Newman’s men’s basketball team just got a huge boost in signing Barton County guard Chip Steven — a 6-foot-2 Derby product who averaged 11.3 points last season to go with 40 percent shooting from beyond the arc and 88 percent from the line. Don’t kid yourself — you can’t be a punk and average double digits in the Jayhawk. Not a chance. And he did it twice. He was also a second-team all-Jayhawk West pick last season. GREAT pickup for the Jets and coach Mark Potter, who is after a Heartland Conference title.
Steven leads an eight-person class, and you can read about the rest of the new Jets here.
There was some bumbling and stumbling to the finish line, but in the end the message was pretty clear: the MIAA’s product is one of the best out there and … they want to protect their brand. Which includes making sure that Southwest Baptist is going to come back in the fold (although they got a longer than expected leash on that one) and they’ll have 12 football playing schools.
So, MIAA expansion is off the table, for now. I doubt they’ll be able to expand unless they bring in four teams at once. But don’t kid yourself on this one — not having football sank Rockhurst.
So my story about Newman came out today (in short, they want to be in the MIAA) and when it got delayed a week I was worried I was going to have to change a big chunk of it because the MIAA’s vote on letting Rockhurst in was supposed to be this past Friday — June 12 — but they put it off until July 1. They did have a vote on Friday about expansion, but it was secret, and it was the athletic directors that voted on it. But if you read my story you can see that the athletic directors in the MIAA are definitely against expansion, so I guess it’s not a very well-kept secret. I tried to talk to all 12 of them, got nine to go on record and out of those, eight were against expansion in any form. What’s that mean? Just that I spent a lot of time talking to ADs, who are an interesting bunch.
I wrote earlier this week that my story — vaguely, it’s about Newman and the MIAA — would come out Sunday. It’s not. It’ll be out sometime in the next week, though. The reason? Nothing scandalous. Look at the story like a movie — a really, really good movie that you have to go see — that picks a release date against a blockbuster that’s going to stomp the competition. And the first movie decides that maybe, if they want any box office, it better pick another weekend. Because the blockbuster is going to kick everyone’s ass. The story that moved is my baby. But it’ll be out in the next week, and it’s as promised.
I’m out. Ta.
I guess I’m like the SATs at Memphis … I’m going to make this real easy for you. Here’s what I mean: Read More »
There’s bad streaks and then there’s the way the Newman University softball team started out the season, losing 27 straight games.
But there might still be a little fight in these Jets. Newman has gone 2-2 over its last four games this week — all on the road — including Monday’s 8-7 win over Oklahoma Panhandle State, sparked by a two-run triple from freshman Kayla Vosberg. Hopefully they can keep up their winning ways.
Roll Call, still in its infancy, is opening its beautiful little baby eyes and looking at spring sports now, which means my little darling is going to be honoring the best of baseball, softball and track & field for the next three months or so.
So let’s get it started.
BASEBALL
TAYLOR HOUSE
Pittsburg State’s Taylor House might not be big (5-foot-9, 175 pounds), but dude packs a punch. Your MIAA hitter of the week went 9 for 14 in four games against Southwest Baptist last week, racking up a home run, two triples, seven RBIs and seven runs. Yeah … that might help his stats a little bit.
Region VI is rolling at Koch Arena with today’s women’s games going — here’s a quick and easy link to the KJCCC Web site, where you can follow all the games via live stats and scoring, so that’s nice. They’re only a couple of games in, but we’ve got Patrick Sheltra out there covering all the goodness that is Koch Arena and JuCo basketball … I remember going to see the 93-94 NJCAA champion Hutch team beat Coffeyville in the Region VI title game at Henry Levitt Arena (RIP). That Blue Dragon team featured future Purdue star Roy Hairston, Arizona (and former KU and Florida) star Ben Davis, who went on to play for the Suns and the Knicks …. and Wichita Northwest product and current Wichita North girls coach Dietric Sanders! Deke’s the man. I played h.s. ball at NW and our coach, Charles Williams, used to take us to watch a lot of Deke’s games that year (he was the sixth man), so we got to be around those guys quite a bit and they were always super-cool. And they smashed one of the backboards at the aforementioned HLA after they won (celebratory hanging on the rim) … and Steve McClain was cool with it.
Back from my mid-week vaca … went and saw Friday the 13th at the Old Town Warren. It was terrible, and also my choice. So my bad, AT, I guess I owe you one. As long as Jennifer Aniston’s not in it. I guess I was trying to recapture some of the great memories I had from waiting in line for 2-3 hours at some Halloween Hayride when I was a kid — they showed the movies in a loop on big screen TVs while you waited to get scared.
Anyways…
The KCAC is already in the heart of its conference tournament … while the Jayhawk and the MIAA aren’t far behind, with league titles and playoff spots still on the line. Got to say I’m looking forward to the Region VI tourney this year … there are always fireworks and hey, it’s always neat to see the big-name coaches come out. It was pretty cool to see Gregg Marshall sit through four straight games at Koch Arena … even if the only thing he got out of it was Reggie Chamberlain. Hopefully RC wasn’t the only reason he was there, and he’s kept in contact with some of last year’s best freshman. Ryan Martin, anybody?
Here’s the gist: Anderson tried to take a different route back to the team’s hotel and ended up playing the role of Dr. Jack Shephard to a guy who crashed in front of her. Without the beard and all the angst, of course.
And while their coach was out trying to save somebody’s life, the Newman players disobeyed Anderson’s orders and got out of the van to direct traffic away from the accident — which occured on an off-ramp off Interstate 10 — and a couple of them went and got a concrete slab to help bust out the window of a car that had just wrecked and had an unconscious, bleeding-from-the mouth passenger trapped inside.
Here’s the skinny on Joanna Pryor, the new Newman volleyball coach who got her grand introduction yesterday. I got to talk to her for a few minutes, and here are some of the highlights:
-She’s from Attica
-There was only one job in Kansas (small college, obviously) she’d consider leaving Cowley for, and she got it.
“When I saw that Newman was going Division II, I told people that was the only job I’d leave Cowley for in the state,” Pryor said. “For so long there was kind of a void in Wichita as far as Division II volleyball, because you had teams at Washburn, Hays, Emporia and so on but not here.”
