Hansen's Sunday Notebook: CDO's Turner Washington, Rio Rico's Allie Schadler were Southern Arizona's best
- Updated
Star sports columnist Greg Hansen offers his opinion on recent sports news.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
My Super Six selections for the 2016-17 Southern Arizona high school sports year:
1. Turner Washington, Canyon del Oro, track. Washington won another state discus championship, with a state-record throw of 218 feet 7 inches. Then he went a step beyond: At the Tucson Elite competition Thursday at Drachman Stadium, the UA-bound Washington unleashed the No. 1 throw in the nation of 227 feet 10 inches — that’s almost like a high-jumper with a career-best of 6-10 suddenly clearing 7-4 — the fourth-best throw in American history by a high school athlete.
2. Allie Schadler, Rio Rico, distance running. If Schadler didn’t surpass former Desert Vista standout Dani Jones, the current Pac-12 1,500 meter champion, as the top female distance runner in state history, she’s no worse than 1-A. Schadler, who will run for the Washington Huskies, won a fourth straight state cross country title (breaking the course record) and then won the state 1,600, breaking the state record.
3. Kristiana Watson, Amphitheater, softball. At 14, the Panthers infielder hit .753 with 17 home runs and 54 RBI in just 28 games. Those are video-game numbers. The daughter of Arizona All-American shortstop Laura Espinoza Watson and UA lineman David Watson has three more years of varsity softball remaining. She was chosen the state’s 4A co-player of the year with CDO’s Arianna Acedo.
4. Roman Bravo-Young, Sunnyside, wrestling. Now 130-0 in his Blue Devils career, including 47-0 this season with a third consecutive state title, Bravo-Young has committed to wrestle at Penn State, the NCAA’s No. 1 wrestling school.
5. Nick Rosquist, The Gregory School, basketball. No, he’s not slugging it out with the 6A and 5A schools, but Rosquist led his team to a 29-2 record and state championship, averaging 28 points per game, and scored 2,142 career points. Last week he chose to attend Merritt College in Oakland, California.
6. Jacqueline Igulu, soccer, Palo Verde. Not only did Igulu lead the state with 55 goals this season, she had 62 a year ago — a state record. The Titans went 40-7 her final two seasons.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
The Pima County Sports Hall of Fame will announce its Class of 2017 on Monday and it is loaded, top to bottom. Among the 14 selections are former Sahuaro High School, USC and NFL quarterback Rodney Peete and Canyon del Oro grads Shelley and Chris Duncan — who combined to play 12 seasons in the MLB — and Pam Reed, who is among the two or three most accomplished ultra-distance runners in American history.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Tucson lost three of its leading coaches and high school sports figures last week: Christine Clark, an all-state basketball player and state champion track athlete at Tucson High and a three-time All-Ivy League guard at Harvard, left Adia Barnes’ UA women’s basketball staff to accept a position with the Florida Gators. Becky Freeman, who coached Salpointe Catholic to the 4A girls state soccer championship in February, 41-5-2 over the last two seasons, resigned her position. “It is very bittersweet but I want to spend more time with my family,” Freeman told me. Canyon del Oro distance running coach Rick Glider, who coached the Dorados’ boys cross country team to the 2011 state title, is retiring. “There are definitely mixed feelings there, but I feel it’s time,” he said. “I spent 19 years coaching teams at Oracle Middle School, then 25 years coaching cross country and the distance runners at CDO. Coaching at CDO has truly been a dream come true and I will always have some wonderful memories from my time there.”
