Jan. 1, 2023 — Giftgiving for the New 12 months

Glad New 12 months, light readers.

That is the time of 12 months the place we hand out presents to the world of ladies’s athletics.

Right here’s a number of:

To Kaiya McCullogh, Kayleigh Kurtz, Sinead Farrelly, Mana Shim, and all different NWSL gamers who had been the goal of abusive and coercive habits by coaches and directors: I sincerely hope you’ll be able to discover pleasure on the soccer pitch once more, a pleasure unjustly wrested from you.

To Brittney Griner: the braveness to make use of your platform to display simply how plainly evil the Putin administration truly is.

To Philadelphia and Nashville: newly-minted WNBA and NWSL groups.

To the U.S. males’s nationwide discipline hockey staff: respect and funding.

To Christen Press: a slot within the closing roster for the USA. You’ve scored too many ridiculous targets to be left dwelling.

To Charlotte North: a stage which is able to enable much more fame and publicity than she’s been getting with Athletes Limitless.

To North American ladies’s lacrosse rulesmakers: the braveness to ditch time beyond regulation and go to 8-meter free positions to interrupt ties.

To the NCAA: a pain-free implementation of the video assistant referee in ladies’s lacrosse.

And, for that matter, implementation of VAR for ladies’s soccer after a blatant missed name within the closing.

To Sam Kerr: an infinite World Cup with success and targets aplenty.

To the LPGA: a good presence on community tv.

To Hailie Deegan: a win in SRX to silence the critics.

To the Premier Hockey Federation and the Skilled Ladies’s Hockey Gamers’ Affiliation: a way of detente and the conclusion that solely a unified skilled presence will assist develop the sport.

To the folks working this spring’s XFL and USFL: the conclusion that maybe the identical quantity of funding in professional ladies’s deal with soccer might need been higher.

To the world’s soccer media: the power to check what will occur this 12 months at a FIFA world occasion to a “males’s World Cup,” not only a “World Cup.”

To the FIFA Ladies’s World Cup, an epic closing between the USA and Canada.

To soccer journalists Meg Linehan and Molly Hensley-Clancy: a Pulitzer.

To the U.S. ladies’s discipline hockey staff: a streak of optimistic leads to the FIH Professional League.

To Karen Shelton, Ann Simons, Pat Toner, and different long-time coaches who’ve retired: an avenue to present again to the sport.

For anybody else I could not have talked about: a lot happiness and well being in 2023. Make it your finest ever!