Arizona State coach Charli Turner Thorne, right, talks with official Brenda Pantoja during the fourth quarter of Arizona State's game against Florida State, Dec. 21, 2015, in Tempe.
As an Arizona point guard in the mid-1990s, Brenda Pantoja averaged 13 points and an NCAA-leading 9.7 assists as a senior. But her career wouldn’t be playing basketball, it would be officiating the game. She is working her eighth Final Four this weekend, and has also worked NBA and WNBA games after the college season shuts down. More impressively, she overcame two knee surgeries early in her UA career to develop into one of America’s best basketball officials.
Loorz
– From 1995-2011, the Frank Busch era of UA men’s and women’s swimming, it raised eyebrows if the Wildcats didn’t finish in the top four or five at the NCAA championships. The UA swimming programs have been an absolute wreck the last 10 years, and it wasn’t much different in last week’s NCAA championships. The UA finished 29th in the men’s finals and 29th in the women’s finals. The UA men scored 15 points and the women 20. Believe it or not, the Wildcats scored a combined 948 points in the 2008 NCAA championships when Busch’s men and women both won the national title. New coach Ben Loorz, hired less than a year ago, might have the most difficult coaching job in the UA athletic department.
Denver Nuggets forward Aaron Gordon (32) shoots a 3-point basket over Golden State Warriors guard Brandin Podziemski (2) during the first half Friday, April 4, 2025, in San Francisco.
– I had to blink when I saw this statistic: ex-Wildcat Aaron Gordon leads the NBA in 3-point shooting percentage, .455, for those with over 150 attempts. At Arizona in 2014, he was a non-shooter, setting a UA-record low by making just 42% of his foul shots. All that has changed. Gordon is now a 69% foul shooter who went 7 for 10 from 3-point distance in a March 10 game against Phoenix. Gordon has been paid $157 million in his 12 NBA seasons.
– Tucsonan Craig Bjornson has three baseball championship rings: One as a pitcher for the 1987 Tucson High Badgers, one as the bullpen coach for the 2017 Houston Astros and a third as the bullpen coach for the 2018 Boston Red Sox. His father, Russ, was a key pitcher on Tucson High’s 1956 state title team. Craig spent the last two years as the bullpen coach for the New York Mets and began this season, his 26th year as a coach, as the bullpen coach for the Triple-A Gwinnett Stripers, an Atlanta Braves affiliate. Very impressive.
