • MS NOW: VAR Gone Too Far?

  • Other Sports Takes and Things of Note

    • MLB All-Star

  • Something Good I Ate: My Sunday Morning Ritual in NC

And here’s Peach!

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s actually straight to the Photo Bay this time around, since my full thoughts on Saturday’s game between the Washington Spirit and North Carolina Courage in North Carolina have been published beyond the gates of this here newsletter! More on that in the My Reporting section.

But also, I just absolutely adored some of these photos I was able to take from the game. They’ll help tell the story of the game in a different way.

“¡Vaya Golazo!”: Leicy Santos and Her Chart-Topping Goal

After more than a half-hour of mostly controlling possession, the Spirit were in a familiar spot: knocking on the door of the goal but with nothing to show for it.

In the 37^th minute, Spirit attacking midfielder Leicy Santos found herself directly in front of goal just inside the 18-yard box. Spirit fullback Kate Wiesner arced a long pass forward from wide on the left side of the field. Santos stretched her right foot out to keep it off the ground and her first touch left a ball that floated just a little bit in front of her.

After just a moment of lining up her left foot with the trajectory of her volley, she reared back and fired the ball on the fly into the left side of the net past a diving Kailen Sheridan.

After the game, there were some rave reviews.

From teammate and fellow goalscorer Trinity Rodman: “To be able to take that touch and pop it up and volley it is crazy.”

From head coach Adrián González: “I just said, ‘what a goal,’ ‘vaya golazo’ in Spanish.”

And from ESPN’s SportsCenter: number one on their Top 10 plays list for Saturday.

@nwslsoccer

No surprise this Leicy Santos stunner made the #SCTop10 ⭐️ #NWSL

And needless to say, in the moment, Santos herself had good reason to be pretty happy.

A Surprise Save on Sanchez?

The first thing to note about the following sequence is none of it counted. After the fact, the flag came up and it was all ruled offside.

North Carolina’s Ashley Sanchez already had one goal taken away after a review found her teammate Shinomi Koyama was too close to the Spirit’s wall of defensive players ahead of the free kick where Sanchez originally scored.

Sanchez has a career-high nine goals this season, second among all NWSL players and just two behind Orlando’s prolific striker Barbra Banda.

Eager to get one that counted, Sanchez found herself on a breakaway in the 63^rd minute.

Washington’s keeper Sandy MacIver has made a seated save or two in her day and was able to anticipate Sanchez’s shot, lunging in sideways to make a diving stop as Sanchez slid forward after her shot and tumbled over.

After getting out of her sideways wrap around the ball and flipping onto her back, MacIver seemed… a bit surprised at ending up with the ball in her hands.

Over the Shoulder

Field-level sideline pictures are rare in any park in the NWSL since photographers are not posted there. In North Carolina, however, there is space to walk right along the sideline to get between the two end lines where photographers can shoot.

A photographer can’t post up there but if you keep moving, you might be able to sneak in a shot if your settings are right.

It’s a bit looser pregame, however, which gave me the perfect chance to stand probably not more than a few yards and a waist-high barrier away from Deb Abiodun as she launched a cross-field ball in warmups.

The chances to get a shot of a pro that close and from directly behind them is pretty rare, but here’s what it looks like.

A Bundle of Laughs

Moods are usually high in the moments before kickoff, especially among the players set to start the game on the bench.

The Courage’s midfielder Carly Wickenheiser was radiating joy while waiting for the starters to come out, as there was hardly a moment where she didn’t have a wide grin or a laugh.

She and her teammate, defender Cameron Brooks, were bouncing around and Brooks clearly cracked Wickenheiser up with a dramatic point over toward some of their teammates.

Kate Calls For It

Another picture stolen from a walk along the sidelines, this time mid-game.

Here, Spirit fullback Kate Wiesner has just crossed midfield and is calling for the ball.

Considering this picture came just a moment after she registered an assist on Leicy Santos’s goal by delivering a long pass from near the same spot, she had good reason to call for it again.

