Nice Hit for UP Soccer on NPR today!

Check it out!

http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2010/07/01/128248366/the-ghana-oregon-comparison-in-defense-of-a-puny-state

Also included a link to professor Andrew Guest's wonderful article about the amazing success of women's soccer at UP.

Nice article, great shout-out to UP..

But the whole article was backwards. Uruguay IS about the size of Oregon in population, with 3.3 million..

Ghana is about 7 times larger. They are the big guys in this contest.

And the little guy did win..

They have the same number of Cups UP does.

Geezaldinho wrote:But the whole article was backwards. Uruguay IS about the size of Oregon in population, with 3.3 million..

Ghana is about 7 times larger. They are the big guys in this contest.

Population wise, for sure.

Area-wise, Ghana is to Uruguay what Oregon is to Washington, at least according to the CIA handbook:

Ghana surface area: 238,533 sq km (slightly smaller than Oregon)

Uruguay surface area: 176,215 sq km (slightly smaller than the state of Washington)

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gh.html

Ha ha... we didn't realize it, but it was a true NW battle.

Almost any guide book description you read about Costa Rica (sadly no team at the World Cup) will say it is a country about the size of West Virginia. This is one of the most useless comparisons ever. First of all who the hell even knows how big West Virginia is? Even Americans don't know. And the shapes of WV and CR are totally unusual and dissimilar. I can't think of even one thing the two places share. For example: Costa Rica's literacy rate: 95.8%. Yet somehow, due to roughly equal land areas, and the two are paired for life in some people's minds.Gee, I wish it was August so I could digress on an actual soccer topic.

The blogger, Tom Goldman, lives in Portland.

His daughter plays soccer of course.