FOV Cavalier of the Year #11/#12/#13

From Old Virginia celebrates its birthday in a unique way: by recognizing one of Virginia's student-athletes as the 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 the 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. The full list of nominees is here.  

Over the next few weeks, two athletes at a time will be profiled, and you'll hear about what they've accomplished while representing Mr. Jefferson's University this year. 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; the point is to emphasize 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.  Today's athletes: Denny McCarthy, Mark Cockerton, and Courtney Swan.

Denny McCarthy - Men's golf

Team accomplishments:

-- Won Bank of Tennessee Intercollegiate
-- Won Jim West Intercollegiate with second-best score by an ACC team in history
-- Won Wolfpack Intercollegiate

Personal accomplishments:

-- Runner-up at ACC championship
-- Finished sixth at NCAA championship
-- PING and Golfweek all-America second-teams
-- First UVA golfer to be named to Ben Hogan Award watchlist
-- VaSID golfer of the year
-- Maryland State Amateur champion

In fits and starts, the UVA men's golf team is starting to do things on the national scene.  Right now you've got Steve Marino as just about the only major UVA alum on the tour, but that could change when Denny McCarthy graduates.  This year's edition of the team was up and down in unprecedented ways; for example, they started that Bank of Tennessee tournament 10th of 14 teams and won it over the following two days.  The team's 45-under-par performance at the Jim West Intercollegiate has only ever been beaten once by an ACC team - a Georgia Tech tourney win in 2005.  UVA's previous best score had been in 1993.

McCarthy is the team's top player, easily, and he's rocketed up the leaderboard over the past three years at the NCAAs.  As a freshman he was 77th; last year he was 22nd; this spring, 6th.  That's the second-best finish by a Hoo, ever; not even Marino ever finished in the top ten.  The best?  Dixon Brooke, the 1940 NCAA champion.  McCarthy might need to match that before we declare him the best ever UVA athlete at his sport, but he's still out there making history.

Mark Cockerton - Men's lacrosse - Attack

Team accomplishments:

-- NCAA 8 seed

Personal accomplishments:

-- All-ACC selection
-- USILA third-team all-American
-- Second-straight 40-goal season

Mark Cockerton's career got off to a bit of a slow start, which is understandable since UVA lacrosse always has upperclassmen in the way.  With 29 goals spread across his first two seasons, he didn't seem to be on pace to write himself a spot in the record books.  That changed in a hurry.  Here at the end of his senior season, Cockerton has become the 15th player in UVA history to record 100 career goals; perhaps even more impressively, his junior year (I did say that these nominations sometimes have a lifetime-achievement aspect) is the 4th-highest-scoring single season in UVA history.

And for an encore, Cockerton followed up a 49-goal season with a 47-goal one, placing that season 6th on the all-time list.  Cockerton is now only 1 of 3 Hoos in history to have two 40-goal seasons; he joins Doug Knight and Chris Bocklet in that category, and like those two, has two seasons in UVA's all-time top 10.  Given the illustrious names in UVA lacrosse history, finding a spot among them and accomplishing something many of them didn't, that's an eye-opener for sure.

Courtney Swan - Women's lacrosse - Attack

Team accomplishments:

-- Reached NCAA Final Four

Personal accomplishments:

-- Tewaaraton Trophy nominee
-- Elite 89 Award
-- IWCLA second-team all-American; first-team all-South
-- Second-team all-ACC
-- Academic all-ACC
-- Second-most draw controls in UVA history (single-season)
-- Third-most draw controls in UVA history (career)

Courtney Swan is a pretty good scorer, as scorers go; her 53 goals was 21st in the country, and 80 points was 16th.  (Women's lax is higher-scoring than men's, largely because you can't club the shit out of the ballcarrier.)  That's really not what lands her here, though; more than just about any UVA athlete, Swan is the total package.

For one, a few breaks her way this coming season could see her break two Brittany Kalkstein records for draw controls, both single-season and career; Swan already came within one this past season (96, to Kalkstein's 97.)  For another thing, that Elite 89 Award?  One is awarded in every sport; it's for the athlete at the NCAA "championship site" (for lacrosse, that would be the Final Four) with the highest GPA.  It's not that old of an award; it was first awarded in 2009-2010, and Swan is the second UVA athlete to receive it.  Getting recognized for both athletic and academic elite-ness; that's the very definition of a Cavalier of the Year.

weekend review

It wasn't a perfect weekend.  A perfect weekend would've involved a tidy clean sweep of Florida State, and the lacrosse team's win would've earned a trophy instead of a small shred of bragging rights.

