FOV Cavalier of the Year, #11/#12

From Old Virginia celebrates its birthday in a unique way: by recognizing one of Virginia's student-athletes as Cavalier of the Year. What are the criteria for the award? You decide: that's the beauty. I nominate the 12 athletes that I think have been most outstanding during the latest season of UVA athletics, and provide a short summary of their accomplishments. You choose the winner in a poll that goes up after all 12 have had their moment in the spotlight.

Over the next two weeks, two athletes at a time will be profiled, and you'll hear about what they've accomplished while representing Mr. Jefferson's University. The athletes are presented in a totally random order so as to hopefully not imply any endorsement one way or another. Athletes from all fields are considered; part of the point is that UVA is about excellence across the entire department and doesn't shortchange its so-called non-revenue sports simply because they don't make headlines. Last year's winner was Danny Hultzen; today's athletes are Ken Clausen and Lauren Perdue.

Ken Clausen - Men's lacrosse - Defense

Team accomplishments:

- #1 seed in NCAA tournament
- NCAA Final Four
- ACC champions

Personal accomplishments:

- Tewaaraton Trophy finalist
- USILA first-team all-American
- Schmeisser Award recipient as nation's outstanding defensive player
- USILA Scholar All-American
- All-ACC selection
- Lowe's Senior Class Award finalist

There was no doubt about this one: Clausen was the country's top defenseman, period. There was a little question before the season about how UVA might replace a few key departures on the defensive side of things, but Clausen put those questions to rest, quickly. He led the ACC in turnovers caused and was always assigned to the opposition's best player, which he usually shut right down. It's not often a defenseman is selected as a Tewaaraton finalist; in fact, Clausen is only the second long-stick player ever selected for invitation to the awards banquet, and first since 2005.

UVA is known for churning out top-notch goal scorers: over the years, players like Matt Ward and Ben Rubeor and Danny Glading pass through, and you chalk them up for 30 goals and maybe a Tewaaraton finalist nomination. But none of them have been three-year all-Americans: Ken Clausen is the first Cavalier to claim that honor. And by starting every game in his career, he shares with Brian Carroll the UVA record for games played with 70. Chances are it'll be years, if ever, until we see another UVA defenseman of Clausen's caliber.

Lauren Perdue - Women's swimming & diving - Freestyle



Team accomplishments:

- ACC champions
- 9th place at NCAA championships

Personal accomplishments:

- ACC Freshman of the Year
- ACC Championships Most Valuable Swimmer
- Two-time ACC Performer of the Week
- 5 All-American events and 1 honorable mention
- 3 individual and 4 relay ACC championships
- 3 UVA records and 1 ACC record

A champion swim team needs a champion freestyler - a point I made when it was Scot Robison's turn in the spotlight. Lauren Perdue is a champion freestyler as well as an ACC record holder (200 yard freestyle.) Those are the kind of accolades you expect for a veteran swimmer; Lauren Perdue is a freshman. She stepped right in and anchored our relays, won multiple events at the conference meet, and finished fifth in the nation in the 50 free and 8th in the 200.

The UVA Invitational was a perfect microcosm of the way Perdue's career might be expected to go. She led off the 400 free relay with a 100-yard swim of 49.06, which set a new pool record. The old record was set by....uh, Lauren Perdue, about an hour prior in the individual 100 yard swim. That record broke the old record held by.....yes, Lauren Perdue, which she'd set the day before. Breaking her own records - I think there's a lot of that in her future.

it's a party and you're all invited

One week from today is a Very Special Day. No, it's not the day your propeller beanie finally comes in the mail. It's my birthday, wheee! Or to get all technically correct about it, it's the birthday of this blog, which dates its founding to June 10, 2008. That means FOV is turning two years old.

It certainly has been an interesting two years, full of triumph, tragedy, and heartbreak. UVA is the most successful ACC athletic department since expansion, and that is awesome, and nearly half those ACC titles have come in the last two years. On the other hand, the last two seasons have both seen major coach firings. Al Groh and Dave Leitao were the big-cheese coaches when this blog began; they've been replaced by Mike London and Tony Bennett. (This also necessitates a change of banners, which I'm working on. My limited graphic design skills are combining forces with my limited software to produce a bunch of stuff I hate. Getting there, though.)

