Hansen's Sunday Notebook: New Arizona Wildcats football coach Brian Knorr has been a travelin' man
- Updated
Star sports columnist Greg Hansen offers his opinion on recent sports news.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona’s new special teams and defensive ends/outside linebackers coach Brian Knorr is the working definition of the uncertain life of a college football coach.
After playing quarterback at Air Force in the early 1980s and rising to the rank of captain while serving at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, Knorr coached three separate stints at his alma mater, and also coached at Wake Forest, Indiana and Ohio State.
He was the head coach at Ohio in 2001 when Rich Rodriguez, in his first year at West Virginia, registered career victory No. 1 over Knorr’s Bobcats.
But what is more telling is how Knorr’s first-ever Ohio staff, in 2001, has spread across the college football landscape. If ever there is a way to define how transient the industry is, check what happened to Knorr’s nine Ohio assistants of ’01:
Greg Gregory is now at Norfolk State.
Everette Sands is in his sixth job since Ohio, coaching at UTSA.
Steve Russ is at Air Force.
Tim Kish, an Arizona assistant from 2004-11, is the linebackers coach at Oklahoma.
Pete Germano is at Fresno State.
Ron Antoine is at Texas State after stops at Wofford and Elon.
Mike Sullivan is the offensive coordinator of the New York Giants.
Eric Washington is an assistant for the Carolina Panthers after coaching at Northwestern and for the Chicago Bears.
Mike Summers, who has coached at six other places since 2001, coaches for Louisvillle.
A year ago, Knorr was an offensive analyst at Ohio State. A year earlier, he was the defensive coordinator at Indiana. The shuttle between jobs can be unreasonably quick. In 2014, a week before Knorr took the Indiana job, Air Force announced that it was hiring him to be its defensive coordinator.
One thing about college football coaching: There always seems to be a place to land. Knorr is only 53; by the time he retires, he could coach at five or six more schools.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
One morning last month I checked email messages and saw three dispatches that began with the same words:
Mike Crawford!
Mike Crawford!
Mike Crawford!
A fourth began this way: “How could you possibly not include Chad Cislak on your list of top 10 Tucson high school pitchers?”
Several exclamation points were used.
I checked my cluttered notebook and found that I had put a star next to the names of both Crawford and Cislak, a not-so-safe system of alerting me that THIS GUY HAS TO MAKE THE LIST.
On that morning, I counted 17 pitchers whose name I marked with a star. The system overloaded.
A science, it was not.
Over the last three months, I authored 71 lists on the Top 10 of just about everything in Tucson sports. There was one common link: Too many worthy people were left out.
Marana basketball coach Joe Acker won almost 500 games in his career. He didn’t make my list of the city’s 10 leading basketball coaches. I heard about it for more than a week.
The list went on and on, with daily reminders of ranking someone too high, too low or not at all.
Where was Rob Waldrop? How about Carl Brunenkant? Somehow I didn’t include Dave Rubio’s 2001 Arizona Final Four volleyball team.
But on no list did I veer from historical accuracy as much as choosing Tucson’s top high school pitchers. In 1997, Cislak went 14-0 with a 1.32 ERA for Sabino, hitting .455, leading the Sabercats to the state title and signing with UCLA.
A year earlier, Crawford completed his Salpointe Catholic pitching career 12-2, coming off a 13-1 junior season. He finished his prep career with 29 victories, equaling Tucson High’s Tavo Alvarez’s city record. Alvarez was No. 1 on my list. Crawford and Cislak might as well have been 1-A and 1-B.
Not that the math will ever work.
