Photo Gallery.  Dunbar 33 Coolidge 21.  Nov. 24th.  © 2011 Matt Dunn

Sign of the times: The city's public schools championship game is no longer just the Turkey Bowl. It's the 42nd Annual Safeway Turkey Bowl.
This year's game, featuring Coolidge and Dunbar, will be the first Bowl held since Mayor Vincent Gray sold the naming rights of the biggest event on D.C.'s scholastic sports [...]

Stephanie Evans will be the next athletic director of D.C. Public Schools. Mayor Vince Gray is scheduled to announce Evans' hiring this morning.
Not counting interim directors, she is the fourth person to hold the job in the last four years.
Unless I've missed somebody, Evans is also the first female athletic director in the school system's [...]

Friendship Collegiate faces H.D. Woodson tonight in what's being billed as The Real Turkey Bowl.
The game has scads of story lines. The most dramatic: Woodson is the past; Friendship is the future.
Woodson is the defending public schools champion. They've got a new state of the art stadium and new state of the art school building [...]

I wrote lots of words for this week's print edition of Washington City Paper about the sorry hand DC Public Schools football players have been dealt.
The adults who run athletics for DC's high schools do the poorest job of running a league that I've ever seen. Nobody comes close.
Forfeits come in bunches in the city's [...]

photo by Darrow Montgomery

Somebody's gotta win.
Remember when Michelle Rhee pronounced the vote against her boss as "devastating for the children of D.C.," the cockiest  utterance from a D.C. public official since Marion Barry's "Get over it!"? (Yeah, Rhee is a public official. I just looked it up.)
Well, it's real tough to view Rhee's leaving, if that's what she's promising us, as much of a loss when [...]

For the justifiably overappreciated print version of Washington City Paper, I wrote this week about how Natalie Randolph, the new Coolidge coach and Parade cover girl, is being used to cover up serious gender inequities within the athletic programs offered by D.C. Public Schools under Michelle Rhee. Pick up a copy, read the column, gaze [...]

DCIAA title basketball game, Ballou beats Eastern, 103-89.

Just before game time yesterday, Dan Snyder, following Cheap Seats Daily's pro bono crisis PR counsel, dropped the FedExField sign ban. Snyder had just as quietly and cowardly put the ban in place before the Tampa Bay game a few weeks ago to keep fans from showing how much they hate him.
“We have no intention [...]

Above is an ad e-mailed out by the Redskins ticket office this week. As you read this, remember, for chuckles, that just a couple months ago Redskins executive Mitch Gershman was claiming in press releases that the team had a waiting list of "over 200,000."
Sure, the Skins waiting list has long been bogus. But this [...]

Another day, another update on Dan Snyder's Cheerleader Car Wash Sweepstakes. Another chance to run that fab/yucky photo from Snyder's WTEM promotion, the one that's sucked in some of the most brilliant minds in new media to our humble comments section.
Seems Snyder doesn't really care who he jumps in bed with these days. His partner [...]

For the print edition of City Paper, I wrote yet another column about Charles Mann and Art Monk's debacle in Anacostia. The former Redskins spent a decade promising that community a job training center, and then sold the proposed site for more than 10 times what they paid the city to obtain it.
One fascinating (to [...]

Stephen Strasburg and the Nationals played chicken, like those hot rodders in "Rebel Without a Cause."
That made for an amazing night to not watch sports, and just refresh this and that web page every few minutes hoping for some Breaking News. Would Strasburg be without a contract? Would the Lerners be without another top draft [...]

When I spoke with the NFL's Davis brothers, Vernon and Vontae, before last weekend's youth football camp at their alma mater, Dunbar, they confirmed that they decided where to go to college because of Mike Locksley. He's the DC native and former Maryland and Illinois assistant coach who gained renown by developing a pipeline of [...]