Hal Yells at the Ball

Spirit midfielder Hal Hershfelt is always good for an entertaining reaction shot, given how expressive she is on the field.

Here, she is almost certainly calling something out for her teammates based on where the ball ends up.

But it does look in this particular shot like she’s yelling at the ball itself for straying too far from the action.

Action Jackson

Courage midfielder Riley Jackson has been a key part of North Carolina’s offensive firepower. At just 20 years old, Jackson already has a cap for the senior U.S. national team and in the NWSL, she has a goal and an assist while helping create chances for attackers higher up the field.

Here, Jackson is closely defended by the Spirit’s Andi Sullivan, and seems to have found a way through to get past her. 

The ball, however, is already a few steps ahead.

Ally Schlegel: Pink Warrior

Courage winger Ally Schlegel always wears a big pink headband when she plays. By her account, she collected a group of them that she and her teammates wore at a tournament when she was a kid, and has been going through them ever since (there are still a handful left.)

For Saturday’s match, she seemed to go all out on the pink look, pairing her usual headband with a wide-ranging cover of what looked to be a pink version of eye black.

Schlegel is a tough, physical player who regularly throws herself into aerial duels with taller players and tries some hard tackles.

But sitting on her wrist tape was the clearest distillation of what it seems like the whole sport is all about. Written on their in black letters was a simple command: Have fun.

My Reporting

As mentioned, my full reporting exists beyond this newsletter, because I was able to freelance!

The wonderful folks at The IX were kind enough to take a pitch from me on the game from the Courage perspective, and then I was also able to write an opinion piece for my now-former employer MS NOW on the shortcomings of VAR at the World Cup.

Let’s take a look at both and give you a little more on both of those things.

The IX: Game Recap

From his arrival before this season, Courage head coach Mak Lind made it clear: his teams want to score goals. A lot of goals.

So far, North Carolina’s roughly in the middle of the pack in scoring, with 20 goals in 13 games.

But since the league returned to play at the start of July, they have been without star attacking midfielder Manaka Matsukubo, after English squad Chelsea reached a deal to sign her away.

Manaka was the lifeblood of the Courage attack last season, leading the team with 11 goals. She tacked on 5 more so far this season to go with 4 assists, but fell to second on the club’s goalscoring chart to winger Ashley Sanchez’s surge to 9 goals so far in 2026.

Losing Manaka’s goalscoring and creativity raised the question of just how much Lind’s new system would produce.

So far, there isn’t a clear answer. In the first game back from the June break, the Courage won 3-1 against the Seattle Reign, with Sanchez scoring two. But on Saturday against the Spirit, they were shut out 2-0.

There were no shortage of chances, however, so it left the club with an eye toward building on their fundamentals and turning it into more goals and more wins down the road.

I wrote on it in a freelance piece for The IX. If you’re not familiar, they do some wonderful work providing detailed coverage of all sorts of women’s sports and you should go ahead and follow what they do and subscribe to their work.

Here’s a bit of what I wrote for them:

And there was more in the piece, from Courage fullback Ryan Williams, who has been pushed higher up to play a bigger role in the attack despite being a defender:

You can read the full piece here.

MS NOW: VAR Gone Too Far?

Even after being laid off, folks at MS NOW are still giving me the opportunity to opine on things, especially around the ongoing FIFA men’s World Cup.

This year, it has felt like VAR has taken the spotlight away from some of the biggest on-field moments.

VAR is the acronym for Video Assistant Referee, the off-field official whose job it is to sit in a room full of monitors and check the calls made on the field.

While the introduction of VAR about a decade ago was meant to correct some of the most egregious blown calls, it has quickly descended into tedious, often arbitrary refereeing.

Split-second calls are now being re-litigated through slow-motion replay, leading to controversial moves like the decision to upgrade a tackle by U.S. player Folarin Balogun from no card directly to a red card. (That’s the decision where President Trump leaned on FIFA boss Gianni Infantino to rescind Balogun’s related suspension.)

