Youth Soccer

Soccer AC St. Louis withstands heat, Palace Baltimore, 1-0 With temperatures reaching 106 degrees Saturday at the Maryland SoccerPlex in Boyds, AC St.Louis (4-10-4) used a goal by Mike Ambersley in the 74th minute to earn a 1-0 victory over Crystal Palace Baltimore (5-9-4) in the USSF 2nd Division. Palace Baltimore's two shots on goal were by Japanese midfielder Tsuyoshi Yoshitake . Palace's next game will be Saturday against the Montreal Impact in Boyds. D.C. United: Danny Allsopp scored three times to help D.C. United beat second-tier English team Portsmouth, 4-0, at RFK Stadium.

A member of the top-rated youth soccer program in the country, Mike Gamble was asked what it felt like to put on the Baltimore Bays' jersey. Gamble, currently on the club's under-16 team and one of the U.S.'s most promising players, hinted that the better question may have been whether he ever takes the jersey off. "In my house and everywhere I go, I'm always wearing Bays stuff because I feel so much pride," said Gamble, the team's top...

Youth soccer Under-19 Bays win crown by defeating NASA Elite, 2-0 The Baltimore Bays' under-19 team beat NASA Elite of Georgia, 2-0, in the national championship game of U.S. Youth Soccer on Sunday in Lancaster, Pa. Mark Jaskolski scored in the 45th minute, assisted by J.J. Raley, to give the Bays the lead. Brendan Klebanoff scored in the 89th minute on an assist from Mike Lansing. The under-19 Bays have won three national championships in the past four years, having won at under-16 and under-18.

Bays under-19 team earns 2-1 win in 2nd round of nationals The Baltimore Bays under-19 team used goals by J.J. Raley and Gary Weisbaum in the final four minutes to top Pike Indy Burn from Indiana, 2-1, on Thursday in the second round of the U.S. Youth National Soccer championship at Lancaster, Mass. The Bays will advance to Sunday's national championship game with a win or a tie against the Colorado Rush today. The Bays under-15 team earned a 1-1 tie with Blast FC from Ohio and will qualify for the championship game with a victory over South Charlotte Gold from North Carolina today.

Cycling All riders tested pass for Tour de France All 189 riders who underwent blood tests ahead of the start of tomorrow's Tour de France showed negative results, the International Cycling Union said. The UCI carried out the tests across the 21 teams early yesterday morning. The race, which will finish July 29, will start with a 4.9-mile prologue in London, then move to Canterbury on Sunday before heading into Belgium and France. The announcement comes on the heels of Germany making it a criminal offense to possess and deal in performance-enhancing drugs.

The way Dan Wolin sees it, Cape Soccer will move forward by going back to the basics. The commissioner of Cape St. Claire Recreation Council Soccer is preparing to hire more experienced soccer instructors to show the young players the fundamentals of the game - and the coaches new ways to teach them. "I want the kids who play to have better skills than they currently have," Wolin said. "We've gotten a lot of good feedback from the coaches on this; they want to have it." Wolin wants to add a mandatory skills session each week starting in the spring, where experienced coaches work with the players and coaches.

If being a soccer fan in America is wrong, I don't want to be right. It's shameful that sports fans in this country huddle behind the provincial boundaries of a few America-centric professional sports. There's a big world out there, and most of it is focused on the World Cup right now. While you were carving out time to watch the fourth-place Orioles play the fourth-place Minnesota Twins over the weekend, you probably missed much of the drama that was playing out in Germany. Take Saturday, for instance, when Paraguay scored the only goal of the game against England and lost, 1-0 ... or when Trinidad and Tobago took a raucous victory lap after playing heavily favored Sweden to a 0-0 tie. England won on an "own goal" when a Paraguayan defender accidentally headed David Beckham's free kick past his own goalie.

BILL STARA, honored last month for the second time by his peers as a national coach of the year, has resigned as coaching director of the 6,000-player Soccer Association of Columbia-Howard County. Stara, 47, a teacher at River Hill High School and coach of the school's dominant boys soccer team, said he wanted to extend the paid, part-time SAC-HC job into a full-time position but that he and the youth club could not agree on terms. "Sometime in the future, I'd like to be a full-time director of a club that wants to do all the right things to teach the sport, as well as compete at a high level, and I was hoping that SAC was the right fit," said Stara, a one-time pro indoor goalkeeper.

Can you hear it? The Thunder is getting louder. The Soccer Association of Western Howard County was formed in 1991 with one travel team for boys under age 10. But the club - Howard's "other" sizable youth soccer organization - grew steadily throughout the decade and changed names, taking on the name Thunder Soccer Club five years ago. Things really began to heat up about three years ago, though, when the club had grown to 17 age-group teams. Several factors combined to spark growth . Today, the Thunder is fielding 45 to 50 travel teams, depending on whether it is the fall or spring season.