Inside Sports
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Sports
Tuesday September 28,1999
Section:
Steve Young suffered a mild concussion in the second quarter, but the 49ers beat the Arizona Cardinals 24-10 last night.
Pro Baseball
Tiger Stadium, which opened in 1912, closed its doors forever yesterday after the Detroit Tigers beat the Royals 8-2.
SEE PAGE 3B
B
SEE PAGE 2B
Big 12 Football
Page 1
The Oklahoma Sooners may be on their way back to football prominence as they return to the top 25.
SEE PAGE 4B
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Tennis players backhand opponents in tournaments
By Melinda Weaver
sports@kansan.com
Kanson sportswriter
The Kansas men's tennis team gained experience for the spring season by playing in two national tournaments, the National Clay Courts and the Middle Tennessee Classic.
The team's positive results in these competitions also could help the players move higher in the collegiate rankings.
Ed Dus, Rodrigo Echagaray and Eleazar Magallan competed in the National Clay Courts Sept. 20-26, a tournament in which players qualify based on their national ranking.
The tournament consisted of a pre-qualifying match, a qualifying match and the actual tournament. None of Kansas' players qualified for the tournament in singles, but the doubles combination of Dus and Echagaray won three matches before losing in the round of 16.
Dus and Echagaray's first two victories over North Carolina St. and Middle Tennessee St. qualified them for the tournament. In the tournament, they defeated Texas Tech 6-4, 6-1 before losing to Clemson, the runner-up of the tournament.
"Ed and Rodrigo played good dou
bles and established himself on the national front," coach Mark Riley said. "We are a lot better off than we were before the tournament. This should get us nationally ranked, and we can go on there."
Riley said that he felt that his team had an advantage on much of its competition because of the regimen led by conditioning coach Fred Roll.
"We have a set schedule every Monday, Wednesday and Friday where we work out for an hour or so," assistant coach Ross Nwachukwu said. "We have intense tennis specific routines designed to build strength and stamina. The most important thing is that we don't do it every now and then; we have a set schedule."
The weather, however, prevented the conditioning from providing Kansas with any kind of advantage.
Because heavy rain from Hurricane Floyd caused unfavorable conditions on the clay courts, matches were played in one eightgame match rather than three six-game matches.
game match. "Rodrigo and I were not prepared for eight-game pro sets," Dus said. "If you get off to a slow start, which I tend to do, it hurts. We didn't get a chance to get our feet wet, and we didn't find our groove.
See TEAM on page 3B
Sinking Jayhawks try to plug the leaks
By Mike Miller
sports@kansan.com
Kansan sportswriter
The Kansas football team may need to call a plumber because the water is quickly rising around it.
Nothing has worked on offense or defense for Kansas in the last two weeks, which would seem to indicate that some major reconstruction would be in the works.
But if you're coach Terry Allen, you do some patchwork and hope things get better.
"They're going to be subtle changes."
"We're not going to make drastic changes," he said.
"They're going to be subtle changes."
But trying to tweak a team that has been outscored 92-30 the last two weeks by unranked opponents might not be enough.
In that span, the offense has been held to less than 200 total yards and has not been able to run the ball effectively since the California State Northridge game. The defense has surrendered more than 500 yards in three of the four games this year and watched Colorado and San Diego State both score more than 30 points in the first half.
But some of the problems can be attributed to poor planning.
San Diego State running back Larry Ned breaks through the Jawhawk line and heads into the path of Kansas junior defensive back Kareem High. The Aztecs beat Kansas 41-13 in Saturday's home game. Photo by Christine Niff/KANSAN
See RANKED on page 6B
Soccer team shuts down foes, shuts out two
Senior defender Lindsey Loeffer, left, dribbles past her Drury College opponent in the opening round of the KU Credit Union Jayhawk invitational last Friday. The Jayhawks defeated Drury
College 3-0 and won again 1-0 against Creighton in their second game of the weekend. Photo by Chad Cummings/KANSAN.
By Chris Wristen
sports@kansan.com
Kansas sportswriter
The defense of the Kansas women's soccer team showed just how much it improved this weekend, shutting out two straight opponents.
The Jayhawk defense notched its first back-to-back shutouts since the first two games of the 1997 season this weekend during the KU Credit Union Jayhawk Invitational. It was just the second time in team history that this feat had been accomplished. In addition, the Jayhawks have allowed just one goal in their last three games.
