From our friends at the National ASR Winter Trade Show in San Diego...

As always the Winter show was a rousing success, and as always the Summer one will be, too !  We had the good fortune to hang with many of the new soccer and extreme sports event organizers who are all very excited about the possibilites for Major League Soccer in San Diego.  Everyone seems to agree that this should be the very next major league sports team here, and it is certainly the one that the general public wants most.  The younger generation would enjoy MLS here, just as they would love the X Games to return  ( has it already been 10 years since Summer X was here ? - yes, it has ! )  It has now been over 3 years since San Diego had a true professional soccer team... so time is ticking away, guys !

Ric Schenck, the founder of the San Diego eXtreme Sports Coalition as well as the director of the San Diego MLS Project since 2005, has written this great comment on the current local controversy over the refusal of the local FOX affiliate to cover X Games, and their claim that X Games are "not real sports".  The Project passes his words along to you here...

"These basic sports - and they are sports - HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR DECADES.  X games simply took the basic sports with bikes, boards to 'extremes' because that was the concept of the X games ( originally called the extreme games ).   Depending on which sport you're talking about, these sports grew up from the 1960's to 1990's, and X Games didn't exist until the 1990's.  X Games did popularize some of them, but...Fox 6 does not even seem to know the history of their own city's sports legacy.  ABC Sports covered skateboarding in San Diego over 30 years ago;  Tony Hawk's been famous in that sport for 20 years, and Shaun started riding for Burton in San Diego when he was 7 years old - about 15 years ago; and he's been really famous for several years now !  Thanks to all for support on this issue."

Note from the Project:  This station also shows the least soccer news of any local TV news in all of southern California.  Makes no sense, becasue they have they have a younger viewing audience than others.  They show no local college or high school highlights (but the others do), and last season they went three months without a single MLS mention - almost the entire second half of the season, up until the day of the MLS Cup final !  They refused outright to show some of the major matches from the SDSU Aztecs, from Women's World Cup, USA men's national team, as well as stories on local pros in MLS.

Here is more from that ASR article on Fox 6 XETV...

ASR Talking Heads: "If you are reading this blog, there’s a good chance you know how much Shaun White has accomplished—from being one of the best in two sports (skateboarding and snowboarding) to winning a gold in the 2006 Olympic Games, so you would think that his hometown station would be interested in doing a story on him."  More... ( http://www.asrtalkingheads.com/2008/02/biased-against.html )