Interesting times for the blog itself, too. I've been so idiotically wrong at times, and prophetic at others. (It counts even if that foresight was the result of a visit to Emo Myspace Land.) I've been quoted at Yahoo and won interesting awards, the latter of which I'd like to think is for being bloody damn right.

Anyway, just like last year, birthday party means it's time to recognize the athletes that are out at the forefront, wearing the colors and representing the school. The 2nd annual FOV Cavalier of the Year Award, which is basically the prestige equivalent of a Nobel Athletics Prize and therefore only Hoos are eligible, is hereby announced. Last year's winner was baseball's Danny Hultzen, a worthy awardee, and he returns as a nominee this year as well. The twelve nominees, in alphabetical order, are:

Robby Andrews (track)
Ken Clausen (lacrosse)
Drew Courtney/Michael Shabaz (tennis)
Chris Henrich (wrestling)
Danny Hultzen (baseball)
Brittany Kalkstein (lacrosse)
Lauren Perdue (swimming)
Diego Restrepo (soccer)
Scot Robison (swimming)
Paige Selenski (field hockey)
Sarah Tacke (softball)
Monica Wright (basketball)

Here's the format: over the next couple weeks, I'll be profiling these standout athletes for you with a summary of their accomplishments this season, two at a time and in a random order. Just about every one of them has earned some kind of hardware or individual recognition for their exploits. When I'm done with the summaries, a poll will go up on the right-hand side. I determine the nominees, but you the readers determine the winner. Hultzen was indeed the people's choice last year, and I must say you chose wisely. The power will again be in your hands; do not use it for evil.

series preview: North Carolina

Flying out of town again on Friday, so this stuff comes at you a day early. Plus I'm getting antsy for more baseball. Final exam break is boring. This weekend's opponent is UNC, and much like in basketball, this is a good chance to stomp the Heels while they're down. Normally an Omaha-caliber team, UNC finds themselves on the bubble for not just the NCAAs, but even the ACC tournament. They are tied at the moment with NC State (whom they beat in an earlier series) for the 8th and final place in Greensboro. The Heels have the tiebreaker, but they also have the tougher row to hoe in the next two weeks - especially this weekend, where they face a team capable of sweeping them if they don't play good baseball.

Yes, I said "sweep" - but I also said UNC would have to play poorly for that to happen. UVA is at a disadvantage right off the bat: it'll have been well over a week since they saw any live pitching in a game. UNC had their finals break a couple weeks ago and are on a nice seven game winning streak - eight if they beat Charleston tonight. A series against Wake Forest such as they had last week is really good for what ails ya.

UNC is still a good baseball team, so if a UVA sweep is in the offing, don't expect this streak of double-digit runs to continue. UNC has quality pitching, especially from Friday starter Matt Harvey, who promises to be excellent competition for Danny Hultzen. Harvey's numbers aren't quite as eye-popping as Hultzen's, but they're still brilliant, especially for college pitchers: a 2.68 ERA, .212 opponents' BA, 80 Ks. Like Hultzen, he's gone the distance once this season.

Second starter Patrick Johnson has been throwing on Sundays lately, likely in an effort to match up against a team's worst starter, and he's no slouch either (3.62 ERA), though somewhat more hittable than your usual second starter (.280 opponents' BA) and prone to the occasional disaster when opponents string those hits together. NC State did just that and lit him up to the tune of six runs in the fourth. The Heels have been tag-teaming the third (Saturday for them) starter's job, with either Chris Munnelly or Colin Bates starting and the other first out of the bullpen. Neither is fearsome.

As for the bats, UNC has 'em, but they lack two things: a bottom third of the order, and that one really nasty, fearsome hitter that you never want to see in the on-deck circle. Dustin Ackley not only left town early, he was the second pick in the MLB draft, behind Stephen Strasburg. He left Carolina without a true masher in the middle of the lineup, so their lineup looks a lot like a poor man's UVA. It's a good set of hitters, but the highest batting average on the team would rank 7th at UVA (that belongs to Dillon Hazlett, hitting .352, but he takes so few walks his OBP is only fifth on the team.) And they're exceedingly low on power. Their 33 home runs are the second-fewest in the conference, ahead of only the anemic Terrapins, and only one player has more than five.

