Queen’s women’s field hockey team opened their season with mixed results from a doubleheader at Waterloo last weekend.
The Gaels, who finished third in the OUA last season, lost a close game on Saturday 1-0 to the York Lions, last year’s OUA silver medalists. The Gaels rebounded on Sunday with a 4-0 defeat of Carleton. Hilary Piets scored twice for the Gaels, while Emily Newton and Kristen Jewell added single goals.

Next year, you might be paying more for that aerobics class, Pilates session or intramural volleyball team.
Although it doesn’t explicitly recommend the institution of fees for intramural sports, the Athletics and Recreation Review asks Leslie Dal Cin, Athletics and Recreation Chair to “commission a report on fees for instructional programs at other universities along with recommendations for possible fees for any Campus Recreation programs at Queens.” Right now, students’ annual athletics and recreation fee subsidizes their participation in intramural sports, instructional programs and V.I.P. fitness classes.

This weekend will be busy for the Gaels. At 1 p.m. Saturday, the men’s rugby team will face the McMaster Marauders at Kingston Field. The Gaels are 2-0 so far, lead the OUA East and have outscored their opponents 154 to three to this point.

The recent eight-game “Super Series” between Canada’s hockey juniors and their Russian counterparts, in which Canada went undefeated with seven wins and one tie, has been glorified by some as another measurement of our country’s worldwide hockey dominance. Others see it for what it truly was: a tiresome waste of time.

The Queen’s soccer teams took a long road trip to North Bay and Sudbury this past weekend, taking on the Nipissing Lakers and the Laurentian Voyageurs.
On Saturday, the women’s team tied the Lakers 1-1 with a goal from Renee MacLellan, while the men lost 1-0.
On Sunday, Katie McKenna recorded her fourth straight shutout for the Gaels in a 0-0 draw. The men were able to convert some scoring chances in their game, and won 3-0 on goals from Brent Lukowski, Stephane Detchou and Nick Milonas.

A hard-fought women’s rugby match against the Trent Excalibur Sunday afternoon resulted in a 20-15 win for the host Golden Gaels.
Winger Jocelyn Poirier said she was happy with her team’s effort late in the second half.

The Gaels’ football team came from behind to win for the third straight game on Saturday, beating the McMaster Marauders 24-20 at Richardson Stadium.

Steve Shortly was a driving force behind the men’s rugby team’s 78-0 romp over Trent University last Saturday. Shortly scored two tries and set up another during the first half, leading the Gaels to an opening-half start from which the Excalibur couldn’t recover.

The Golden Gaels women’s rugby team opened their season with a convincing 31-19 win over the York University Lions on Wednesday.
The team received tries from five different players, including two from scrum-half Lauren Young.
Young, one of the team’s four co-captains, said she was pleased with her team’s effort.

One of the greatest rivalries in southern Ontario took to the pitch on Wednesday afternoon as the unbeaten Golden Gaels travelled to the Royal Military College to play the Paladins for Kingston soccer supremacy.

It was a tough weekend road trip for Gaels soccer. The men’s and women’s teams both earned draws against the Carleton Ravens on Saturday, but the women’s team lost to the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees on Sunday.

With all the scandal surrounding professional sports over the past few months, it’s easy for even the most forgiving fan to become disillusioned with them altogether.

The Gaels’ men’s rugby squad put on a show in their home opener Saturday, defeating the Trent Excalibur 78-0.
In the second half, the Gaels used all seven of their reserve players. One of the starters who remained in the match, fourth-year veteran Colin Alexander, scored the game’s most spectacular try. The Excalibur had the ball within 10 yards of the Queen’s goal when Mike Simmons knocked it loose with a hard tackle. Tim Richardson recovered the ball and quickly passed to Alexander, who promptly ran the length of the field and dodged several tacklers to record the try.

The men’s football team overcame a slow start to defeat the Guelph Gryphons 26-14 in their rain-soaked home opener on Sunday.

Women’s soccer turned in an impressive performance on Saturday, defeating the Ryerson Rams 2-0, and then tied the perennially strong University of Toronto Varsity Blues 0-0 on Sunday. The team had a lot to prove after winning silver at last year’s nationals.

The Golden Gaels’ basketball teams had rude awakenings this past weekend as a pair of NCAA teams gave them a lot to think about.
At Carleton University, the men’s team was soundly defeated 73-43 by the Villanova Wildcats of the Big East Conference. The Wildcats raced to a 23-2 lead and never looked back, leading 41-16 at halftime.

Probably the best way to justify raising the athletics fee is to consider the consequences of not doing so.
First, Queen’s interuniversity teams will suffer. As suggested in the Athletics Review, their current performance is not acceptable. One reason for this is the financial restriction on hiring. Most coaches are part-time and thus cannot, despite supreme efforts, dedicate themselves to their teams as much as other OUA coaches can.

One of the more controversial aspects of the recent review of Queen’s Athletics and Recreation was its recommendation to raise the Athletics and Recreation fee “to a level that puts them among the top five universities in Ontario.” This means the fee, which is indexed to inflation and set at $128.66 for full-time undergraduate students for 2007-08, would be raised to at least $163.84, the amount students pay to support athletics and recreation at the University of Western Ontario, which has the fifth-highest fee in the province.