Researching the Top 10 lists was a joy; ranking them was another story.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Sad to hear that Betty Larson, wife of Arizona head basketball coach Bruce Larson, 1961-72, died last month. She was 85. Betty and Bruce met at Eastern Arizona College in Thatcher more than 60 years ago; he was the basketball coach and a zoology teacher; Betty was in his zoology lab. They raised five children during their 61 years of marriage as Bruce served on the UA faculty and became the TV analyst for UA broadcasts with Dave Sitton. Bruce arrived at Arizona from Fargo, North Dakota, in 1950, bent on playing catcher for UA baseball coach Frank Sancet. Instead, he became a coach, helping Weber State win the 1959 NJCAA national championship before returning to Tucson with Betty and his young family.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Catalina Foothills made the coaching hire of the summer when they agreed to terms with Canyon del Oro and UA grad Sue Darling, who is the most experienced women’s basketball coach in Tucson history. Darling has been the head coach at Northern Arizona, Air Force, Pima College, Amphitheater and Salpointe Catholic, as well as being an assistant at Arizona, Arizona State, Dartmouth and Northwestern. The 1982 captain of the UA women’s basketball team has a compelling résumé. She left coaching for four seasons from 2004-08 and became a police officer in Boulder, Colorado.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Saturday’s celebration of life for Amphi’s record-setting football coach Vern Friedli was much more than a reflection on 331 football victories. One of the young men that Friedli impacted was Bill Kinneberg, a baseball pitcher at Morenci High School who pitched a one-hitter, striking out 12, in the 1973 state championship game, which was Friedli’s first state title. Kinneberg went on to be a standout pitcher at Arizona, head baseball coach at UTEP and Wyoming, and coached Utah to the 2016 Pac-12 baseball championship.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
While a student at Catalina Foothills High School, Christian Muscarello became an all-city shortstop who went on to be an all-conference player at Trinity University in San Antonio. After leaving Trinity, Muscarello signed with the St. Louis Cardinals and played minor-league baseball in 2014. He has since quit baseball and returned to Tucson to become one of the leading amateur golfers in Arizona. At last week’s Arizona Amateur in Phoenix, Muscarello shot 11 under par to be co-medalist in the state’s top amateur golf tournament. He advanced to the 64-man match play championships and reached the quarterfinals. He is working with ex-UA golfer Susie Meyers, who last year was named one of the Top 100 golf teachers in America by Golf Magazine. Meyers also works with Catalina Foothills sophomore Maya Benita, who recently won the national championship in the 16U Long Drive tournament.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
UA sophomore third baseman Nick Quintana struggled in the Cape Cod League this summer. At the end of the regular season last week, Quintana had struck out 50 times in 104 at-bats and hit .204. He led the UA with 54 strikeouts in his freshman season, which was fourth among Pac-12 hitters.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
UA baseball coach Jay Johnson lost his top recruit, Matt Sauer, when the pitcher signed with the New York Yankees for $2.49 million last month. But Johnson was able to keep Casa Grande lefty Gil Luna, who enrolled in UA summer school. A year ago, Luna was a revelation to recruiters; he struck out 138 batters in 252 innings for Casa Grande High as his fastball hit 94 mph. Luna injured his forearm last spring and only pitched 21 innings as a senior, but has recovered. Johnson gets no break from summer recruiting this month: He will be at the Long Beach Area Code Games this week.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
At the end of the summer basketball recruiting season, Arizona women’s coach Adia Barnes made an impact like few could’ve expected. One recruiting service, prospectsnation.com, ranks Arizona’s class No. 2 nationally. That’s crazy. In addition to a top Italian prospect, Barnes has commitments from players ranked No. 29 and No 47 nationally, which is a program-changer.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Tucsonan Jim Fogltance will begin his 40th season as part of the Pac-12’s football officiating system next month; he’ll be a TV replay crew chief. At the same time, his son, B.J. Fogltance, is climbing the officiating ladder. B.J. has been hired to work for the Big 12, Southland and Mountain West conferences. Two other emerging Tucson football referees — Ty Druse and Tommy Drzazgowski — have been hired by the Pac-12 as part of the league’s referee developmental program. Druse and Drzazgowski also will work FCS games.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona’s Sean Miller, Arizona State’s Bobby Hurley, Utah’s Larry Krystkowiak and Oregon State’s Wayne Tinkle almost have a quorum big enough to have a Pac-12 coaching convention in Spain. The Sun Devils, Wildcats, Utes and Beavers all will play exhibitions in Barcelona between now and Aug. 27. The competition is likely to be weak, but the four Pac-12 teams all get 10 pre-Europe practices. All four teams should know what to expect when training camp officially opens in two months.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
The 2017 Lute Olson Fantasy Camp will be held Sept. 7-10 at the Sporting Chance Center. Organizers Steve Rivera and Mike Feder have arranged an impressive coaching staff: Damon Stoudamire, Mike Bibby, Reggie Geary, Pete Williams and Ben Davis, among others. Entry deadline is Monday. Information: feder1616@yahoo.com
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona has joined scores of college football organizations such as Notre Dame, Texas and Oregon in intensifying restrictions for the media at pre-practice warmup sessions. It seems so trivial.