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
With its third head coach in three years, Jeffry Bloomberg, the Catalina Foothills boys tennis team won its fourth consecutive state championship this month. The state tennis coaches, through the AIA, selected Foothills junior George Jiang the 4A player of the year, and named the Falcons’ Connor Oseran and Mason Lee as the state doubles players of the year. The Falcons have now won 69 consecutive boys tennis matches. Dynasty? They’ve won 12 state championships since 1997.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona junior first baseman JJ Matijevic appears to have a firm lead on becoming the Pac-12’s 2017 baseball player of the year. Why not? Through Friday, he leads the Pac-12 in hitting (.400) and RBIs (60). Oregon State’s Nick Madrigal, who plays for the nation’s No. 1 team, is likely Matijevic’s closest pursuer; Madrigal is hitting .385 with 26 RBIs. Arizona has produced seven Pac-12 baseball players of the year: Terry Francona, 1980; Chip Hale, 1987; Alan Zinter and Scott Erickson, 1989; Trevor Crowe, 2005; Alex Mejia, 2012; and Scott Kingery, 2015.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
This is one of the reasons it’s so difficult to be consistently good in college baseball recruiting: A year ago, Arizona coach Jay Johnson evaluated and signed Casa Grande High lefty Gilbert Luna in the Class of 2017. Luna was coming off a season with a 1.19 ERA and 138 strikeouts in 64 innings. This season, Luna injured his arm and was limited to 21 innings, with just one outing of more than five innings.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona’s men’s and women’s track and field programs have had an unexpected fall from Pac-12 contendership since coach Fred Harvey’s remarkable 2011 conference meet, when the Wildcats finished No. 2 to Oregon in both the men’s and women’s finals at Drachman Stadium. This year, Arizona was eighth in the women’s finals and ninth in the men’s meet; neither team has finished higher than sixth the last three seasons. The loss of jumps coach Sheldon Blockburger to USC hurt, and the once-formidable UA distance running crews, men’s and women’s, have noticeably faded.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
I wrote last week that Empire High School softball coach Shannon Woolridge, with state championships in 2015 and 2017, has a career record of 136-34. That’s terrific by any standard, but not accurate. Woolridge is actually 121-29, a slightly better winning percentage of .806. In his first year at Empire, Woolridge inherited a team at mid-season that was 15-5. Those 20 games do not belong on his record.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Sabino High School and UA grad Nathan Tyler, a regular on the Web.com Tour in 2014 and 2015, had not played a competitive round of golf for six months before entering the U.S. Open local qualifying tournament last week in Dallas. Tyler won a playoff to reach next week’s sectional finals. He joins ex-Wildcats Brian Prouty, David Berganio and Jonathan Khan, and Salpointe Catholic senior Trevor Werbylo.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
For the first time, the NCAA will allow college football teams to open training camps in July, and Arizona State coach Todd Graham is among the first to announce that the Sun Devils will indeed take advantage and open camp July 25. Arizona’s Rich Rodriguez has not announced the official dates of football camp. He could score heavily with the UA’s first-ever Polynesian Athletic Showcase at Arizona Stadium on June 9-10. Compared to most Pac-12 schools, the UA has been tardy in recruiting Polynesian football players. Now, it will become more aggressive, sharing the June 9-10 camp with BYU, which currently lists 36 Polynesian players on its roster. The UA expects players from American Samoa, Hawaii, California and Colorado.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona’s 2015 All-Pac-12 basketball forward Rondae Hollis-Jefferson returned home to Chester, Pennsylvania, last week and was surprised (and emotional) when the Chester Community Charter Schools district told him it was naming the high school’s gymnasium the “Rondae Hollis-Jefferson Gymnasium.” His two seasons at Arizona didn’t result in a Final Four, but his character, hustle, good nature and the way he represented Sean Miller’s program went beyond wins and losses.
This is something I've only dreamed of!! I just want to inspire all races, ages, gender that no matter what steer through the blurred vision pic.twitter.com/4QOKsmBRw2
— R.HollisJefferson (@IAmCHAP24) May 18, 2017
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
On paper, Central Michigan appears to have scored well in replacing Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke. The MAC school last week hired Michael Alford, senior associate AD at Oklahoma. Alford has spent a career in sales/marketing at Alabama, USC and in the NFL, and recently was the key figure in raising $160 million for the Sooners’ equivalent (and then some) of Arizona’s Lowell-Stevens Football Facility. Heeke’s final fundraising project at CMU was to raise $2 million to build a performance and development center at the school’s baseball stadium. His son, freshman Zach Heeke, is hitting .253 as a starting third baseman for the Chippewas.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
My former colleague Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury-News reported last week that Arizona received $28.6 million from the Pac-12 in the fiscal year 2015-16. That sum is similar to the other Pac-12 schools, an annual collection from media rights, and income from the NCAA basketball tournament and football bowl games.
