A few weeks ago at practice, I asked the No. 14 Cal Women’s soccer team one of my favorite road trip questions: If you could have five professionals follow you around wherever you went, what would they be?

Coach Neil McGuire

1) A clothing designer- “So that my players will stop making fun of me for every item of clothing that I wear.”

2) A nutritionist- “To keep me in check.”

3) A person trainer- “To make sure that I continue to work out.”

4) A chauffeur- “So I don’t have to drive from Danville to Berkeley everyday in all that traffic.”

5) “I would give the fifth one to my wife and she would probably use it for a spa treatment or a hair stylist.”

Alex Morgan

1) An umbrella holder/ water boy (Click here to read more…)

Last Friday, a record-setting crowd watched the Cal volleyball team defeat Stanford in a thrilling five-setter in the Big Spike at Haas Pavilion.

During the victory, sophomore outside hitter Tarah Murrey took the event’s name to heart, rising high for an attack attempt against the Cardinal.

Daily Cal photographer Emma Lantos was on hand to capture the action, and she left the arena with this week’s “Points and Shoot” image.

Ain’t it pretty?

For more fantastic photos from the past week in Cal athletics, check out the “This Week in Cal Sports” slideshow. For more coverage of the Bears volleyball team, click here.

Coach Rich Feller’s squad continues Pac-10 play this weekend when it travels to Los Angeles to face USC and UCLA.

This Friday is the No. 5 Cal men’s soccer team’s first Big Game of the the season.

And you know what? This is possibly the most important Big Game of their lives.

And you know why? Because this is the next Big Game.

With a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately mentality in professional and collegiate sports, a team is only as good as its next victory. In other words, forget that Cal beat Stanford twice last year, including a 1-0 victory in overtime, because it’s a new season with new goals. (Well, actually, revel in it and hold it over anyone you know at Stanford a little bit longer.)

Unless the Bears manage to win the national championship this year (which they have a very good potential to do, however unlikely it is for any team), this game against Stanford will be the true litmus test for success 10, 20, 30 years down the road.

And if you don’t agree, perhaps you should. People for years now have gotten arrested, embarrassed, and otherwise ridiculously and inappropriately passionate for these games.

And not just the football game.

Cal athletes owe it to generations of their fellow athletes, and us simple, pedestrian non-athletes, to give it all they got and leave it all on the field.

To the Bears on Friday, it might be just another Pac-10 contest if a massive red “S” wasn’t stamped across the chest of their counterparts, but that simple piece of embroidery is soaked in centriues of tradition, blood, sweat and a grass stain or two.

This post is dedicated to the interesting sights and sounds from a nice, hot afternoon of racing on the Farm:

– It’s no secret that distance runners are incredibly fit people; but go watch a cross country meet or two, and you may just get a decent work out as well. With the race course broken down into lanes that looped around a section of the golf course at Stanford, fans had to run all over, back and forth just to get glimpses of their respective teams.

– Speaking of spectators … UC Davis may have taken third and fourth in the race, but their fans certainly deserved a some sort of first place trophy. The most dedicated of the Aggies faithful came decked out in blue and yellow face/body paint, and the truly dedicated fans dressed up in Spartan/300 attire with masks, fake shields and spears to boot. What that has to do with their school mascot, I’m not sure, but impressive nonetheless. The temptation to ask them their profession was quite great.

– Perfect placement for the Cal cross country camp: positioned underneath a nice, tall, long-branched tree. Might be the only time I’ll be grateful to see a Stanford tree.

– By far the best cross country team shirt spotted at the meet: “WE’RE BRING XC BACK”

– I didn’t get a view of the entire race course, but some of those turns must have been sharp. More than once I overheard runners complaining about running into the boundary poles.

-- During the finish of a high school race, I overheard the public address announcer mention as he was calling the name of a finishing runner that a relative of theirs graduated from Stanford.

-- Following racing in the heart of 90-degree heat (6k for the women, 8k for the men), the team closed with a 20-minute aptly named “warm-down.”

– Cal junior Steve Sodaro led the team in a “Go Bears on three, Go Bears on three” chant after the race debriefing. I would have to say he did it better than the current Mic Men. Future Mic Man in the making?

You probably watched the Cal football team win its first road game of the season against Minnesota.

If you did, you saw an extremely talented (and very tough) receiver in Eric Decker. He was the Gophers’ go-to target all game, even though the Bears were well aware that Decker was Minnesota’s No. 1 (read: only) threat.

Anyway, Daily Cal staff photographer Nathan Yan traveled to Minneapolis and brought back a few eye-pleasing photos to share with us.

This week’s “Points and Shoot” image, in which Mike Mohamed and Brett Johnson attempt to take Decker down, is one of them.