I generally love adding replay reviews to sports. I think being correct matters a ton. But in the piece I wrote, I came down on the side that the perfect is the enemy of the good here.

And far be it from me to simply criticize the problem, I proposed a solution: wrap it up in 60 seconds. Give VAR 30 seconds to look at a call after the whistle or a stop in play, and 30 more seconds if needed to get the ref to look at it and make the final call.

Baseball and tennis have made quick replay reviews work with their automatic ball/strike challenge system and in/out line judging, respectively. But sports like basketball, football, and now soccer see games drag on forever thanks to an array of slow reviews.

Either get it done or move on.

You can read my full take on the VAR situation here.

Other Sports Takes and Things of Note

MLB All-Star

I am dreading MLB’s All-Star Game festivities and I feel terrible about it. 

Major League Baseball has the best all-star game of any of the major American sports leagues. Maybe it’s because it’s the oldest and the game carries a bit more pomp and circumstance. Maybe it’s some nostalgia on my part, I don’t know.

In the modern game, though, it is kind of wearing out its welcome. Players already opt out a lot—starting pitchers who throw the Sunday before the game sit out, as well as other folks managing injury or workload. MLB has kept its traditional approach of American League vs National League intact, even as other leagues have tried (and largely failed) to make things more compelling with multi-team tournaments, schoolyard-style pick’ems, or U.S. vs. World splits.

I don’t think that’s an especially bad thing but it does leave the league as an example of the classic problem. The All-Star Game used to be a fantasy come true. Players who never faced each other would have the chance to do so and the public would get to experience it, first on radio and later on TV. 

But now, when every game is available to watch live and every team plays each other, there’s not much novelty to it.

The Home Run Derby, on the other hand, has long been a joy. And despite a million different formats, occasionally the league strikes gold.

MLB used to have an amazing format: a tournament where each batter had as many pitches as they could take or hit until they hit 10 balls that were not home runs. It gave fans insane moments, like when then-Texas Rangers slugger Josh Hamilton went on a generational run in the 2008 All-Star Game held in the old Yankee Stadium in its final season.

It was great, but it could take forever as hitters could often become extremely judicious on pitches.

In recent years, the Derby found a faster-paced, but possibly even more thrilling setup. Players had four minutes to hit as many home runs as they could, with 30 seconds of bonus time available if they hit two home runs longer than a particular distance.

It worked great. One of the most memorable examples came in Washington in 2018, when then-local Nationals slugger Bryce Harper hit a Derby-winning home run as the clock ticked down.

But of course, MLB can’t have that much fun. This year, they changed the format again in a way that seems like it will neuter the joy.

Now, it’s not timed, but it’s not about outs. It’s about swings. Hitters will have an increasingly small number of swings as the bracket is culled—20 in the first round, 15 in the second, 10 in the finals.

While MLB did allow for players to keep going if they homer on their final swing, it all but shuts the door on prolific home run binges. In this format, you won’t see a player hit more than 20 home runs in their round or even see them hit 20 in quick succession. You’ll have to wait and hope they go 10-for-10. 

No wonder this league is on the brink of locking out its players in perpetuity after the end of the season.

Something Good I Ate

This time we’re bending the rules a bit for something good I drank, but on the way out from North Carolina, I stopped at Morning Ritual, a coffee shop that is technically in Durham but really on the outskirts by Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

All three times that I have covered games in North Carolina, I have stopped in on the following Sunday morning before the long drive back up toward DC.

It’s a lovely little corner of an all-day/brunch-friendly restaurant on a pretty quiet street in an otherwise pretty generic suburban development.

But the spot itself provides a nice little tranquil spot to take a seat and idly sip on a really good iced coffee.

It’s been warm pretty much every time I’ve been there, so I’ve defaulted to their iced lattes. The iced vanilla latte, like the one pictured here from Sunday, is one you can’t go wrong with.