Soaking in as much of the Women’s World Cup as I can, I acknowledge the fact that women’s soccer has changed so much. The USA team is not the dominant team it was 8 years ago when most other nations could not field 11 quality players. The did not have the skills, the size, the stamina , or the experience that our players had, so we won the tournament unchallenged until the finals.

Yet, other nations have always had one thing that our team rarely has: A player with a great name. The name I want to talk about here is one of a Netherlands player who gave us fits during the match. You could say she repeatedly ‘donked’ us off the ball. In spite of her diminutive 5ft 3 inch frame, Miss van de Donk bumped, knocked down, and pushed more players out of her way that I could ever manage as one of the shortest players on the pitch. Let’s see what we can say about Danielle van de Donk. Okay, really just gonna play with the Donk part of the name.

I noticed that donk rhymes with bonk, which has a similar meaning of hitting, punching, or bumping into. We said often that Danielle was donking our players. Monk rhymes with clunk, which has a similar meaning to donk, though it seems clunking is not intentional. Danielle definitely meant to bonk players off the ball.

Should it be a requirement to honk before you donk? When she got conked in the head, it was not a donk, because they did not mean to hit heads, nor did anyone honk. Tonk only makes sense if we add an ‘a’ at the end, because every tonka truck that we owned took a lot of donks and kept on honking. Tonka rhymes with Wonka, which is all about chocolate. Tonka also rhymes with danke, which in german mean ‘thank you’ for the Wonka or ‘thanks that was a good donk’. Maybe only in the Bronx do they say danke for the donks.

May you have a Happy Friday with no donks.