Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Amphi's Williams flying high after round for ages
- Updated
Star sports columnist Greg Hansen offers his opinion on recent sports news.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
The Big Four of the week in Tucson sports:
1. Jessica Williams, golf. After finishing second in the state golf championships last fall, the Amphi senior accepted a scholarship to study space/physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Career goal: to be an astronaut.
Williams was in orbit Friday at Dell Urich Golf Course, shooting an 8-under-par 62, believed to be the lowest score by a Tucson female amateur in history. On the back nine alone, Williams birdied Nos. 10, 12, 13, 15 and 16 for a 5-under 30. She finished second in the Tucson City Junior Championships, shooting 74-62, three strokes behind Phoenix’s Ashley Menne, who shot 68-65.
The amazing part to Williams’ story is that she started playing golf just three years ago. She shot 90-99 in the state tournament as an Amphi sophomore. Then she began working with former Catalina Foothills state championship golf coach Mark Polich, who says Williams is “shockingly long” for a younger female golfer, with driving distance to 280 yards and beyond. Williams will play on the Embry-Riddle golf team coached by former Arizona and Florida head coach Kim Haddow, who was Annika Sorenstam’s coach at Arizona in 1991 and 1992.
2. John Gleeson, president, Pima County Sports Hall of Fame. Gleeson made his mark in Tucson sports by coaching Flowing Wells to the 1983 state baseball championship. Amazingly, the baseball facilities at Flowing Wells and Salpointe Catholic are both named in his honor — Gleeson Field — after he coached at both schools.
In the last 10 years, Gleeson has been president of the Hall of Fame, diligently maintaining its museum downtown at La Placita year-round.
Unfortunately, with redevelopment of La Placita, the sports Hall of Fame museum has until July 31 to vacate. It’s a scramble to find the funds for a new home. “We’ve got to take everything down, and I’m working like the dickens to try to get stuff labeled and in boxes,” said Gleeson, 84.
The Hall selected its Class of 2016 last week (honorees won’t be revealed until August). Gleeson then announced he will retire after the Hall of Fame banquet in October. His is a job well done.
He will be succeeded at the top by former Cincinnati Reds and Rincon High pitcher Pat Darcy.
3. Chris Singleton, linebacker. One of the leading football players in UA history, a two-time All-Pac-10 linebacker in 1988 and 1989, Singleton was the No. 8 overall pick in the 1990 NFL draft. He played seven seasons for New England and Miami.
He has never strayed far from his UA roots; he is a regular at Arizona home games, as is his twin brother, ex-UA standout Kevin Singleton, who fought and beat leukemia in his five football seasons here.
The Singleton twins were undefeated, both 4-0, against Arizona State.
So you might imagine how foreign it felt last week when both attended the graduation of Nicolas Singleton, Chris’ son from Chandler Hamilton High School, at ASU’s Wells Fargo Arena.
But in March, Nic Singleton took a tour of the UA campus and decided he, too, would be a Wildcat. His best sport? Golf.
4. Ali Farhang, attorney. The chairman of the Nova Home Loans Arizona Bowl, the force behind Tucson’s second-year bowl game, has now made it an all-Tucson enterprise.
The inaugural game was owned and operated by a Phoenix group, the Arizona Sports and Entertainment Commission.
It was very helpful in the start-up process. But Farhang and his capable Tucson committee now owns and manages the game as a nonprofit organization.
This needed to be a Tucson operation, and now it is.
The game will wisely be played on the afternoon of Friday, Dec. 30. It will be up against ESPN and CBS telecasts of the Liberty and Sun Bowls, but who cares about those games?
The ideal game for putting people in the seats would be New Mexico State of the Sun Belt Conference vs. UNLV of the Mountain West Conference.
