weekend review, spring edition

Once again, we'll take a spin around some of the non-revenue sports and football recruiting. This seems like a pretty good format for Mondays and I think I'll keep it up, at least until the spring seasons wind down.

Starting with....

Swimming

The girls are ACC champs, and it wasn't even, like, close. They scored 848 points - almost 250 more than second place. To recap some of the domination:

- There are five relay events - we won all of them, which earns you 200 points.

- There are thirteen individual events, not including the diving, which we're a little weak at. With eight swimmers in each championship heat (and a further eight in the consolation heat, which still earns points) there are 104 possible slots. In a conference of 11 teams (no Wake Forest here) evenly distributing those spots would give each team 9.5 qualifying swimmers total. We had 39 of 104.

- Finishing last in the championship heat earns you 11 points. If you give us our 200 relay points, and give all 39 of our spots last place (impossible, because we had more than one swimmer in all events) that would give us enough points to win the meet by about 30 points.

- Of the eight swimmers in the 200 IM championship heat, six were 'Hoos, earning us 89 of a possible 118 points in that heat. P.S. - Only one, Megan Evo, was a senior. Four were underclassmen - three sophomores and a freshman.

- Of the 18 event records that existed before the championships, we broke 10.

The NCAA championships are about a month away.

Lacrosse

No surprises here - the team is 3-0 after a pretty dominating performance against SUNY-Cupcake (er, Stony Brook) on Saturday. About the only complaint so far this season is letting the opponents into the game in the second half - our opponents have scored twice as much (14 goals against 7) in the second half as the first, and Dom Starsia pretty explicitly called out the second-half execution after the Bryant game. Otherwise, the results have been pretty much what you'd expect when the #2 team in the land takes on a trio of cannon fodder.

As for last season's glaring concern - faceoffs - the Stony Brook game looked pretty good, but there are zero conclusions to be drawn here, since the 19-of-32 faceoff performance was exactly the same as last year. I'll wait til Syracuse to see if we really are any better at that. In the two games against the 'Cuse last year we won only one-third of the faceoffs, which is awful, and yet we went 1-1 against them and broke even on goal differential. Just break even on faceoffs and the sky's the limit.

Baseball

Yup, it's that season too. Baseball was one of my favorite things to go see in my student days because the "security" never cared to ask why we were wearing jackets in the 70-degree weather. (Jackets have pockets, pockets hold beer. If you went to college and didn't blow off class on one of the first beautiful warm spring afternoons of the year, smuggle a six-pack into Davenport Field and enjoy a ballgame and beer while sitting on the grass, you didn't go to college.)

Anyway, the season started exactly the same as it did last year: a dominating four-game sweep of a ridiculously overmatched Patriot League opponent; in this case, Bucknell. Which, like, great, but honestly in my limited looks at the baseball season this year I don't see any evidence we can expect anything more than last year's results: a middling ACC finish and a first-round exit from the NCAA regionals. I suppose I shouldn't complain. Simply making the NCAA tournament is more than some of our higher profile sports can claim.

Basketball

Not much to say here right now except that if you haven't already, you should go read Jerry Ratcliffe's article on this season's forgotten man, Mamadi Diane. A healthy Mo this season would have saved us a lot of embarrassment; unfortunately for all involved, it wasn't to be.

A little bit of something on the recruiting front here, too. We're in good shape to land PG Eric Atkins out of Maryland for the class of 2010, and soon. Atkins and Mychal Parker would make a pretty good first half of the recruiting class, no?

Football

As promised, an update to the recruiting board.

- Moved RB Kevin Parks to orange. 43 touchdowns FTW.

- Added WR E.J. Scott, TE Blake Barker, OT Robbie Havenstein, and S Dontae Johnson to the yellow section. For the most part these are Junior Day attendees, either the one we just had two weeks ago or the one coming up this Saturday the 28th.

- Added DE Henry Anderson to the red section. (Offer.) Also added to red: RB Khalek Shepherd (Junior Day invitee) and LB Nick Forbes (Offer, though given the nationwide interest it's unlikely he'll ever leave the red section. We've got better chances with Khairi Fortt and Aramide Olaniyan.)

- Added a few schools to a few prospects' lists, most notably Auburn to Olaniyan's. This is interesting because Auburn's recruiting footprint doesn't really overlap ours much. If Auburn is wandering up to the Blue Ridge foothills to recruit Olaniyan, this sounds like a prospect I very much want to see committed to UVA.