I'll take it, though.  I will always take it.  Especially when two more ACC trophies are added to the case; the tennis teams brought home the hardware this weekend.  I was honestly surprised to learn the women's tennis team had never won an ACC title before.  I'd have guessed they had a few by now, if you'd asked.  On the plus side, getting a first-time ACC title means there are only four teams at UVA that have never won an ACC title: volleyball, field hockey, and mens' and womens' golf.

That brings our title count to four (men's basketball, women's swimming & diving, and the two tennis team) this season, with a fully-expected rowing title yet to come and obvious contention for a baseball title still in the works.  We won't catch Florida State this year, as they have seven championships, but c'mon - three of them are basically the same damn team (women's cross country and indoor and outdoor track.)  No fair that we don't ever get to count indoor tennis.

****************************************************

And hey, at least we scored bragging rights over the Noles in baseball this weekend.  Nick Howard is the star of the weekend as far as I'm concerned.  Seven batters faced, seven strikeouts.  That's just rude.  Howard turned some perfectly good hitters totally upside-down; the Noles didn't even look remotely good against him.  One of the better at-bats was turned in by Jameis Winston on Friday.  When Jameis Winston looks like the best hitter of the inning, the other guys did something really wrong.  And Winston got this distinction by being one of the few to actually foul off a pitch.  Then he watched dumbfounded as a waist-high, straight-line fastball zipped merrily across the middle of the plate for strike three.  The other guys brought their Swiss cheese bats to the plate.

At this point it's hard to make a case for anyone else but Howard as the top closer in the country.  15 saves - our bats have been just good enough to give him lots of chances and just bad enough to give him lots of chances.  But the really nasty stuff: 43 Ks against 6 BBs.  And he's been getting better as the season goes on.  Nate Kirby is doing a ridiculous job, too, and Brandon Waddell - who started the season by giving up 6 runs in 4 1/3 - has worked his ERA all the way down to 2.90.

The weekend finally convinced Collegiate Baseball to stop being the last holdout among the five polls/rankings, and give UVA the #1 nod.  Five rankings, five #1's for UVA.  #1 in the country - and currently sitting in the ACC's 3rd seed for the tournament.  No further proof is required for the fact that having divisions for baseball is monumentally stupid.

****************************************************

I turned the lacrosse game off in disgust during the second quarter, only to be overcome by curiosity, and turned it back on at some point midway through the third.  That second period was perfectly emblematic of why this team has struggled.  The first half, really.  Matt Barrett couldn't stop a beanbag.  Mick Parks gave up yet another faceoff win so clean that UNC's R.G. Keenan had but to run straight ahead til he arrived at the doorstep.  And on one UNC goal - their second of the game, I think - a UVA defender watched the eventual scorer catch the pass, and then peeled off for parts unknown while the ballcarrier (Pat Foster, if memory serves) strode easy as you please into the vacated spot and potted the easiest goal of his life. 

This is to say nothing of the pitiful clearing game.  Awful decisions and half-assed passes turned the clearing game into a sloppy mess.  One failed clear was an inexcusable 30-second violation - probably brought about by doing too much of a 180 from recklessness to an overabundance of caution.  Fortunately, the Heels were even worse, particularly in the very crucial fourth quarter where they cleared two of six attempts.

The fourth also happened to be Barrett's time.  He saved only 45% all day, but 100% when it mattered.  Consistency is not Barrett's middle name, but there's a chance yet that we can be going into the 2018 season going "whatever will we do without that guy?"

I really think this team has a higher ceiling than it's shown this year.  And effort is not the problem.  This team has out-ground-balled everyone this year; in fact, they lead the nation in ground balls per game.  Joseph Lisicky gets a lot of well-deserved attention for sucking up ground balls but it's not just grinding long-stick guys; that was UVA's leading scorer Mark Cockerton diving into the scrum for a loose ball, in front of an empty UNC net, and coming out with the crucial two-goal lead.

No, this team's problem is between the ears; they keep shooting themselves in the foot with mental breakdowns in all facets of the game.  They shoot more with no backup behind the net than any team I've seen - and the X man will hang out blissfully by the side of the net when the shooter is winding up, instead of getting a head start on the backup.  Several times a game I'll wish I could get inside the head of a defender and find out why he didn't consider the guy with the ball worth defending.  And even when they were playing well against UNC, the passing was rather less than crisp.  Either end of a pass might be the one to screw up the next one - maybe it goes sailing over someone's head, maybe it just gets ignored by the recipient.  Eight seconds to go in a game where you have the ball and a two-goal lead, and you manage a giveaway.  Silly.

This team would be a legit as hell title contender if they could just deal with some of this low-hanging fruit.  They could very well find themselves in the Final Four - the draw I gave them in this week's bracketology happens to be an awfully favorable one, about as good as they could ever hope for, and set up beautifully for a potential trip to Baltimore.  But they can't beat four good teams in a row with their brains working the way they do now.