If the Arizona Bowl gets two bowl-starved teams within driving distance, the crowd could exceed 30,000.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
UA athletic director Greg Byrne has been elected third vice president of the National Association of College Directors of Athletics (NACDA), and by rotation, will be president of the group in 2018-19. It’s not unprecedented; former Arizona AD Cedric Dempsey was due to be president of NACDA in 1994-95, but left to become executive director of the NCAA. Is that Byrne’s future, an official at a high-ranking national post? I don’t think so. “I like to have one team to cheer for,” he told me when he did not pursue the WCC’s commissioner job three years ago. Bill Byrne, Greg’s father and then-Oregon AD, was president of NACDA 30 years ago.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
Washington last week hired Jen Cohen as athletic director. The school paid a search firm $105,000 to find her, even though she had worked on the UW staff for 18 years. That’s typical of the waste of money in college sports. Cohen is the lone female athletic director in the league. The previous three female ADs in Pac-12 history all had failed tenures: Washington’s Barbara Hedges was fired after the Rick Neuheisel gambling fiasco; ASU pushed out Lisa Love, who was in over her head running a Power 5 conference department; and Cal’s Sandy Barbour was forced out and left the school an academic and financial mess to clean up.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
New Miami football coach Mark Richt donated $1 million for the Hurricanes to build an indoor football facility. That leaves Arizona, Cal, UCLA, Stanford and USC as the only five schools of the Power 5 conferences without an indoor arena. Byrne insists the Wildcats will build one when finances are available. Why? It can be used in daylight hours June through September to avoid practicing when temperatures are in the 90s. It’s inevitable, especially now that the Pac-12 has distributed about $25 million to the UA from its media rights package, up from about $21 million a year ago. None of the California schools face the UA’s weather/thunderstorm football practice issues.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
A national sports website, SB Nation, wrote last week that the Sept. 3 Arizona-BYU game in Glendale “appears to be one of the more winnable games” for the Cougars. Pretty funny. Arizona looks at BYU the same way. Once the Pac-12 season begins, Rich Rodriguez’s team is likely to be favored in just one game, at home against Colorado.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
When Jeff Scurran coached Pima College’s first football teams to national prominence in the early 2000s, he helped to raise funds for an artificial turf field at PCC’s East Campus, adjacent to Fred Enke Golf Course. The master plan was to make it a smaller stadium, for community and high school football and soccer. It was a wonderful idea, but none of it ever came to fruition under the turbulent reign of ousted PCC Chancellor Roy Flores. I drove past the old PCC practice field last week and the artificial turf, which normally has a lifespan of about 10-15 years, had been stripped away. Now it’s just dirt and sand. What a waste.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
Sabino High and UA grad Nathan Tyler, who has lost his playing privileges on the Web.com Tour after 56 career events, is making a strong comeback. He breezed through the U.S. Open local qualifying last week in Southlake Texas, and advances to the U.S. Open Sectional finals June 6. Tyler has won $142,000 on the Web.com tour and about $400,000 as a pro.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
The lineage of CDO’s remarkable softball program remains as impressive as ever. The seven-time state champion Dorados had two pieces of good news last week: Mattie Fowler, the state’s 2011 Player of the Year, was named a first-team NCAA Academic All-American at Nebraska; she has a 3.8 GPA in finance and is working on her MBA. And pitcher Alexis Alfonso, part of CDO’s 2012 state title team, went 10-0 as a junior pitcher at Division II West Texas A&M, which entered the NCAA D-II World Series ranked No. 1. Alfonso has one year remaining for the Lone Star Conference champs, who went 59-5.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
More on the Mike Candrea coaching tree: Lovie Jung, a 2004 and 2008 Olympics second baseman from the UA, is a volunteer coach at Cal State Northridge this season. Jung works for head coach Tairia Mims Flowers, a Salpointe Catholic grad who was an All-American at UCLA and part of Candrea’s 2004 gold medal team in Athens. Jung is a firefighter for the Riverside County Fire Department.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
This is an important week in the development of Catalina Foothills senior quarterback Rhett Rodriguez, son of the UA head coach. He will begin the three-week summer passing league, 7 on 7, against some of the state’s best competition, at ASU. Rodriguez, who is included in the UA’s recruiting class of 2017, is viewed by some as a marginal prospect. How he performs in June should be an indicator of his future as a Power 5 conference prospect.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
Now that Tucson will field a hockey team in the AHL, it’s not accurate to say that all previous hockey enterprises here were failures.
Fifteen years ago, ex-Tucson Mavericks GM Merle Miller told the Star that the 1970s franchise “didn’t fail in any way, shape or form. I believe that, if we had had the chance to play two years, we might still be playing now.”
Miller cited two reasons for the Mavericks’ disappearance: Their parent club, the Phoenix Roadrunners of the World Hockey Association, went bankrupt after the 1975-76 season and had no funding to provide the Mavericks with players for the following year. Worse, rent at the Tucson Convention Center doubled.
