Thursday Cardinal Couple - Letters, We've Got Letters

THURSDAY CARDINAL COUPLE

( CARDINAL COUPLE columnist Jeff McAdams puts the pen to paper and sings signs today's column before faxing it to Co-Co...who promptly delivers it to Bill The Goat for a tasty mid-morning snack. Here at CARDINAL COUPLE, we do a lot of singing, not so much signing anymore since Timmy The Intern fed most of our writing utensils to Billy. )

Apparently yesterday was National Singing Day...though why so many people were so gung ho about their favorite choirs, I'm not so sure.  Signing?  Not singing?  Oh, well that's different.  (With apologies to Emily Litella).

Yes, yesterday was the beginning of the spring signing period, where athletes sign and submit their National Letters of Intent to the school of their choice.  This process was enacted to give prospective student athletes a way to turn off the deluge of communication from college coaches in their recruiting efforts.  Although, it appears to have also given the student athletes the forum to make grand pronouncements and garner massive amount of sports media attention...at least for a few sports.  By signing a National Letter of Intent, the student athlete is put off-limits for further recruiting efforts.  The other significance to the NLI is to allow the schools to publicly speak about the recruits.

In addition to Football, however, yesterday started the signing period for a number of other sports, notably for us here at The Cardinal Couple:  Field Hockey, Soccer, Track and Field, and Cross Country.

Field Hockey

Gianna Perrone is the only prospective student athlete, outside of Football, that has been confirmed as submitting an NLI to Louisville.

Gianna is out of Eastern Regional High School in Vorhees, New Jersey in the Camden, NJ/Philadelphia, PA metro area.  Eastern has quite the reputation as a Field Hockey powerhouse, most recently by being ranked as the number one team in the country for the past two seasons.  Eastern also holds the national record for consecutive wins at 153 and has won 14 consecutive state championships in New Jersey.

Louisville Field Hockey coach Justine Sowry has apparently signed another 5 players, who will be announced in the coming weeks.

-- This has been the first Signing Day in several years that your affable Co-Owner Paulie hasn't been involved in a Signing Day Party at the Parrish House with Louisville Sports Report for Cardinal Football. That's probably because the Parrish House has been vacated and the new tenant hasn't been determined yet. It still didn't prevent a few of us from going down there, though...and signing (and singing a bit as well) each other's shirts, newspapers and court-ordered summons documents out in the middle of Boxley Avenue. We haven't determined how well Gianna Perrone can sing yet...maybe she'll stop in for Timmy The Intern's weekly karaoke at the Fischer's caboose. Yup, slow Wednesday night. --