Almost no Power 5 Conference school allows access to football workouts.
Those days ended more than a decade ago.
I laugh when I hear reporters cry that this is the end of civilization, and at coaches who insist they can’t trust anyone with a notebook or a tape recorder.
I must’ve gone (wasted time?) to more than 500 college football practices over the years, and at no time did anyone betray a coach’s strategy or leak vital information to suspected spies.
I once went to a Utah State practice during my college days and parked adjacent to the Aggies’ workout. The new head coach, Bruce Snyder, blew his whistle, stopped practice, and sprinted to my car.
“You can’t park there!” he cried. “You can’t watch practice!”
I told him I was a reporter for the student newspaper.
He introduced himself and said, “Let’s get together for lunch.” Now they would call the police.
When Arizona held open-to-everyone practices on campus and at Camp Cochise in the 1990s, a thunderstorm canceled an afternoon practice at the Cochise facility. Dick Tomey moved the team into the basketball gym for a walk-through, and then arranged to have the newspaper guys play a full-court basketball game against the UA coaching staff.
The football team circled the court and cheered — and booed — loudly for an hour.
The only dustup was when UA line coach Jim Young — yes, the former UA, Army and Purdue head coach — elbowed me in the nose while pursing a rebound.
Those were no-harm, no-foul days.
Later that night, most of the coaches and writers met at Brewery Gulch in Bisbee to tell stories to one another.
Over all those years, the only damage was to a good night’s sleep.
Arizona’s new special teams and defensive ends/outside linebackers coach Brian Knorr is the working definition of the uncertain life of a college football coach.
After playing quarterback at Air Force in the early 1980s and rising to the rank of captain while serving at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, Knorr coached three separate stints at his alma mater, and also coached at Wake Forest, Indiana and Ohio State.
He was the head coach at Ohio in 2001 when Rich Rodriguez, in his first year at West Virginia, registered career victory No. 1 over Knorr’s Bobcats.
But what is more telling is how Knorr’s first-ever Ohio staff, in 2001, has spread across the college football landscape. If ever there is a way to define how transient the industry is, check what happened to Knorr’s nine Ohio assistants of ’01:
Greg Gregory is now at Norfolk State.
Everette Sands is in his sixth job since Ohio, coaching at UTSA.
Steve Russ is at Air Force.
Tim Kish, an Arizona assistant from 2004-11, is the linebackers coach at Oklahoma.
Pete Germano is at Fresno State.
Ron Antoine is at Texas State after stops at Wofford and Elon.
Mike Sullivan is the offensive coordinator of the New York Giants.
Eric Washington is an assistant for the Carolina Panthers after coaching at Northwestern and for the Chicago Bears.
Mike Summers, who has coached at six other places since 2001, coaches for Louisvillle.
A year ago, Knorr was an offensive analyst at Ohio State. A year earlier, he was the defensive coordinator at Indiana. The shuttle between jobs can be unreasonably quick. In 2014, a week before Knorr took the Indiana job, Air Force announced that it was hiring him to be its defensive coordinator.
One thing about college football coaching: There always seems to be a place to land. Knorr is only 53; by the time he retires, he could coach at five or six more schools.
One morning last month I checked email messages and saw three dispatches that began with the same words:
Mike Crawford!
Mike Crawford!
Mike Crawford!
A fourth began this way: “How could you possibly not include Chad Cislak on your list of top 10 Tucson high school pitchers?”
