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KELCIE MATOUSEK/KANSAN
Lauren Aldridge, a sophomore guard, dribbles the ball down the court.
Veterans lead Kansas women's basketball to 80-54 exhibition win against Pittsburg State
DYLAN SHERWOOD
@dmantheman2011
Opening the season with a brand new coach is a change for the Kansas women's basketball team. The first game of the program was a transition with new coach Brandon Schneider. On Sunday, Schneider's first game was against a familiar foe he saw during his time at Emporia State — Pittsburg State. Kansas won 80-54.
Kansas would make six of its first 10 attempts from three-point range. The returning
players led Kansas in junior forward Caelynn Manning-Allen and sophomore guard Lauren Aldridge. Aldridge led Kansas with 21 points, while Manning-Allen collected a double-double, posting 12 points and 11 rebounds.
"There will be times where we will make some mistakes, quite frankly your lack of experience, but hopefully we will be intelligent enough to learn from them," Schneider said.
Kansas trailed by four within the first four minutes of the game but got a boost with a three-point range barrage with
back-to-back-to-back threes; first from freshman guard Aisia Robertson, followed by freshman guard Kylee Kopatch and capped off by Aldridge.
The 9-0 run was one of two for the Jayhawks in the quarter, as Kansas went 5-of-7 from long range after one quarter.
Pittsburg State made things interesting heading into the second quarter only trailing by eight points. The Gorillas got within two points late in the quarter and outscored the Jayhawks by four in the quarter. Pittsburg State's deficit was
"I was not happy at all with how we defended in the second quarter." Schneider said.
onlv 39-35 at halftime.
Schneider wanted a response, and the team answered immediately.
Another three-point run started the third quarter with back-to-back threes by Aldridge. Kansas took control of the second half with its defense, keeping Pittsburg State at 22.2 percent shooting in the third quarter.
Kansas would have another 9-0 run late in the fourth quarter to pull away with the game.
Schneider said he liked the way the team played with the new format of the four 10-minute quarters instead of the two 20-minute halves.
"I didn't see any big issues, we hung on to them for the most part, no scenarios to move the ball up," Schneider said. "The biggest challenge for me was trying to find the foul count on the scoreboard."
With one game under its belt, the team seems confident with a new coaching staff.
"We have confidence in each other and we trust in [Schneider], just what he does and
how we respond to it," Kopa tich said.
Up next
Kansas will take on Division II preseason No. 1 Emporia State. Schneider said he thinks that the Hornets are a mid-major Division I team instead of a Division II team because of the experience Emporia State has.
"We played a really good team in Pittsburg State. We will get a different challenge next week against Emporia State," Schneider said.
Rogers: Grantland's end marks a sad day for journalism
JARRET ROGERS
@JarretRogers
On Friday, ESPN announced that its sports and pop culture website, Grantland, would be shut down for good.
Gone with an order from the suits in charge.
Instead, I want to talk about why this is an incredibly sad day for journalism and what Grantland changed in the minds of so many people.
I'm not going to talk about the last six months that the best staff on the Internet had to endure.
Bill Simmons has been different since the start of his career in the late 1990s. He revolutionized the sports column by taking it out of the locker rooms, where journalist ask questions that lead to player talk 90 percent of the time, and moved it inside bars, where friends were discussing players they hated and loved. He was one of the first writers to be exclusively on the Internet, and he was out in front of the podcast revolution by starting the B.S. Report in the mid 2000s.
So it came as no surprise that when Grantland launched
that it would be different than anything we had seen before.
Grantland took a pool of writers, both established and unestablished, and put them in a place where they could write the things that were important to them. Rembert Browne could write about who won the year, Wesley Morris could rip into "Ted 2," and Zach Lowe could talk about court designs in the NBA during the offseason.
There was truly important work done at Grantland. Browne went to Ferguson, Mo., and he didn't simply report on what was happening — he wrote about why the moment mattered so much and what it meant to him and the black community.
Some of it wasn't so important, but it was a whole lot of fun. Part of the staff did a whole week of pieces on the NBA Developmental League, which was amazing for three people other than myself.
Louisa Thomas wrote about domestic violence in the NFL more eloquently than anyone else did when it was the biggest topic in sports.
But, at the end of it all, I realize that whether or not
the work was important in the grand scheme of the world, the conversations were.
Reading a piece by Wesley Morris was like talking to the smartest guy in the room who you could only half-understand, but you desired to understand more. Seeing what Jason Concepcion could do to top himself in the humor department was a daily occurrence. Listening to Andy Greenwald talk music with Jack Antonoff and Brandon Flowers was some of the most fun I've ever had.
Grantland was a website that dared to be different. To take the old school out of journalism and reinvent the wheel was no small task, and it came with hiccups. But 99 percent of the time they got it right and knocked it out of the park.
Never again will we see a staff quite like Grantland's, and never again will we see coverage like we saw from those writers. It was a risk-taker from the beginning, and it never let go of that. As an aspiring writer, I can only hope to be half as good as the writers they assembled. Some people are just really damn
good at this, and Simmons and crew managed to find them all.
Grantland will forever be the place that I and so many other
young writers were changed by. It will always be the place we talk about in the future when we look back on why we do what we do, and it will
always be the type of place we crave to work at.
Thanks, Grantland. It was a fun four years.
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