Shifting gears here for a sec ...

Stars and Stripes will name its Pacific high school spring season Athletes of the Quarter on Sunday.

For 21 years, we've selected each season a boy and a girl for top honours, and also have tabbed our Coach of the Quarter, team and program of the quarter, most improved team and program among other categories.

Those award winners are selected via coaches' nominations with yours truly the final selection authority.

We turned the comments off Tuesday night to give the blog a "cool-down" period. While we feel its important for people to be able to express their opinions, we'd like them to conduct themselves in an manner that is fit for a public discussion in a public space.

We want to make this space available for people to discuss Pacific sports, but won't be able to if every discussion devolves into back-and-forth name-calling. All discussion must display the same spirit of sportsmanship in our comments that we expect from our student-athletes, coaches and parents.

Wild Wednesday segued into Fabulous Friday.

What a series of championship matches we witnessed! Three went to overtime. Two went to PKs.

That's what championship soccer is truly all about.

Jen Abel, coach Hoa Nguyen and the Kadena Panthers most certainly didn't expect their run of three straight Far East Girls Class AA Soccer Tournament titles to end that way.

Not with Abel sent off with a second yellow card for dissent -- the first time she's been DQ'd from a game in her entire career. Not with Nguyen ordering his team to take a seat on the field and quit playing the moment he discovered that the center referee in Thursday's semifinal was a parent of a rival Nile C. Kinnick player.

Wow! What a wild Wednesday that was!

If Best Damned Sports Show Period ever did a top 50 list of the greatest games ever played in Far East tournaments, that Taegu American overtime victory over Matthew C. Perry in the Girls Class A Tournament would have to make the top 10.

"How can the boys final ever top that?" I asked, minutes after the girls final and minutes before E.J. King and Indianhead International took the pitch for the Boys Class A title clash.

It did.

NASA might have to ramp up its timetable for the next moon shot considerably, if anybody is to someday post any serious challenge to Kadena senior striker Jen Abel’s other-worldly goal-scoring totals.

Should Jeff Morton be at the Kanto Plain Invitational track and field meet?