Several exclamation points were used.
I checked my cluttered notebook and found that I had put a star next to the names of both Crawford and Cislak, a not-so-safe system of alerting me that THIS GUY HAS TO MAKE THE LIST.
On that morning, I counted 17 pitchers whose name I marked with a star. The system overloaded.
A science, it was not.
Over the last three months, I authored 71 lists on the Top 10 of just about everything in Tucson sports. There was one common link: Too many worthy people were left out.
Marana basketball coach Joe Acker won almost 500 games in his career. He didn’t make my list of the city’s 10 leading basketball coaches. I heard about it for more than a week.
The list went on and on, with daily reminders of ranking someone too high, too low or not at all.
Where was Rob Waldrop? How about Carl Brunenkant? Somehow I didn’t include Dave Rubio’s 2001 Arizona Final Four volleyball team.
But on no list did I veer from historical accuracy as much as choosing Tucson’s top high school pitchers. In 1997, Cislak went 14-0 with a 1.32 ERA for Sabino, hitting .455, leading the Sabercats to the state title and signing with UCLA.
A year earlier, Crawford completed his Salpointe Catholic pitching career 12-2, coming off a 13-1 junior season. He finished his prep career with 29 victories, equaling Tucson High’s Tavo Alvarez’s city record. Alvarez was No. 1 on my list. Crawford and Cislak might as well have been 1-A and 1-B.
Not that the math will ever work.
Researching the Top 10 lists was a joy; ranking them was another story.
Sad to hear that Betty Larson, wife of Arizona head basketball coach Bruce Larson, 1961-72, died last month. She was 85. Betty and Bruce met at Eastern Arizona College in Thatcher more than 60 years ago; he was the basketball coach and a zoology teacher; Betty was in his zoology lab. They raised five children during their 61 years of marriage as Bruce served on the UA faculty and became the TV analyst for UA broadcasts with Dave Sitton. Bruce arrived at Arizona from Fargo, North Dakota, in 1950, bent on playing catcher for UA baseball coach Frank Sancet. Instead, he became a coach, helping Weber State win the 1959 NJCAA national championship before returning to Tucson with Betty and his young family.
Catalina Foothills made the coaching hire of the summer when they agreed to terms with Canyon del Oro and UA grad Sue Darling, who is the most experienced women’s basketball coach in Tucson history. Darling has been the head coach at Northern Arizona, Air Force, Pima College, Amphitheater and Salpointe Catholic, as well as being an assistant at Arizona, Arizona State, Dartmouth and Northwestern. The 1982 captain of the UA women’s basketball team has a compelling résumé. She left coaching for four seasons from 2004-08 and became a police officer in Boulder, Colorado.
Saturday’s celebration of life for Amphi’s record-setting football coach Vern Friedli was much more than a reflection on 331 football victories. One of the young men that Friedli impacted was Bill Kinneberg, a baseball pitcher at Morenci High School who pitched a one-hitter, striking out 12, in the 1973 state championship game, which was Friedli’s first state title. Kinneberg went on to be a standout pitcher at Arizona, head baseball coach at UTEP and Wyoming, and coached Utah to the 2016 Pac-12 baseball championship.
While a student at Catalina Foothills High School, Christian Muscarello became an all-city shortstop who went on to be an all-conference player at Trinity University in San Antonio. After leaving Trinity, Muscarello signed with the St. Louis Cardinals and played minor-league baseball in 2014. He has since quit baseball and returned to Tucson to become one of the leading amateur golfers in Arizona. At last week’s Arizona Amateur in Phoenix, Muscarello shot 11 under par to be co-medalist in the state’s top amateur golf tournament. He advanced to the 64-man match play championships and reached the quarterfinals. He is working with ex-UA golfer Susie Meyers, who last year was named one of the Top 100 golf teachers in America by Golf Magazine. Meyers also works with Catalina Foothills sophomore Maya Benita, who recently won the national championship in the 16U Long Drive tournament.