(Speaking of bracketology: I've finished a project of mine that perfectly calculates every team's RPI and all the RPI-related factors that go into bracketology too.  All I have to input is wins and losses.  Put in the results of one game and it calculates every change to every RPI in the whole system.  What does this mean?  Faster bracketology; I don't have to wait for the Internet to update itself before I can start.  Now that it's conference tournament week I plan on pushing out an update on Thursday and then every day unti Selection Sunday.

Even better: I should be able to adapt the thing for basketball and baseball and do my own bracketology for those sports, too.  Baseball won't be ready in time for this year's tourney, but next year, wait and see.)

****************************************************

I guess we have to spoil things by finishing up with football.  It's attrition season, and you expect to wring your hands occasionally when someone with untapped potential transfers out or washes out, what have you, but you don't really ever expect your top passing-game weapon to say see ya later.

Jake McGee's transfer comes as a surprise to us in the outside world, but word floats around the tubes that he and Tom O'Brien got along like Tom and Jerry from day one, and that just maybe that move to "TE/WR" was mostly about having McGee get his coaching from Marques Hagans instead of TOB.  That is rumor, but it passes my smell test.

There's no way to put a positive spin on any aspect of it.  Demeitre Brim also announced his transfer this past week, to Central Florida, and that was easily explainable by the fact that he's a Sam backer and nothing even remotely like the kind of Sam backer that Jon Tenuta is using.  Is it a shame we couldn't finagle his considerable athletic potential into usefulness on the field?  Sure.  But it's also a cost of doing business.

McGee, on the other hand - they're selling his jersey FFS.  He's plastered all over all kinds of advertising and literature.  That the coaches allowed that to happen despite knowing he might leave is at a minimum a lousy grasp of PR; that McGee made it plain that he thinks Tight End U can't do a good job of preparing him for the NFL, that is just about as bad a piece of pub as we could've asked for.

The passing game is now short a terrific mid-range and red-zone option, and McGee's receiving skill set will not be easily replaced.  Perhaps more importantly, Mike London's regime just took a major blow to the solar plexus of its image.

weekend review

So it's been kind of a crap spring so far, relatively speaking.  It's much colder than last year's, I've had all this damn work to do, and worst of all from the actual perspective of the blog, the lacrosse team has stunk up the joint.  We've been spoiled, man - I've gotten used to spring being the season when being a UVA fan is at its peak.  Weekend reviews speak of glorious triumphs on two fields at once.

So this weekend was pretty refreshing.  Even if the lacrosse game ultimately meant very little in the grand scheme, hey, at least it was a Senior Day win, and it was nice to watch the ball go in the net for once.  Nobody's scored 12 goals on Bellarmine all year, not even likely #1 seed Denver.  A few bullets on that game:

-- Mark Cockerton scored four goals, but the game's MVP is Tyler German, who won two out of every three of his faceoffs.  Mick Parks was absent for personal (not disciplinary) reasons, and might find his seat taken when he gets back.  German was only 5-for-14 coming in, but certainly deserves a few shots against Maryland next weekend.

-- Also, while we're on the subject of faceoffs, anyone who didn't enjoy watching Thompson Brown truck his opponent on the garbage-time faceoff he took must not actually like lacrosse.

-- I'll touch on this more when the season's over and I write a seasonal postmortem, but one thing I've gotten tired of is watching our shooters try the same shot over and over with the same result, which is usually a save.  I lost track of how many times our guys were on the doorstep and tried to lob the ball into the net as if there were no goalie, which was a failed strategy every time.

-- I was incredibly surprised to see UVA credited with 23-of-24 on clearing attempts.  We had to be worse than that.  Had to be.

-- Maybe the best thing of all was scoring a goal with three seconds left in the third quarter after watching every team all year do that to us.

*************************************************

Baseball brought the brooms to Davenport this weekend and knocked Florida State off their top-5 perch.  Before the series I wrote a Sabre post that said something to the effect of: if the team could simply go .500 in the rest of their ACC games and win all the nonconference ones, they'd be in the conversation for a top-8 national seed in the tournament and a near-certain regional host.  That'd have put them at 41-14 plus whatever happened in the ACC tourney.  Now they've swept a team that they could've easily dropped two games to.  It's not a stretch to say they could win their next ten in a row and be 45-6 going into the Carolina series.

That said, finals break is before the Duke series.  At the moment, Duke is in the 9th slot overall in the ACC, with VT in the 8th slot, a mere one game ahead.  Duke has Maryland this coming weekend, so the odds are decent that they'll pull ahead of the Hokies.  So just to be dicks I think we should sweep VT and then activate our secret powers of post-finals suckery to get swept by Duke.  Just for a laugh at the Hokies' expense.  And as a public service - to spare ACC tournament viewers the agony of the eyes.