“We didn’t go into bankruptcy, and we didn’t just take off,” said Miller, who was very successful in his other two Tucson sports endeavors, helping to start the Copper Bowl in 1989 and the Tucson Toros in 1969.
“I think the city got 10 percent of the gate receipts. We received no parking revenue, no advertising, no revenue from concessions. If any of these things had been done for us, we probably would have made it past the first season.”
Tucson’s AHL franchise, with financial backing from the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes and a more forward-thinking city administration, isn’t likely to face any of those issues.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
Arizona did not win a Pac-12 championship in any sport in the 2015-16 school year. In the last 30 seasons, that happened in just 1995-96 and 2008-09.
It’s so hard to win a Pac-12 championship, in any sport. As it now stands, if a mid-level school like Arizona wins two titles per year, it’s going to be unusual.
The UA’s best decade for league championships was 2000-09, when it won 19. Here’s how it happened: In addition to basketball and softball excellence, Dave Rubio won his lone volleyball title, the soccer team won its only league championship, and Frank Busch’s women’s swimming teams won three titles.
The so-called “golden years” of UA sports were the early 1990s, when Arizona won league championships in women’s golf, men’s golf, basketball, men’s cross-country, softball and baseball. The UA hasn’t been able to continue that pace in what is probably the most difficult league, for all sports, in the NCAA.
The last time Arizona went consecutive years without a conference title was 1980-81 and 1981-82, when it was still finding its way in the Pac-10.
That “oh-fer” is likely to repeat in 2016-17.
Arizona doesn’t stack up as a favorite in any of its 19 sports. Oregon will be picked No. 1 in Pac-12 men’s basketball with the return of Dillon Brooks and Tyler Dorsey.
Arizona’s best chance will be in women’s golf, as coach Laura Ianello returns four starters from the NCAA’s No. 9 team, plus standout recruit Sandra Nordaas of Oslo, Norway.
- Greg Hansen
The Big Four of the week in Tucson sports:
1. Jessica Williams, golf. After finishing second in the state golf championships last fall, the Amphi senior accepted a scholarship to study space/physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Career goal: to be an astronaut.
Williams was in orbit Friday at Dell Urich Golf Course, shooting an 8-under-par 62, believed to be the lowest score by a Tucson female amateur in history. On the back nine alone, Williams birdied Nos. 10, 12, 13, 15 and 16 for a 5-under 30. She finished second in the Tucson City Junior Championships, shooting 74-62, three strokes behind Phoenix’s Ashley Menne, who shot 68-65.
The amazing part to Williams’ story is that she started playing golf just three years ago. She shot 90-99 in the state tournament as an Amphi sophomore. Then she began working with former Catalina Foothills state championship golf coach Mark Polich, who says Williams is “shockingly long” for a younger female golfer, with driving distance to 280 yards and beyond. Williams will play on the Embry-Riddle golf team coached by former Arizona and Florida head coach Kim Haddow, who was Annika Sorenstam’s coach at Arizona in 1991 and 1992.
2. John Gleeson, president, Pima County Sports Hall of Fame. Gleeson made his mark in Tucson sports by coaching Flowing Wells to the 1983 state baseball championship. Amazingly, the baseball facilities at Flowing Wells and Salpointe Catholic are both named in his honor — Gleeson Field — after he coached at both schools.
In the last 10 years, Gleeson has been president of the Hall of Fame, diligently maintaining its museum downtown at La Placita year-round.
Unfortunately, with redevelopment of La Placita, the sports Hall of Fame museum has until July 31 to vacate. It’s a scramble to find the funds for a new home. “We’ve got to take everything down, and I’m working like the dickens to try to get stuff labeled and in boxes,” said Gleeson, 84.
The Hall selected its Class of 2016 last week (honorees won’t be revealed until August). Gleeson then announced he will retire after the Hall of Fame banquet in October. His is a job well done.
He will be succeeded at the top by former Cincinnati Reds and Rincon High pitcher Pat Darcy.
3. Chris Singleton, linebacker. One of the leading football players in UA history, a two-time All-Pac-10 linebacker in 1988 and 1989, Singleton was the No. 8 overall pick in the 1990 NFL draft. He played seven seasons for New England and Miami.
