Sports Arena

Girls soccerThe under-19 Joppatowne Soccer Club Thunder defeated Edgewood, 5-2, to win the Red Conference Championship at the Maryland Sports Arena.Amanda Laughton and Nicole Simone scored twice each for the Thunder, and Nikki Terzigni scored once. Assists were made by Carrie Gorsch and Holly Harris.On Friday, the Thunder will meet Joppatowne Purple at the Edgewood arena for the league championship.Boys soccerUnder-8 -- Fallston tallied its sixth straight win in a 17-0 shutout of Joppatowne in indoor action at the Maryland Sports Arena.

Boys soccerWhen members of the D & M Storm traveled to the National Indoor Soccer Championships in Atlanta last weekend they expected to play well, but after advancing to the finals, the team was in position to win the national tournament.What they got was a second-place finish, cruising to the finals but losing to a tough Canadian team, the Maverick Magic, 4-2.opened with a win over the Georgia Steamers, 8-1, but then lost to the Wisconsin Wave, 3-0. The Storm then played the Syracuse Blitz, needing a win to advance to the quarterfinals.

After almost a decade competing in professional and Olympic level soccer, Bobby McAvan had to hang up his shoes in 1985 due to injury.But he wasn't about to give up for good the sport he'd played as a young boy on the streets of his native home, Dundee, Scotland.Today, you'll find McAvan, 38, passing on his enthusiasm and knowledge of the game to young players who jam the Maryland Sports Arena in Edgewood weeknights and weekends.McAvan and his business partner, Abingdon resident Ron Szczybor, have transformed the former indoor tennis barn into the county's only indoor soccer arena.

FootballTen-year-old Kiel Kauserud of Bel Air not only had a chance to enjoy the Washington Redskins game at RFK Stadium last weekend, the Redskins picked up the tab and provided the turf for Kauserud to play on during the NFL's annual Gatorade Punt, Pass & Kick Contest.Kauserud joined youngsters ages 8-13 at RFK at halftime last Sunday for the competition. Kauserud won the age-10 bracket with 190.3 points. He may have a chance to compete at the Pro Bowl in Honolulu on Feb. 6 for a national title.

General Assembly leaders say that if Baltimore fails to win a National Football League team, the city still may get the bulk of stadium construction money to use for some other tourist-attracting facility, such as a new sports arena."

John A. Moag Jr., the head of the Maryland Stadium Authority and the man who engineered the Cleveland Browns' move to Baltimore, has been named by Legg Mason Wood Walker Inc. to lead an investment group catering to the sports industry.Moag, 43, becomes managing director of Legg Mason's professional sports industry group, the Baltimore-based investment house said yesterday.Moag had been a partner and lobbyist based in the Baltimore office of Patton Boggs LLP, a Washington law firm, where he focused on sports-related legal issues and negotiations.

The proposals for a new Baltimore arena envision a sporting and entertainment venue unlike any in the city: a seven-screen movie theater, a rooftop park, a 1,000-seat concert hall, hotels and, of course, an 18,500-seat sports arena in combination with some or all of the above. But what's missing is any reasonable idea of who's going to pay to build a $300 million-plus complex in this economy, and without that element, the arena proposals remain little more than grand dreams of a re-imagined civic center.

LOS ANGELES -- All right, you people, everybody who predicted last summer that the Los Angeles Clippers would be the last Los Angeles sporting franchise eliminated from this years' playoffs, front and center. Don't shove, there's room up here for both of you.Yes, friends, the Los Angeles Kings are dead, the Los Angeles Lakers will consider themselves blessed when a merciful curtain is drawn over their star-crossed season tonight, but the Clippers -- the lowly Clippers -- live to fight another day.Their 98-88 win over the Utah Jazz at the Sports Arena in Game 3 of their best-of-five series last night was a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

ST. LOUIS - When they named a University of Missouri sports arena after their daughter, billionaire Wal-Mart heirs Nancy and Bill Laurie pronounced themselves "very proud parents." But this week, they found themselves stripping her name from the building on the Columbia campus - after allegations that she paid a roommate $20,000 to do most of her coursework at the University of Southern California. Elizabeth Paige Laurie, 22, graduated from USC this year. But her first-semester roommate, Elena Martinez, says the Lauries' daughter hired her to write papers, prepare oral reports and even exchange e-mail with professors in nearly every class she took for four years.

Brash. Assertive. Megalomaniacal.These are adjectives Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jim Murray uses in his new biography to describe Jack Kent Cooke, the Washington Redskins owner who says he plans to move his NFL team to Laurel.But Murray, who got to know Cooke well during his days as a sports owner in Los Angeles, even having Cooke as a guest in his home, also says this of him: "He was as unstoppable as a glacier."It's good to keep all that in mind as we try to figure out Cooke's plan to abandon the District of Columbia and move his Redskins to Anne Arundel County.