Congrats to Duke rising sophomore Maddie Jenner on being named to the USA U-19 national team that will compete in this summer’s U-19 world championship.
First in an occasional series.
Marquette head coach Joe Amplo is leaving to become the head coach at Navy.
Boston University attackman Chris Gray, a 111-point scorer as a sophomore, has put himself in the NCAA transfer portal. Reports say that he told his Terrier teammates he was looking for better academics. Hmmm ... we know a place that would offer that.
Congrats to Duke rising sophomore Maddie Jenner on being named to the USA U-19 national team that will compete in this summer’s U-19 world championship.
Another big name hits the transfer portal: Loyola midfielder Chase Scanlan, a second-team A-A as a freshman, is on the move.
Not necessarily Duke-related, but Loyola Greyhound and reigning Tewaaraton winner Pat Spencer is transferring to Northwestern hoops to play for Chris Collins.
...few have watched Spencer play basketball the last four years. He’s played pickup against [Josh] Selby and other pros at the UA Center in Baltimore. He excelled in the Annapolis Summer Basketball League, earning MVP honors, and also averaged 19 points in the Brunson League last summer. But the kid who had a late growth spurt in high school (he was 5-foot-4 as a freshman), the one who committed to Loyola prior to his junior year of high school, is a complete mystery on the hardwood. He didn’t play AAU ball in the summer because he was playing lacrosse.
Former Towson star and overseas player Kurk Lee, who runs the UA Center and played 48 NBA games, said Spencer wasted no time making an impression the first time he came down to play pickup a few years ago. Spencer got the ball on the break, Lee was defending him and went up to try and block the shot.
“He dunked right on top of me and everyone in the gym went crazy,” Lee said. “I had no idea who he was. I didn’t know he was the number one lacrosse player in the country. He doesn’t say a word about that.”
“He’s tough as nails,” Lee added. “I always put him against pros when he comes down and he holds his own.”
In several conversations with Danowski, I've wanted to ask him about how he offers scholarships (but I didn't want to bore him to tears). The NCAA only allows something like 12.6 scholarships, and it obviously takes
a lot more than 13 guys to field a competitive team, so the trick is in maximizing what you get via partial scholarships...this is a longwinded way of speculating that perhaps some schools offered more of a scholarship than others, purely a guess...
As at most private schools, prospective Duke athletes with a partial offer have to contend with the remainder of the tuition, et al. State schools have a big advantage, starting with much lower tuition. 12.6 scholarships don't go as far at Duke...
As far as I can tell, though, Lax is still a more upper-middle-class high school sport, so the parents have more options, using Lax to get (legal) preferred admissions. It's changing, though...
-jk
Right...that's why I'd love to talk with Danowski about how he handles that...some kids need the scholarship, or partial, more than others...and he only has 12.6 to work with, while you really need a couple dozen contributors on the field. Complicated.
Meanwhile, hoops has more scholarships than they can typically use (giving scholarships to walkons, which is nice).
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
Well, okay, but you are making a lot of assumptions here. For one, he may be smart enough to want better academics than he has at BU but not necessarily smart enough to be a good academic fit in every elite school in the country. For another, he may have been looking for a specific program or major. And for a third, while he played very well at BU, he may not be the perfect lacrosse fit for every one of those teams.
Kids gonna do what kids gonna do, for a whole lot of reasons, and more power to them.
Totally disagree, there is no way any rational human being could have assumed how badly or pervasively unc was cheating with respect to the academic scandal. Worse case scenario wouldn't have gotten you anywhere near the ugliness underlying "the carolina way."
How about this:
assuming the worst about the Heels often gets you on the path to reality
IL is reporting that Scanlan has narrowed his transfer choices to Virginia, Maryland, Hop, and Cornell. He has been quoted elsewhere as saying that his problems at Loyola were of the fish-out-of-water variety. Recall that he is one of nine children of a Seneca family from the Cattaraugus reservation (median household income < $30k/yr.). Upscale Catholic school in Baltimore probably didn’t feel much like home. Why Virginia? Well, former UVa standout Zed Williams is Scanlan’s cousin, for one. And Hoos’ head coach Lars Tiffany is from Lafayette, NY, home of the Onondaga Nation; he seems to get it.
All that said, I’d be surprised if Scanlan plays four years of college lacrosse. He’s a guaranteed first-round pick in the NLL draft whenever he declares; his numbers in Junior A box are astronomical.