UA sophomore third baseman Nick Quintana struggled in the Cape Cod League this summer. At the end of the regular season last week, Quintana had struck out 50 times in 104 at-bats and hit .204. He led the UA with 54 strikeouts in his freshman season, which was fourth among Pac-12 hitters.
UA baseball coach Jay Johnson lost his top recruit, Matt Sauer, when the pitcher signed with the New York Yankees for $2.49 million last month. But Johnson was able to keep Casa Grande lefty Gil Luna, who enrolled in UA summer school. A year ago, Luna was a revelation to recruiters; he struck out 138 batters in 252 innings for Casa Grande High as his fastball hit 94 mph. Luna injured his forearm last spring and only pitched 21 innings as a senior, but has recovered. Johnson gets no break from summer recruiting this month: He will be at the Long Beach Area Code Games this week.
At the end of the summer basketball recruiting season, Arizona women’s coach Adia Barnes made an impact like few could’ve expected. One recruiting service, prospectsnation.com, ranks Arizona’s class No. 2 nationally. That’s crazy. In addition to a top Italian prospect, Barnes has commitments from players ranked No. 29 and No 47 nationally, which is a program-changer.
Tucsonan Jim Fogltance will begin his 40th season as part of the Pac-12’s football officiating system next month; he’ll be a TV replay crew chief. At the same time, his son, B.J. Fogltance, is climbing the officiating ladder. B.J. has been hired to work for the Big 12, Southland and Mountain West conferences. Two other emerging Tucson football referees — Ty Druse and Tommy Drzazgowski — have been hired by the Pac-12 as part of the league’s referee developmental program. Druse and Drzazgowski also will work FCS games.
Arizona’s Sean Miller, Arizona State’s Bobby Hurley, Utah’s Larry Krystkowiak and Oregon State’s Wayne Tinkle almost have a quorum big enough to have a Pac-12 coaching convention in Spain. The Sun Devils, Wildcats, Utes and Beavers all will play exhibitions in Barcelona between now and Aug. 27. The competition is likely to be weak, but the four Pac-12 teams all get 10 pre-Europe practices. All four teams should know what to expect when training camp officially opens in two months.
The 2017 Lute Olson Fantasy Camp will be held Sept. 7-10 at the Sporting Chance Center. Organizers Steve Rivera and Mike Feder have arranged an impressive coaching staff: Damon Stoudamire, Mike Bibby, Reggie Geary, Pete Williams and Ben Davis, among others. Entry deadline is Monday. Information: feder1616@yahoo.com
Arizona has joined scores of college football organizations such as Notre Dame, Texas and Oregon in intensifying restrictions for the media at pre-practice warmup sessions. It seems so trivial.
Almost no Power 5 Conference school allows access to football workouts.
Those days ended more than a decade ago.
I laugh when I hear reporters cry that this is the end of civilization, and at coaches who insist they can’t trust anyone with a notebook or a tape recorder.
I must’ve gone (wasted time?) to more than 500 college football practices over the years, and at no time did anyone betray a coach’s strategy or leak vital information to suspected spies.
I once went to a Utah State practice during my college days and parked adjacent to the Aggies’ workout. The new head coach, Bruce Snyder, blew his whistle, stopped practice, and sprinted to my car.
“You can’t park there!” he cried. “You can’t watch practice!”
I told him I was a reporter for the student newspaper.
He introduced himself and said, “Let’s get together for lunch.” Now they would call the police.
When Arizona held open-to-everyone practices on campus and at Camp Cochise in the 1990s, a thunderstorm canceled an afternoon practice at the Cochise facility. Dick Tomey moved the team into the basketball gym for a walk-through, and then arranged to have the newspaper guys play a full-court basketball game against the UA coaching staff.
The football team circled the court and cheered — and booed — loudly for an hour.
The only dustup was when UA line coach Jim Young — yes, the former UA, Army and Purdue head coach — elbowed me in the nose while pursing a rebound.
Those were no-harm, no-foul days.
Later that night, most of the coaches and writers met at Brewery Gulch in Bisbee to tell stories to one another.
Over all those years, the only damage was to a good night’s sleep.
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