Yet more bullets from the weekend:

-- It's pretty amazing how we're 36-5 and we don't even have any good players.  The ACC media has not yet seen fit to award even one single player of the week honor (or pitcher) to a Cavalier.

-- It's time to put some padding on the wall next to the right-field bullpen.  Past time, really.  Joe McCarthy jammed his finger (that's not, like, Kevin Ware-gruesome, but you click on that link, you'll see a finger going a direction it weren't ever meant to) catching a foul ball, and slammed his elbow on the cement top in the process.  And later, FSU's right fielder Jameis Winston nearly broke his kneecap sliding into it in another foul ball attempt.  Winston happens to be FSU's selection for starting quarterback in the fall - we'd have looked like a bunch of assholes if he missed the year because of our brick wall.  I seem to recall an Irvine player taking a hard run at that wall as well, and coming out rather the worse for the encounter.  Let's get some padding there before someone breaks their skull open.

-- Winston, by the way, is one of the least comfortable-looking players I've ever seen patrol an outfield.  When Derek Fisher hit his three-run triple, I swear Winston ran right past the spot where the ball eventually landed.

-- Pretty much every pitcher we ran out to the mound had themselves a really nice weekend.  Scott Silverstein pitched seven innings of shutout ball and FSU was held to one hit in a game for the first time since 1998.  Nick Howard was wild for two innings and then got himself together - and that's the kind of thing pitching coaches love.  They know you'll be off your game sometimes.  If you can get back on, mid-contest, that's the mental makeup they're looking for.  I'm awfully surprised at the impotence of FSU's bats, though.  Much credit goes to our pitchers, but you have to cast an eye at the FSU bats as well, who might've hit two or three balls hard all weekend.  So many of their hits were Texas Leaguers or choppers that slithered just past the infielders.

-- Kyle Crockett's instructions for his trip to the plate on Sunday (necessitated by the lineup shifts following McCarthy's injury removal) basically boiled down to this: Just keep the bat on your shoulder unless they're all fastballs, in which case I guess sure why not try a swing just for giggles.  He will probably never let his teammates forget the resulting base hit.

-- The following batter was Brandon Downes, and the strategy looked awfully odd.  Downes was still bunting with two strikes.  My guess: The coaches decided that even a foul-bunt strikeout or allowing the out at third was preferable to the possibility of Crockett having to try and slide to break up a double play.  As it turned out, the out at third is what happened, and at that point, Crockett was moved up a base and he wasn't going to be caught up in any double plays.  Good thing he didn't have to slide into home, though.

*************************************************

I'll do a recruiting board update later, but yes, J.J. Jackson committed to basically take Chris Nelson's spot - which, assuming we can land Andrew Brown, is a good positional tradeoff because Jackson plays a position of much greater need.  The coaches were dead serious about trying to land Jackson even though his offer list sucks, so they must like something.

Even more interesting, really, are these two Monday developments: the post-spring depth chart and the ACC's media rights thingy.  The depth chart doesn't change too many of my post-spring impressions, but does leave a few surprises.  The list of position switches that I can see:

-- Pablo Alvarez from the bottom of the secondary depth chart to the bottom of the WR depth chart.  This is a likely indication that Alvarez isn't to be counted on for contributions.  Injuries played a major role in that.

-- Luke Bowanko to LG and walk-on Jackson Matteo to center.  That's the top surprise right there, and somewhat related is Sean Cascarano sticking at RG while Conner Davis moves to the second string and Jay Whitmire has the RT job.  (And Cody Wallace now backs up Whitmire instead of a guard.)  This Matteo thing could either be really good or really bad.  A walk-on freshman beats out a senior for one of the most important positions on the line.  I could see that turning out very badly, as Matteo hasn't played a single down of college football.  It's just as possible that Matteo is a minor prodigy with a talent for the nuances of the center position that Bowanko never had; center is a tricky thing to master.  This brings us the potential to have four years of the same center, which is the kind of continuity that coaches salivate over.

-- Kelvin Rainey at safety is also interesting.  As is Wil Wahee at second string corner.  After Matteo, the next thing people are talking about - in this case putting up a whiny fuss about, more than anything else - is Maurice Canady backing up Drequan Hoskey.  Even if the crowd that thinks he's the second coming are correct, being the third cornerback is like being the third wide receiver.  He'll have plenty of time on the field.

Part two of the weekend review runs tomorrow, as the brave new ACC - which includes the first wave of Notre Dame games - deserves its own post.