He has never strayed far from his UA roots; he is a regular at Arizona home games, as is his twin brother, ex-UA standout Kevin Singleton, who fought and beat leukemia in his five football seasons here.
The Singleton twins were undefeated, both 4-0, against Arizona State.
So you might imagine how foreign it felt last week when both attended the graduation of Nicolas Singleton, Chris’ son from Chandler Hamilton High School, at ASU’s Wells Fargo Arena.
But in March, Nic Singleton took a tour of the UA campus and decided he, too, would be a Wildcat. His best sport? Golf.
4. Ali Farhang, attorney. The chairman of the Nova Home Loans Arizona Bowl, the force behind Tucson’s second-year bowl game, has now made it an all-Tucson enterprise.
The inaugural game was owned and operated by a Phoenix group, the Arizona Sports and Entertainment Commission.
It was very helpful in the start-up process. But Farhang and his capable Tucson committee now owns and manages the game as a nonprofit organization.
This needed to be a Tucson operation, and now it is.
The game will wisely be played on the afternoon of Friday, Dec. 30. It will be up against ESPN and CBS telecasts of the Liberty and Sun Bowls, but who cares about those games?
The ideal game for putting people in the seats would be New Mexico State of the Sun Belt Conference vs. UNLV of the Mountain West Conference.
If the Arizona Bowl gets two bowl-starved teams within driving distance, the crowd could exceed 30,000.
- Greg Hansen
UA athletic director Greg Byrne has been elected third vice president of the National Association of College Directors of Athletics (NACDA), and by rotation, will be president of the group in 2018-19. It’s not unprecedented; former Arizona AD Cedric Dempsey was due to be president of NACDA in 1994-95, but left to become executive director of the NCAA. Is that Byrne’s future, an official at a high-ranking national post? I don’t think so. “I like to have one team to cheer for,” he told me when he did not pursue the WCC’s commissioner job three years ago. Bill Byrne, Greg’s father and then-Oregon AD, was president of NACDA 30 years ago.
- Greg Hansen
Washington last week hired Jen Cohen as athletic director. The school paid a search firm $105,000 to find her, even though she had worked on the UW staff for 18 years. That’s typical of the waste of money in college sports. Cohen is the lone female athletic director in the league. The previous three female ADs in Pac-12 history all had failed tenures: Washington’s Barbara Hedges was fired after the Rick Neuheisel gambling fiasco; ASU pushed out Lisa Love, who was in over her head running a Power 5 conference department; and Cal’s Sandy Barbour was forced out and left the school an academic and financial mess to clean up.
- Greg Hansen
New Miami football coach Mark Richt donated $1 million for the Hurricanes to build an indoor football facility. That leaves Arizona, Cal, UCLA, Stanford and USC as the only five schools of the Power 5 conferences without an indoor arena. Byrne insists the Wildcats will build one when finances are available. Why? It can be used in daylight hours June through September to avoid practicing when temperatures are in the 90s. It’s inevitable, especially now that the Pac-12 has distributed about $25 million to the UA from its media rights package, up from about $21 million a year ago. None of the California schools face the UA’s weather/thunderstorm football practice issues.
- Greg Hansen
A national sports website, SB Nation, wrote last week that the Sept. 3 Arizona-BYU game in Glendale “appears to be one of the more winnable games” for the Cougars. Pretty funny. Arizona looks at BYU the same way. Once the Pac-12 season begins, Rich Rodriguez’s team is likely to be favored in just one game, at home against Colorado.
- Greg Hansen
When Jeff Scurran coached Pima College’s first football teams to national prominence in the early 2000s, he helped to raise funds for an artificial turf field at PCC’s East Campus, adjacent to Fred Enke Golf Course. The master plan was to make it a smaller stadium, for community and high school football and soccer. It was a wonderful idea, but none of it ever came to fruition under the turbulent reign of ousted PCC Chancellor Roy Flores. I drove past the old PCC practice field last week and the artificial turf, which normally has a lifespan of about 10-15 years, had been stripped away. Now it’s just dirt and sand. What a waste.
- Greg Hansen
Sabino High and UA grad Nathan Tyler, who has lost his playing privileges on the Web.com Tour after 56 career events, is making a strong comeback. He breezed through the U.S. Open local qualifying last week in Southlake Texas, and advances to the U.S. Open Sectional finals June 6. Tyler has won $142,000 on the Web.com tour and about $400,000 as a pro.
