Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Johnson No. 1 among incoming UA athletes

One man’s look at the 10 leading newcomers in UA sports, 2014-15:

1. Stanley Johnson, basketball. A combination of Chris Mills and Michael Dickerson.

2. George Cunningham, golf. The UA’s top men’s golf recruit since Ricky Barnes 14 years ago.

3. Bailey Roth, distance runner. The school’s 50-year lineage of elite distance runners continues with the Colorado steeple-chaser.

4. Gabi Stoian, soccer. Arizona’s 2014 player of the year at Phoenix Pinnacle High School should help to revive Arizona’s long-suffering soccer program.

5. Kadeem Allen, basketball. No apostrophe in Kadeem, but the 2014 NJCAA Player of the Year is the X-factor on a bid to get to the Final Four.

6. Trish Parks, softball. A combo hitter-pitcher from SoCal is a big talent who’ll try to fit into a big-time program.

7. DaVonte’ Neal, football. Think of Dennis Northcutt in 1999 when he caught 88 passes and averaged 18.9 yards per punt return.

8. J.J. Matijevic, baseball. Drafted in the 22nd round by the Red Sox, Matijevic, a Pennsylvanian, chose to enroll at Arizona. He’s a lefty hitter, middle infielder, who hit .567 with 10 homers as the Pittsburgh area’s prep Player of the Year.

9. tie, Samantha Senczyszyn and Rasmus Skjaerpe, swimming. You’ll need spell-check to get their names right, but Senczyszyn, of Wisconsin, and Skjaerpe, a Norwegian national team swimmer who went to prep school in Florida, are among the nation’s most sought-after freshmen prospects.

10. Trevor Wood, football. He’s not the next Rob Gronkowski, but who is? Wood is a hybrid tight end/athlete made for 21st century offenses.

Special mention: Freshmen golfers Krystal Quihuis of Salpointe Catholic and Natalia Forero of Cali, Colombia, are elite-level additions. But Laura Ianello’s five-woman team returns intact from last year’s group that tied for seventh in the NCAA finals, so making the lineup will be unusually difficult.

In today’s sports market, Lee Carey would’ve left Tucson High School with a $2 million signing bonus from the Cleveland Indians instead of the $19,000 he received in 1947.

Or he would’ve had to choose from football scholarship offers by Arizona and ASU, or certainly some Top 25 programs.

But in 1947, one of the most remarkable athletes and coaches in Tucson history — Carey was a starter on nine state championship teams as a THS football/basketball/baseball player — went all-in as a third baseman.

Incredibly, his greatest achievement in sports might have come later: he coached his alma mater, THS, to a pair of state championships and Rincon High to another in baseball. His first, in 1955, came when Carey was just 26.

“My grandmother had a scrapbook about my dad’s career that was 4 inches thick,” says Brian Carey, Lee’s only son and one of four children. “He had nine varsity letters. He once ran against an Olympic sprinter and beat him. He was just a natural.”

Carey died in Tucson last week, at 85, and his legacy is going strong.

In 1947, when the Cleveland Indians began the first spring training camp in Tucson history, they signed Carey and put him on the field. Imagine the pressure. He signed with the Indians instead of St. Louis because Cleveland stipulated it would pay for his education.

Carey had a 4.0 GPA at Tucson High and competed in spring training with a big-league club while taking UA classes. He got his degree in 4½ years and it came in handy: When he chose to leave baseball after 672 minor-league games in 1952, he became a career educator.

He was the Dean of Boys at Rincon and later assistant principal. His athletic prowess continued for decades; he rode the full 112 miles of El Tour de Tucson when he was 60.

“My dad was a jokester, a kind, generous man who did so much for kids,” Brian Carey says. “He was the type of man who did the right thing.”

Six years after she helped Team USA to an Olympic silver medal in China, ex-UA outfielder Caitlin Lowe was selected to the National Pro Fastpitch 2014 all-star team last week. Playing for Florida-based USSSA Pride, Lowe hit .364, which was No. 5 in NPF. Lowe, an assistant softball coach at UA, is 29 and seems to have made just one concession to age: She stole six bases this year. At Arizona she stole 156 bases in four seasons.

Eight-time NCAA distance-running champ Lawi Lalang hit the motherlode for pro runners last week when he accepted an endorsement offer as part of the Nike running stable. Flowing Wells grad Tara Erdmann is part of the Nike Project for distance runners; she was the fifth-best American female finisher (10th overall) in last week’s Falmouth (Mass.) Road Race, earning $1,000. Arizona’s 2012 All-American Stephen Sambu was paid $10,000 for winning the men’s race at Falmouth.

Yoichi Tomita, a former Olympic gymnastics coach who operates Tucson Gymnastics Worlds training facilities, is in Pittsburgh this weekend as part of the selection committee for USA Gymnastics. Tomita will help select the USA team to the world championships in China later this year. Tomita’s gym has three Division I men’s gymnasts: CDO’s Nathan Goff at Army; Rincon/University’s Emeric Quade at Ohio State; and Josh Everitt at Nebraska.