Wilner’s report also disclosed that SEC schools were paid $40.5 million and that Big Ten schools were paid $34.8 million from annual conference revenues.
So how does Arizona keep up financially?
Two things happened last week that seem sure to be part of college sports over the next decade. One, the Cleveland Cavaliers will begin wearing a Goodyear logo on game jerseys next season.
By 2020, it’s possible all Arizona athletic teams, and those in the Pac-12, will have similar corporate logos on their game-day gear (in addition to Nike, Adidas or Under Armour). The Pac-12 could arrange the sponsorship from someone like DISH (but not DirecTV) for several million per school, per year.
USC is expected to announce it will sell naming rights to the historic Los Angeles Coliseum for as much as $70 million over 15 years. Once that dam breaks, anything goes. In the Pac-12, only Washington — with Alaska Airlines Field at Husky Stadium — has sold naming rights to its football stadium. The Huskies are being paid $41 million over 10 years.
Wilner wrote that, “barring a major new revenue stream, each Pac-12 school will be $12-plus million behind its SEC and Big Ten peers for the final seven years of the conference’s media rights deal, which runs through 2023-24.”
The math is sobering: Seven years of a $12 million per year deficit per Pac-12 school is $84 million per school over the seven years. That’s close to $1 billion during the life of the league’s media rights package.
The kicker to this economic gloom is that Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens last week told The Oregonian that the demand for football tickets to Autzen Stadium “softened” even while the Ducks went to the 2015 college football playoffs and deployed Heisman Trophy quarterback Marcus Mariota.
“The buying public has changed,” Mullens said. “Sports consumption has changed, both live and through media outlets.”
But financial issues are for the suits, right?
Right now, in May 2017, the biggest sports issue in Tucson is whether Rawle Alkins will return to McKale Center for his sophomore season.
My Super Six selections for the 2016-17 Southern Arizona high school sports year:
1. Turner Washington, Canyon del Oro, track. Washington won another state discus championship, with a state-record throw of 218 feet 7 inches. Then he went a step beyond: At the Tucson Elite competition Thursday at Drachman Stadium, the UA-bound Washington unleashed the No. 1 throw in the nation of 227 feet 10 inches — that’s almost like a high-jumper with a career-best of 6-10 suddenly clearing 7-4 — the fourth-best throw in American history by a high school athlete.
2. Allie Schadler, Rio Rico, distance running. If Schadler didn’t surpass former Desert Vista standout Dani Jones, the current Pac-12 1,500 meter champion, as the top female distance runner in state history, she’s no worse than 1-A. Schadler, who will run for the Washington Huskies, won a fourth straight state cross country title (breaking the course record) and then won the state 1,600, breaking the state record.
3. Kristiana Watson, Amphitheater, softball. At 14, the Panthers infielder hit .753 with 17 home runs and 54 RBI in just 28 games. Those are video-game numbers. The daughter of Arizona All-American shortstop Laura Espinoza Watson and UA lineman David Watson has three more years of varsity softball remaining. She was chosen the state’s 4A co-player of the year with CDO’s Arianna Acedo.
4. Roman Bravo-Young, Sunnyside, wrestling. Now 130-0 in his Blue Devils career, including 47-0 this season with a third consecutive state title, Bravo-Young has committed to wrestle at Penn State, the NCAA’s No. 1 wrestling school.
5. Nick Rosquist, The Gregory School, basketball. No, he’s not slugging it out with the 6A and 5A schools, but Rosquist led his team to a 29-2 record and state championship, averaging 28 points per game, and scored 2,142 career points. Last week he chose to attend Merritt College in Oakland, California.