- Greg Hansen
The lineage of CDO’s remarkable softball program remains as impressive as ever. The seven-time state champion Dorados had two pieces of good news last week: Mattie Fowler, the state’s 2011 Player of the Year, was named a first-team NCAA Academic All-American at Nebraska; she has a 3.8 GPA in finance and is working on her MBA. And pitcher Alexis Alfonso, part of CDO’s 2012 state title team, went 10-0 as a junior pitcher at Division II West Texas A&M, which entered the NCAA D-II World Series ranked No. 1. Alfonso has one year remaining for the Lone Star Conference champs, who went 59-5.
- Greg Hansen
More on the Mike Candrea coaching tree: Lovie Jung, a 2004 and 2008 Olympics second baseman from the UA, is a volunteer coach at Cal State Northridge this season. Jung works for head coach Tairia Mims Flowers, a Salpointe Catholic grad who was an All-American at UCLA and part of Candrea’s 2004 gold medal team in Athens. Jung is a firefighter for the Riverside County Fire Department.
- Greg Hansen
This is an important week in the development of Catalina Foothills senior quarterback Rhett Rodriguez, son of the UA head coach. He will begin the three-week summer passing league, 7 on 7, against some of the state’s best competition, at ASU. Rodriguez, who is included in the UA’s recruiting class of 2017, is viewed by some as a marginal prospect. How he performs in June should be an indicator of his future as a Power 5 conference prospect.
- Greg Hansen
Now that Tucson will field a hockey team in the AHL, it’s not accurate to say that all previous hockey enterprises here were failures.
Fifteen years ago, ex-Tucson Mavericks GM Merle Miller told the Star that the 1970s franchise “didn’t fail in any way, shape or form. I believe that, if we had had the chance to play two years, we might still be playing now.”
Miller cited two reasons for the Mavericks’ disappearance: Their parent club, the Phoenix Roadrunners of the World Hockey Association, went bankrupt after the 1975-76 season and had no funding to provide the Mavericks with players for the following year. Worse, rent at the Tucson Convention Center doubled.
“We didn’t go into bankruptcy, and we didn’t just take off,” said Miller, who was very successful in his other two Tucson sports endeavors, helping to start the Copper Bowl in 1989 and the Tucson Toros in 1969.
“I think the city got 10 percent of the gate receipts. We received no parking revenue, no advertising, no revenue from concessions. If any of these things had been done for us, we probably would have made it past the first season.”
Tucson’s AHL franchise, with financial backing from the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes and a more forward-thinking city administration, isn’t likely to face any of those issues.
- Greg Hansen
Arizona did not win a Pac-12 championship in any sport in the 2015-16 school year. In the last 30 seasons, that happened in just 1995-96 and 2008-09.
It’s so hard to win a Pac-12 championship, in any sport. As it now stands, if a mid-level school like Arizona wins two titles per year, it’s going to be unusual.
The UA’s best decade for league championships was 2000-09, when it won 19. Here’s how it happened: In addition to basketball and softball excellence, Dave Rubio won his lone volleyball title, the soccer team won its only league championship, and Frank Busch’s women’s swimming teams won three titles.
The so-called “golden years” of UA sports were the early 1990s, when Arizona won league championships in women’s golf, men’s golf, basketball, men’s cross-country, softball and baseball. The UA hasn’t been able to continue that pace in what is probably the most difficult league, for all sports, in the NCAA.
The last time Arizona went consecutive years without a conference title was 1980-81 and 1981-82, when it was still finding its way in the Pac-10.
That “oh-fer” is likely to repeat in 2016-17.
Arizona doesn’t stack up as a favorite in any of its 19 sports. Oregon will be picked No. 1 in Pac-12 men’s basketball with the return of Dillon Brooks and Tyler Dorsey.
Arizona’s best chance will be in women’s golf, as coach Laura Ianello returns four starters from the NCAA’s No. 9 team, plus standout recruit Sandra Nordaas of Oslo, Norway.
Most Popular
-
Arizona lawmaker seeks to jump-start I-11 construction
-
Former Arizona governor admitted to partaking in Peep jousting
-
Faculty concerned about changes to U of A admissions policy -
Report: Sheriff Nanos improperly used position, resources in political foe's suspension
-
Tucson Water violates state rules for keeping track of its drinking supply
