FOV Cavalier of the Year #9/#10

From Old Virginia celebrates its birthday (a bit late this year) 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: Ryan Shane and Courtney Swan.

Ryan Shane - Men's tennis

Team accomplishments:

-- National champions
-- ACC champions
-- ACC consecutive-win streak at 139

Personal accomplishments:

-- Singles national champion
-- ITA all-American (singles and doubles)
-- NCAA all-tournament team as no.1 singles
-- First-team all-ACC
-- ITA National Indoor Championship semifinalist
-- ITA Atlantic Regional singles champion
-- ITA Atlantic Regional doubles champion

Another year, another UVA tennis player completely dominating the national tennis scene.  Two years ago it was Jarmere Jenkins taking home a dump truck of assorted trophies.  Now it's Ryan Shane's turn to stake a very obvious claim as the best player on the best team in the country.

And Shane did something Jenkins, for all his hardware, fell just shy of: won the national singles championship.  This gives Shane two different legs of tennis's triple crown.  Shane is only the second UVA men's tennis player to win the singles title, after the original superstar Somdev Devvarman did it twice.  And quite a few players (most of them from Stanford) have won the singles title after their team won the national championship, but Shane, of course, is the first UVA player to pull off the feat.

Since Devvarman's championships, UVA has brought home six individual tennis titles - in that span, no other school has more than three.  So what Ryan Shane has done might not separate him much from his very illustrious predecessors (this is like praise with faint damnation), except in the unique combination of hardware he has.  But with every Ryan Shane that goes through, UVA separates further and further from the pack as currently the pre-eminent tennis program in the country.

Courtney Swan - Women's lacrosse - Attack

Team accomplishments:

-- NCAA second round

Personal accomplishments:

-- IWCLA 2nd-team all-American
-- IWCLA 1st-team all-region
-- 2nd-team all-ACC
-- ACC leader in assists per game
-- Tewaaraton Award nominee
-- VaSID 1st-team all-state
-- ACC women's lacrosse Scholar-Athlete of the Year
-- Capital One 3rd-team academic all-American
-- UVA's nominee for NCAA Woman of the Year

The women's lacrosse team pulled together quite a few individual accomplishments this year; picking one player out of the bunch isn't easy.  Rachel Vander Kolk was ACC Freshman of the Year.  Casey Bocklet was first-team all-everything.  Courtney Swan, obviously, was no slouch at all on the field, making a bunch of all-something teams herself and catching the eye of the Tewaaraton people, too.  And the ACC's top playmaker, leading the league in assists per game, always counts for something.

But you know how this nomination process goes, and winning something like Scholar-Athlete of the Year - emphasis on Scholar - makes the choice pretty easy after all.  Swan is as much a boss in the classroom as on the field - maybe more, which is saying something.  ACC recognition as your sport's top student is a big deal.  So is the Weaver-James-Corrigan Award, a $5,000 grant towards grad school that the ACC hands out to three athletes per school per year.  (She's going to be an orthopedic doc.)  Swan is a past winner of the NCAA's Elite 89 award as well, which is an automatic handout to the athlete at each national championship with the highest GPA.  And UVA has recognized her scholarhood too, making her the school's choice for NCAA Woman of the Year, which, by the way, her lack of a win should not be construed as "only" a nomination, since the award hasn't been handed out yet.  I try to mean it when I say these nominations are for all-around awesomeness; Courtney Swan makes it easy to back up my words.

super, thanks for asking

It took a while, but spring finally sprung, as they say.  You can tell because UVA sports have begun kicking ass again.

So much that was said about the Lake Elsinore regional came true.  Evenly-matched?  Yup - the regional flipped upside-down right out of the gate, with the top two teams both facing elimination after one day.  UCSB as a shaky host?  Yup again - the only one seed not to win a game.  And UVA needing to race through at top speed or else miss out on the supers?  I guess we don't know for sure, which is good.

But BOC sure felt that way.  In other years, Josh Sborz probably wouldn't have been kept on the mound after his team padded a 3-1 lead with three more runs brought to you by Geico.  And he wouldn't have been asked to "save" a five-run lead after pitching the previous two days, either.  Sborz's usage tells you all you need to know about how BOC felt about stretching out the series, which is to say, DON'T, at all costs short of shredding all his elbow ligaments.

It's obvious why: come the 11th inning, the Hoos were down to one unused pitcher, who was also the center fielder.  Had UVA lost that game I don't know what the hell, man.  You'd have had to hope a combination of Adam Haseley and Alec Bettinger could've gotten you through seven innings, eight if you're really lucky, and then I suppose more of Sborz (who wouldn't have gone on Sunday if he wasn't protecting a lead) and then some dudes who'd pitched like three innings all year.

Scary thought.  Less scary had San Diego State held on in the losers' bracket, because their pitching staff is in even worse shape, which makes me sort of wish they'd beaten USC and then us on Sunday to set up a hitters' duel for the ages.  If 14-10 represents the mutual near-collapse of two pitching staffs, I'd've bet everything on the over in a UVA-SDSU matchup on Monday.  I guess we'll just have to settle for winning the regional the semi-easy way.

A lot of credit goes to hitting that was clutcher than clutch.  Ernie Clement delivered the game-winning hit on Saturday and almost the whole lineup made Sunday happen, but for my money the guys who won this regional are Connor Jones and Brandon Waddell.  This simply doesn't happen if they don't both pitch into the eighth, combine for sixteen innings, and allow one lousy run each.  UVA will advance through the tournament as long as those two pitch lights-out, and be eliminated when they don't.

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I have yet to exult in UVA's 22nd national championship, so: woohoo tennis!  Five schools have won multiple national championships this season - UConn, Colorado, Ohio State, Stanford, and, of course, because I wouldn't mention it otherwise, UVA.  Three years ago, men's tennis was a program with a rep for being that program that couldn't get over the hump.  Now with two trophies, they've taken their place in the elite.  Hopefully for quite some time.

I was also going to write about consecutive trophies, but I forgot it was two years ago they won their first.  I realized I was thinking of Danielle Collins's individual singles championship last year.  Silly me, mixing up our powerhouse programs like that.  It didn't help my muddled situation that Ryan Shane won the singles title this year.  All these damn trophies are so confusing to keep track of.  How I long for the simplicity of life in Blacksburg and the clean, uncluttered trophy cases and freed-up postseason schedules.  Oh wait no I don't.

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-- Don't you love when you watch this really long drawn-out recruitment that takes years and then the subject of said recruitment sticks around for one season and then boogies?  Jamil Kamara's name first popped up when he was a high school freshman at Princess Anne.  His full UVA career: one catch, six yards.  Unlike the loss of Greyson Lambert I don't really chalk this up to the fact that this program is the result of a crash between a fireworks truck and an oil tank.  I guess you could argue that there's excessive WR depth and that the inmates are just a little too much in charge of the asylum when it comes to redshirting decisions.  I'd happily concede both points.  It's just that Kamara's overinflated opinion of his readiness is why he didn't redshirt last year in the first place, and why he'll be suiting up elsewhere next year.

-- I know the baseball team's camo unis have a near-perfect win-loss record.  I still hate them.  Especially when the home whites are so damn classy-looking and they finally got a set of decent road grays.  I'd just hate to think we might finally win a national title and all the lasting images of the team that does so would be in brown.