6. Jacqueline Igulu, soccer, Palo Verde. Not only did Igulu lead the state with 55 goals this season, she had 62 a year ago — a state record. The Titans went 40-7 her final two seasons.
The Pima County Sports Hall of Fame will announce its Class of 2017 on Monday and it is loaded, top to bottom. Among the 14 selections are former Sahuaro High School, USC and NFL quarterback Rodney Peete and Canyon del Oro grads Shelley and Chris Duncan — who combined to play 12 seasons in the MLB — and Pam Reed, who is among the two or three most accomplished ultra-distance runners in American history.
Tucson lost three of its leading coaches and high school sports figures last week: Christine Clark, an all-state basketball player and state champion track athlete at Tucson High and a three-time All-Ivy League guard at Harvard, left Adia Barnes’ UA women’s basketball staff to accept a position with the Florida Gators. Becky Freeman, who coached Salpointe Catholic to the 4A girls state soccer championship in February, 41-5-2 over the last two seasons, resigned her position. “It is very bittersweet but I want to spend more time with my family,” Freeman told me. Canyon del Oro distance running coach Rick Glider, who coached the Dorados’ boys cross country team to the 2011 state title, is retiring. “There are definitely mixed feelings there, but I feel it’s time,” he said. “I spent 19 years coaching teams at Oracle Middle School, then 25 years coaching cross country and the distance runners at CDO. Coaching at CDO has truly been a dream come true and I will always have some wonderful memories from my time there.”
With its third head coach in three years, Jeffry Bloomberg, the Catalina Foothills boys tennis team won its fourth consecutive state championship this month. The state tennis coaches, through the AIA, selected Foothills junior George Jiang the 4A player of the year, and named the Falcons’ Connor Oseran and Mason Lee as the state doubles players of the year. The Falcons have now won 69 consecutive boys tennis matches. Dynasty? They’ve won 12 state championships since 1997.
Arizona junior first baseman JJ Matijevic appears to have a firm lead on becoming the Pac-12’s 2017 baseball player of the year. Why not? Through Friday, he leads the Pac-12 in hitting (.400) and RBIs (60). Oregon State’s Nick Madrigal, who plays for the nation’s No. 1 team, is likely Matijevic’s closest pursuer; Madrigal is hitting .385 with 26 RBIs. Arizona has produced seven Pac-12 baseball players of the year: Terry Francona, 1980; Chip Hale, 1987; Alan Zinter and Scott Erickson, 1989; Trevor Crowe, 2005; Alex Mejia, 2012; and Scott Kingery, 2015.
This is one of the reasons it’s so difficult to be consistently good in college baseball recruiting: A year ago, Arizona coach Jay Johnson evaluated and signed Casa Grande High lefty Gilbert Luna in the Class of 2017. Luna was coming off a season with a 1.19 ERA and 138 strikeouts in 64 innings. This season, Luna injured his arm and was limited to 21 innings, with just one outing of more than five innings.
Arizona’s men’s and women’s track and field programs have had an unexpected fall from Pac-12 contendership since coach Fred Harvey’s remarkable 2011 conference meet, when the Wildcats finished No. 2 to Oregon in both the men’s and women’s finals at Drachman Stadium. This year, Arizona was eighth in the women’s finals and ninth in the men’s meet; neither team has finished higher than sixth the last three seasons. The loss of jumps coach Sheldon Blockburger to USC hurt, and the once-formidable UA distance running crews, men’s and women’s, have noticeably faded.
I wrote last week that Empire High School softball coach Shannon Woolridge, with state championships in 2015 and 2017, has a career record of 136-34. That’s terrific by any standard, but not accurate. Woolridge is actually 121-29, a slightly better winning percentage of .806. In his first year at Empire, Woolridge inherited a team at mid-season that was 15-5. Those 20 games do not belong on his record.
Sabino High School and UA grad Nathan Tyler, a regular on the Web.com Tour in 2014 and 2015, had not played a competitive round of golf for six months before entering the U.S. Open local qualifying tournament last week in Dallas. Tyler won a playoff to reach next week’s sectional finals. He joins ex-Wildcats Brian Prouty, David Berganio and Jonathan Khan, and Salpointe Catholic senior Trevor Werbylo.
