Football

Robin Zahor of Ellicott City spends at least two hours every weekend watching her sons play football. "I sit there like a stooge," said Zahor, 45. "It's complicated to me, and I can't ask anybody -- I feel like an idiot." "This is torture," she added. So Tuesday night, Zahor and 29 other women huddled in the central library's meeting room to hear Diane Schumacher, athletic director at Howard Community College, present "Football for Femmes." "I really need this class," Zahor said. Schumacher starts off with a simple question: "Why are you all here?"

As we sit around palpitating about the undue process of NFL expansion, it's time for a confession. There is a bothersome aspect to the possibility, however remote, that we might get a franchise.It means we would actually have to watch NFL games.Who would want to do that?C'mon, admit it: It's one thing to lie around and watch, but you haven't come across more than a couple of truly interesting games, have you? Didn't think so. It's all Jets and Colts, or so it seems.OK, yes, it's different when you have your own team, when you're grabbed by the lure of the home team, the personalities, the politics, the fraternity of rooting.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed an age discrimination lawsuit against the National Football League yesterday, claiming the league was not playing fair with its older referees."

McDonogh senior Cap Poklemba has played baseball and soccer since he was 5.On Tuesday night, however, Poklemba orally accepted a full scholarship to play football at Temple after only one season of high school football.The scholarship, for soccer-style kicking ability that almost always landed the ball out of the end zone, will allow Poklemba to play baseball, as well. Mississippi, Clemson and Northwestern also expressed interest.Several times last fall, the second-team All-Metro shortstop from Taylorsville took time away from soccer and football to go on recruiting visits for baseball -- his initial focus.

Call them the "CFL Colts." The "Baltimore CFL Colts."That is owner Jim Speros' compromise choice for the name of his Canadian Football League expansion team, which will begin play here this summer.The announcement was made at a downtown hotel this morning. Also unveiled was the team logo, which is a chess-like figure of a horse's head.The decision to identify the new team as the "CFL Colts" is a concession to a threatened lawsuit by the National Football League for an alleged trademark infringement.

Many might guess Amos Alonzo Stagg, Knute Rockne or Pop Warner. But they were famous coaches. The American game's originator, and there's no argument over the point, was Walter Camp. * Camp, an early rugby player at Yale University, is credited with Americanizing the English game in 1879 while still in college. He later helped found the National College Athletic Association and was on every football rules committee through 1911. He died in 1925. * Rules he persuaded others to use included starting plays from a stationary scrimmage line, snapping the ball from a center, having four downs to advance the ball or yield it, having set plays, and limiting teams to 11 players on the field.

Lawyers for the county school board asked a Carroll County judge to dismiss a $1.25 million suit filed in August by the county's first female high school football player.Tawana Hammond, a safety and fullback for the Francis Scott Key Eagles, is seeking damages as a result of injuries she received during a 1989 scrimmage. She claims in her suit that the school board failed to adequately warn her of the dangers inherent in football.Her mother, Peggy Hammond, also is a plaintiff in the case.

Selling football tickets for a team that doesn't yet exist is nothing new for Baltimore.Baltimore was required to sell 15,000 season tickets before the Dallas Texans were allowed to move here in 1953. The tickets were sold in four weeks -- two weeks less than the maximum established by the NFL commissioner -- and the team moved here and changed its name to the Colts.And city leaders, incensed with the 1984 departure of the Colts to Indianapolis, announced a season-ticket drive that year to try to convince the NFL that there were football fans here, even though many of them had soured on the Colts.

Broadneck's Jason Smith, one of the area's top all-around athletes, has verbally committed to play football at Rutgers next fall.Smith, a 6-foot-2, 170-pound receiver, made his decision yesterday, choosing the Scarlet Knights over Boston College and Nebraska."

We all know what's wrong with football. The game's ills are reported almost ad nauseam.John Bridgers, who was back in Baltimore this week, has written a book entitled "What's Right with Football." It will be published in the spring by Eason Press in Austin, Texas.Bridgers spent 28 years coaching football. In the late 1950s, he was an assistant to the Colts' Weeb Ewbank. For four years before that, he coached Johns Hopkins. Later he coached with Paul Dietzel and Chuck Noll.Counting his time as athletic director at Baylor, Florida and New Mexico, Bridgers worked in football 42 years -- plus the four he played at Auburn.