In general I expect a low-scoring series: Carolina's strength is their pitching and they have a capable bullpen. Their hitting ought to be good enough to take one game, two if we show up on Friday and the batspeed hasn't caught back up to the fastballs yet. But if Hultzen is really zoned in on Friday, and if the crafty but hittable Patrick Johnson suddenly starts giving up hits all in a row on Sunday....well, NC State has Duke this weekend and the pressure is on UNC to steal one or they'll be seriously behind the 8-ball going into the regular season's final weekend.

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Quickly:

- Ken Clausen is a Tewaaraton Trophy finalist. No defenseman has ever won the males' trophy, and I doubt it'll happen this year; it'd probably take a UVA national title plus Duke falling short of the final four for the voters to turn their heads away from Ned Crotty's 51 assists.

- The ACC/Big Ten Challenge opponent is Minnesota, so yay for my prognostication. I suppose I'd have been smart to check out which other Big Ten teams had been on the road last year. So we probably lose that game. The annoying thing after all is that there are eleven Big Ten teams, and this is, I think, the 12th year of the event, and this'll be the fourth matchup against Minnesota. No imagination, man. But we get the first-day matchup in which UVA is the only show of the day, so that means a national TV audience.

game preview: UNC

The big lacrosse game isn't til Saturday and the GT baseball series starts tomorrow, so I'm kinda doing these previews bass-ackwards. That's because I'm hopping a flight to Ohio for the weekend right after work tomorrow, so tonight you get the one that requires actual writing on my part. Tomorrow morning comes the Q&A session with the fine folks of From The Rumble Seat concerning the GT series; today, UNC.

Obviously, every discussion of UNC starts with Billy Bitter, and every time a UVA game has been on TV lately the announcers have been salivating over the likely eventual matchup between Bitter and Ken Clausen. But UNC is the #2 team in the country, so the rest of the defense is going to have to step up equally against the rest of UNC's attack in order to win the game. Right?

Right....mostly. UNC's offense took a major hit against Maryland when midfielder Sean Delaney went down with a shoulder injury. Despite missing the Hopkins game, Delaney is still the team's leading goal-scorer, and he isn't listed on the depth chart for Saturday either. And UNC isn't the most efficient or prolific offensive team. For a national contender, their numbers are pretty average. The low point on the season was a 5-4 win over Bryant - although that's not totally weird as Bryant's coach Mike Pressler knows UNC pretty well from his days at Duke. Still, the talent gap should have been enough to win without such a sweat.

It's the defense that's got UNC where they are. The GAA is a sparkling 6.3, best in the country except for "reclassifying" (i.e. not-all-the-way-DI-yet) Bryant. Best by a wide margin, actually. So the real matchup is going to be this: #1 offense in the country (that's us) vs. #1 defense. In most sports, defense rules, but my opinion of lacrosse is that if you have the ball long enough, goals are inevitable. So I like our odds.

The key is, I don't think UNC can outscore us. In order for the Heels to win, the game has to be low-scoring. A high-scoring game favors Virginia. And the peripheral stats all tilt our way - not extremely, but they do. UVA is better at ground balls, clears, and (sit down for this one) faceoffs.

Still, it'll be tight. I think we're better, but not so much better that the mistakes we've seen out of this team can be overcome if too often repeated. No wasted possessions. Lot at stake here - not only the #1 ranking in the country (which is nice but ceremonial) but also the #1 seed in the ACC tournament, which goes to the winner. The stage couldn't be bigger: the first-ever event in the new Meadowlands stadium. Just think, that stadium is going to stand there for at least 30 years, who knows how long, and it won't be the New York Giants that opened it up - it'll be your Hoos. (Hofstra/Delaware is actually the Big City Classic's first game, but good luck finding it on TV.) We're more battle-tested: UNC has Princeton, Maryland, and Duke on its wall, and that's nice, but they haven't got Syracuse, didn't smoke Hopkins like we did, didn't cream Cornell like we did. Like I said before the Hopkins game, this team has earned the right to have it said that if they play their game and take care of business, they'll win. Carolina is a much stronger opponent, but the previous applies. Play your game, win the game - it's that simple.