Greg Hansen's Notebook: This entry is part of longtime Star columnist Greg Hansen's weekly notebook.
Subscribers can read this week's "Hansen's Notebook" in its entirety in the Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024, edition of the Arizona Daily Star (Page C2) — either in print or at Tucson.com/EEdition. Or, dig into the Hansen archives at Tucson.com/Hansen.
• UA football coach Brent Brennan spent a rare free Friday night by returning to his former turf in Northern California to watch his son, Los Gatos High School senior quarterback Scotty Brennan, throw a 45-yard touchdown pass in the game’s opening minutes of a 62-6 rout over Mountain View High. Scotty’s team is 4-0. He is much like his father was a few decades ago at NorCal’s St. Francis High. Scotty wears jersey No. 14, as did his dad when he was a UCLA receiver. At 6-5, Scotty averaged 14 points last season for the Los Gatos basketball team; Brent was also a high school basketball standout. Brennan’s daughters, Blake and Casey, are both attending Colorado. Blake was a soccer and field hockey standout at Los Gatos High; Casey was a starting basketball guard on a Los Gatos championship team.
Arizona head coach Brent Brennan follows the cheer squad to Arizona Stadium for the Wildcat Walk and the game against NAU earlier this month.
• Salpointe Catholic senior placekicker Kyah Francone kicked field goals of 50 and 51 yards Thursday in a 27-23 victory over longtime state power Peoria Centennial. Francone is on the recruiting radar everywhere; he has attended Arizona and ASU kicking camps, as well as the prominent Chris Sailer camp in California, where he was named one of the nation’s 12 leading prospects. As far as I can determine, only one other high school kicker in Tucson ever made two or more 50-yard-plus field goals: Palo Verde’s Bill Zivic, 1977. Zivic went on to be the UA’s primary placekicker for two seasons, 1978-79, making 17 field goals and all 28 extra-point kicks attempted. At Palo Verde, Zivic made a 57-yard field goal against Sunnyside, a Tucson record, as well as a 55-yarder against Santa Rita and another of 51 yards.
Greg Hansen is the longtime sports columnist for the Arizona Daily Star and Tucson.com.
• It would’ve been unthinkable 10 or 20 years ago that anyone connected to Arizona softball icon Jennie Finch would play softball anywhere but for Mike Candrea at Arizona. But with Candrea retired, Finch’s niece, Malaya Majam-Finch, last week committed to play for the nation’s No. 1 softball program, Oklahoma. Majam-Finch is the daughter of Fullerton, California’s Shane Finch, who is Jennie’s brother. A class of 2026 prospect, Majam-Finch is a pitcher/outfielder with a 4.0 GPA, ranked as high as No. 25 overall in the Class of ’26.
• One of the inevitable fallouts of moving from the Pac-12 to the Big 12 is taking place in officiating, of all things. Tucson’s Bob Scofield, one of the Pac-12’s leading women’s basketball officials of the last 30 years, a Final Four referee and member of the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame, chose not to be in the group of Pac-12 officials who jumped to the Big 12. Why? A demanding travel schedule that could have him, and others, officiate a game in Morgantown, West Virginia., on a Wednesday night, and then, say, a game in Manhattan, Kansas, on a Thursday night. Scofield has chosen to officiate in the Mountain West and Big Sky conferences in 2024-25, and he won’t be the only one. The Big 12 will pay top basketball officials about $4,000 per game. The Mountain West pays about $3,000 per game. But the officials pay their own travel expenses, so it might be a wash.