Cal opens Pac-10 play against Oregon this Saturday in Eugene, Ore.

For more coverage of the gridiron, head over to the Daily Cal football blog, Extra Points.

For more photos from this week in Bears athletics, check out our weekly slideshow.

Enjoy!

Goalkeepers don’t contribute on offense all that often. Sure, well-placed outlet passes are crucial to feeding counterattacks, but those aren’t the sort of things that show up on a stat sheet. In the cage, you’ll likely spend more time barking out orders to your defense or watching the shot clock than doing anything flashy like score a goal.

That is, unless your name is Joel Dennerley and you play for top-ranked USC.

With 3:40 left in the first quarter against No. 3 Cal in the NorCal Invite on Sunday, the sophomore managed to slip a slow, rolling ball into the cage—his own cage, which he was, ya know, supposed to be defending.

Dennerley had tried to fling the ball away from the goal, only to hit one of his own teammates on the head. The ball then ricocheted behind him, dribbling in painfully to put the Bears up, 3-2, as he desperately lunged back.

The goal was credited to sophomore Ivan Rackov for being the last Bears player to touch the ball, making it his second of the game and ninth of the weekend.

“Never,” Rackov said when asked if he’d ever scored quite like that. “I didn’t even know it was my goal until they called it. It was a little bit funny, but a goal’s a goal.”

Of course, the Trojans still won, 8-6, to finish third in the tournament, which made the whole mishap significantly less embarrassing.

Honorable Mentions

A pair of field blocks also deserves mention.

Let’s start with Spencer Warden’s leaping block to stop a point-blank shot in the third quarter. Warden had been yelling for someone to cover the open man on the left post, but when no one was able to shift quickly enough, he dove away from defending the set to swat down the shooter’s arm.

Brian Dudley freelanced even more in the last two minutes of the game. The junior two-meter defender got creative defending the perimeter, sticking his foot up out of the water to block the shot.

Stop it, you’re making them blush.

After the No. 7 Cal men’s soccer team defeated No. 18 San Francisco, 3-0, on Thursday, Dons head coach Erik Visser only had nice things to say about this year’s talented Bears team.

“Cal is one of the best college teams I’ve seen in quite a few years,” he said.

But the flattery gets even better.

Visser is no neophyte when it comes to Cal teams. The coach played for two NCAA championship teams at San Francisco in 1978 and 1980, including a 91-6-5 record with the Dons.

After graduating, Visser joined the USF coaching staff and has since seen the past 31 Cal squads.

Thats what I would call historical perspective.

“Their composure, experience and technical ability on the ball is a mark of a truly elite team,” Visser continued, waxing poetic over the Bears. ”This Cal team is the best Bears’ team we have faced in many, many years and could be a true Final-Four team.”

Final-Four? Goodness Mr. Visser, you’re shameless. 

But in fact, according to a source close to Visser, the man doesn’t throw compliments to any old nationally ranked squad.

“He isn’t prone to hyperbole,” Dons assistant athletic director Ryan McCrary said.

So stay tuned, Bears fans. This could be a special year for the team whose only loss has come at the hands of No. 1 Maryland in a 2-1 overtime thriller back on Sept. 6.

This past Thursday, the No. 7 Cal men’s soccer team beat No. 18 San Francisco, 3-0, extending its win streak to three games since losing to No. 1 Maryland, 2-1, in overtime on Sept. 6.

The Bears have truly been on a tear of late, scoring 10 goals in three games, but the biggest surprise of the year hasn’t been the prodigious offense. No, instead it has been sophomore goalkeeper David Bingham, who has posted a 0.60 goals-against average so far this season.

But at Negoesco Stadium on Thursday, Bingham was also an offensive threat.

Yes, I said offensive. (Click here to read more…)

Bad news for the Cal volleyball team. Sophomore middle hitter Shannon Hawari is officially out for the entirety of the 2009 season.

Hawari incurred a full tear to her left ACL in the first set of the match against Hawaii on Sept. 6 and was seen sporting a tight ace bandage around that knee in the last week. She’ll be having her season-ending surgery next Thursday.

In her stead, there are a few freshmen who will need to step up. Tia Gaffen has done nicely in Hawari’s spot. Gaffen had six kills and three assists against San Jose State last Saturday. After Kat Brown returns from her minor ankle injury, she should also see some time in Hawari’s vacant spot. Hawari will petition for a medical hardship waiver, which would give her another year of elibigility.

For Cal fans who are horribly disappointed by this unfortunate bit of news, take solace in the fact that Hawari was just a true freshman middle hitter herself last season. And she ended up being a freshman All-Pac-10 selection. Could Gaffen or Brown be the next? We shall see.