For the first time, the NCAA will allow college football teams to open training camps in July, and Arizona State coach Todd Graham is among the first to announce that the Sun Devils will indeed take advantage and open camp July 25. Arizona’s Rich Rodriguez has not announced the official dates of football camp. He could score heavily with the UA’s first-ever Polynesian Athletic Showcase at Arizona Stadium on June 9-10. Compared to most Pac-12 schools, the UA has been tardy in recruiting Polynesian football players. Now, it will become more aggressive, sharing the June 9-10 camp with BYU, which currently lists 36 Polynesian players on its roster. The UA expects players from American Samoa, Hawaii, California and Colorado.
Arizona’s 2015 All-Pac-12 basketball forward Rondae Hollis-Jefferson returned home to Chester, Pennsylvania, last week and was surprised (and emotional) when the Chester Community Charter Schools district told him it was naming the high school’s gymnasium the “Rondae Hollis-Jefferson Gymnasium.” His two seasons at Arizona didn’t result in a Final Four, but his character, hustle, good nature and the way he represented Sean Miller’s program went beyond wins and losses.
This is something I've only dreamed of!! I just want to inspire all races, ages, gender that no matter what steer through the blurred vision pic.twitter.com/4QOKsmBRw2
— R.HollisJefferson (@IAmCHAP24) May 18, 2017
On paper, Central Michigan appears to have scored well in replacing Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke. The MAC school last week hired Michael Alford, senior associate AD at Oklahoma. Alford has spent a career in sales/marketing at Alabama, USC and in the NFL, and recently was the key figure in raising $160 million for the Sooners’ equivalent (and then some) of Arizona’s Lowell-Stevens Football Facility. Heeke’s final fundraising project at CMU was to raise $2 million to build a performance and development center at the school’s baseball stadium. His son, freshman Zach Heeke, is hitting .253 as a starting third baseman for the Chippewas.
My former colleague Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury-News reported last week that Arizona received $28.6 million from the Pac-12 in the fiscal year 2015-16. That sum is similar to the other Pac-12 schools, an annual collection from media rights, and income from the NCAA basketball tournament and football bowl games.
Wilner’s report also disclosed that SEC schools were paid $40.5 million and that Big Ten schools were paid $34.8 million from annual conference revenues.
So how does Arizona keep up financially?
Two things happened last week that seem sure to be part of college sports over the next decade. One, the Cleveland Cavaliers will begin wearing a Goodyear logo on game jerseys next season.
By 2020, it’s possible all Arizona athletic teams, and those in the Pac-12, will have similar corporate logos on their game-day gear (in addition to Nike, Adidas or Under Armour). The Pac-12 could arrange the sponsorship from someone like DISH (but not DirecTV) for several million per school, per year.
USC is expected to announce it will sell naming rights to the historic Los Angeles Coliseum for as much as $70 million over 15 years. Once that dam breaks, anything goes. In the Pac-12, only Washington — with Alaska Airlines Field at Husky Stadium — has sold naming rights to its football stadium. The Huskies are being paid $41 million over 10 years.
Wilner wrote that, “barring a major new revenue stream, each Pac-12 school will be $12-plus million behind its SEC and Big Ten peers for the final seven years of the conference’s media rights deal, which runs through 2023-24.”
The math is sobering: Seven years of a $12 million per year deficit per Pac-12 school is $84 million per school over the seven years. That’s close to $1 billion during the life of the league’s media rights package.
The kicker to this economic gloom is that Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens last week told The Oregonian that the demand for football tickets to Autzen Stadium “softened” even while the Ducks went to the 2015 college football playoffs and deployed Heisman Trophy quarterback Marcus Mariota.
“The buying public has changed,” Mullens said. “Sports consumption has changed, both live and through media outlets.”
But financial issues are for the suits, right?
Right now, in May 2017, the biggest sports issue in Tucson is whether Rawle Alkins will return to McKale Center for his sophomore season.
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