U.S.Women's Olympic Hockey at least got a Bronze Medal

Today the Defending World Champion U.S. womens hockey team beat Finland 4-0 behind Katie Kings' hat trick and Chanda Gunns' shutout goaltending to gain the Bronze medal in the Turin Olympics(non of this PC Italian language b.s. for me). Despite having increased the talent level on the team over recent years the U.S. Womens Hockey program has regressed from a Gold medal the 1998 olympics in Nagano, Japn to a Silver in 2002 at Salt Lake City, U.S.A. and finally managed a Bronze in the 2006 Turin, Italy olympics just this morning. With Julie Chu, Jenny Potter, Krissie Wendell, Natalie Darwitz, Angela Ruggiero, Katie King and all these talented young women most of whom could play in the AHL (some have played games with pro hockey teams) there really is no excuse for anything other than Gold. When you get right down to it there is no reason even the Canadian team should be able to beat the U.S. women. So what is the problem? We'll have to take a look at why an inferior Finnish team has twice in one year been able to take commanding 3-1 leads in the second periods before losing 5-3 at UNH at the end of last year and 7-3 in the preliminaries. This must have something to do with the coaching, but they have had the same coach for the last eleven years, it might just be time to finally make a change because something is no longer working. They hit the top of the sport eight years ago and have begun a gradual slide backwards since then. It was nice to win the world championship over Canada in 2005, but that takes a huge backseat to the Olympics. They are first and foremost in importance for amateur sports. Until they can mantain success in the Olympics everything else is secondary. Nice but secondary.