Favored to win the Pan-Pacific swimming championship in the 100 breast stroke last week in Brisbaine, Australia, UA senior and six-time NCAA champion Kevin Cordes was disqualified when his goggles snapped in mid-race and came off. Better than in the Olympic Trials or NCAA finals, I suppose.

Does anyone else get the irony of ex-Arizona quarterback Nick Foles starting at QB for the Philadelphia Eagles over two ex-USC All-Americans, Mark Sanchez and Matt Barkley? Foles was 2-10 his senior year at Arizona, which, in retrospect, is almost unfathomable.

Amphitheater will properly honor Hall of Fame coach Vern Friedli at Friday’s opener against Pueblo. It will be Amphi Alumni Football Night at Friedli Field. All coaches from Friedli’s 1979 state championship team plan to attend, as do dozens of ex-Panthers including former Colorado and NFL linebacker Steve Doolittle.

Former UA forward Jesse Perry is on the move again. After playing in the Euroleague in Finland, Lithuania and Lebanon last year, Perry has signed to play for Aget Service in Italy this season. Small world: His agent is Toby Bailey, who helped UCLA win the 1995 Final Four.

Santa Rita grad Terrell Stoglin will play for his sixth Euroleague team in three years in 2014-15. Italy’s Cimberio Varese declined to renew his option for the coming season.

Arizona State AD Ray Patterson has announced the Sun Devils will debut their 10th football helmet design this season, copper, which triggered some unrest among UA fans. The Wildcats have been wearing copper helmets for two seasons. But in truth, ASU was the first of the schools to wear copper, doing so in an April 2012 baseball game against USC. It doesn’t matter any more. Oregon wears chrome. Stanford wears all-black. Arizona’s basketball team has worn platinum. UA athletic director Greg Byrne holds the trump card: ultimately someone calling the shots at Arizona will trot out a football team wearing the school’s original colors, sage green and silver. That will be a day to cherish.

Given the recent Little League World Series success of Philadelphia pitcher Mo’ne Davis, it’s cool for girls to play baseball. That applies in Tucson, too. Stephanie Nicholson helped Flowing Wells win two state softball championships, set the single-season home run record at Oklahoma State and then coached CDO to the 2012 state softball championship. Her next adventure? She made the final roster for the USA team at the Women’s Baseball World Cup next month in Japan. Nicholson, 31, had not played competitively for about nine years when she went to the USA Baseball tryouts. She made the team as an infielder.

Arizona’s chances to successfully defend its 2013 Pac-12 women’s cross country championship (the UA finished No. 2 in the NCAA) took a hit this summer when sophomore standout Maria Larsson chose to remain in her Switzerland home and train there.

The curious career of ex-ASU point guard Jahii Carson gets stranger and stranger. After failing to get drafted in June, Carson last week signed to play for the Wollongong Hawks in Australia’s National Basketball League, which is far from the beaten path of overseas pro hoops. It’s the same team that featured ex-UA backup Dylan Rigdon 15 years ago. Carson and Nick Johnson entered college in the same year. Carson, a superior prospect, did not improve much. Johnson became the Pac-12 Player of the Year. A lot of it has to do with the day-to-day competition in practice, and the strength of a team’s non-conference schedule. Carson didn’t have access to those benefits at ASU.

Former Canyon del Oro, Santa Rita and Mountain View linebacker Blake Martinez is likely to start at inside linebacker for Stanford against UC Davis on Saturday. But he faces significant day-to-day competition to keep that job from three players: Noor Davis, Joe Hemschoot and Kevin Palma. They are attempting to replace all-conference LB Shayne Skov, who was the face of Stanford’s defense the last two seasons.

Sean Miller’s announcement that Arizona will play a home-and-home basketball series against UConn in 2017 and 2018 continues to set the pace in Pac-12 non-conference scheduling. And it should. Arizona is a school that in 1998 played Kentucky, Duke and Kansas in the regular season, and in 2006 played Kansas, Michigan State and North Carolina in the regular season. It has had home-and-home series with Duke, UConn, North Carolina, Kansas, then-powerful Arkansas, Texas, Florida, Villanova and Syracuse. It’s a tradition.

Rich Rodriguez’s third Arizona football season swings on three factors:

• Splitting, at worst, road games against Utah and Washington State.   
• Deploying a quarterback, probably redshirt freshman Anu Solomon, who can avoid making the Killer Mistake.                                      
• Developing enough confidence and momentum that UA can sweep Washington and ASU in Nov. 15 and Nov. 28 home games, respectively.

I think it’s entirely possible Arizona will open 4-0 and finish 6-6 because no team in the conference enters the season with a more potentially troublesome quarterback situation.

On the final football-free weekend of 2014, I see the Wildcats 6-5 as they take the field Nov. 28 against the Sun Devils.

If Rodriguez gets winning production from any of his four QBs, all of who project as No. 2 quarterbacks, and if Arizona somehow wins eight games again, he should be the Pac-12 Coach of the Year.

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