The shutouts left coach Mark Francis pleased.
"Defensively, we played very soundly, so I was happy." Francis said.
was happy, Francis said.
A variety of Jayhawks contributed to the effort, most notably Betsy Pollard. The senior goalkeeper made eight stops during the weekend, highlighted by a clutch save with four minutes remaining in Sunday's 1-0 victory against Creighton University. Pollard also garnered a roar of applause from the crowd during Friday's win against Drury College after stopping Lotte Reijmers' rocket-shot from point blank range. Pollard dove left and snagged the ball as the smack of it hitting her hands echoed across SuperTarget Field.
"Betsy did a great job," Francis said. "She didn't get a lot to do, but she came up with a great save. We got caught on the wrong side of a player, and the girl fired. I thought it was a goal for sure."
The closeness of Sunday's game was something Pollard hoped wouldn't happen, but she was pleased with the outcome.
"I was hoping we'd score more than one goal, but we didn't, and that's okay, since we still won," Pollard said.
sun won. Potter took 15 shots, Creighton was held to just nine, largely due to the efforts of the defenders assisting Pollard. Seniors Cynthia Dahle and Lindsey Loeffler, junior Emma Di Cesare and freshman Bridget Goyen all worked together to wreak havoc on the opposition's forwards, breaking up many plays. Goyen and Dahle's play earned them positions on the All-Tournament Team for defense.
for defense. Francis said he was proud of the progress his defense has made during the last few games. He said they were now ready for conference play, which resumes Friday at Baylor and Sunday at Texas Tech.
"We were giving up goals I'd say were soft goals." Francis said of his team's early-season play. "We've eliminated that now."
Edited by Ronnie Wachter
Jayhawk football off focus,off pace just plain off
Two weeks ago, I vowed to attend every single home football game this season.
single home night, Saturday night, I sprained my neck stretching to watch as those words bit my butt.
The evening started out well enough — it was beautiful outside, I had good tickets and pleasant company and once again the police looked the other way as we enjoyed a few beers in the parking lot.
The color on the video board was off, and the Kansas defense was apparently playing under a hands-off
ing under a hands-off policy.
I made some off-color remarks regarding our defense and promptly was told off by some guy with a bad combover.
A guy sitting a couple seats away gave us updates on his being ticked off ("I'm starting to get ticked off, this is ticking me off, O.K., now I'm really ticked off").
Derek Prater
sports columnist
sports@kansas.com
And wide receiver Harrison Hill even
acknowledged that, "People are pissed off."
When Terry Allen came to Kansas, he brought a "pro-style" offensive mentality. It depends on mixing the run and pass to keep defenses on their heels.
Unfortunately, Kansas doesn't have players in the skill positions with "pro-style" talent.
on.
The only thing that seemed to be on was the San Diego State offense, which put up 572 total yards and demonstrated what our offense would look like if we had more talent.
Our injury-depleted receiving corps has guys who are relatively fast (Harrison Hill) and guys with size (Mike Chandler), but we're missing the big-play guy who has both.
You have to like Zac Wegner's toughness and Dylen Smith's potential, but neither has shown that they can throw with enough accuracy to connect consistently on timing patterns and outs.
These are the types of plays that we need, for our offense to move the ball effectively. Of course, we also need to gain more than zero yards on the ground.
Sure, our quarterbacks combined for a total of 62 yards, but that still leaves our running backs with only 62 yards on 19 carries.
than zero yards on the ground
Twenty six carriers, zero yards
The biggest disappointment, however,
wasn't our awful stats or the lopsided 41-13
final score. It's the way we lost.
San Diego State is a good team — no doubt about it.
They just outplayed us. They concentrated harder, they executed better, and they did it all in our stadium.
Chancellor Hemenway's ill-timed video board greeting to our fans might as well have been directed to the Aztec players because on several occasions it looked as though our defense was merely escorting them to the end zone.
Two weeks ago, I also stated that I was wary to make any predictions about how the team would fare this season.
After watching a couple of enlightening losses, I'm ready to make a prediction.
The Hawks will finish 4-8 (3-8 not counting Division I-AA College State-Northridge). They will win one surprise upset (hopefully against Missouri) and show much more moxie than they did on Saturday in a couple of close losses.
Allen will get his guys to play better, but like my fat-cat friends in the scholarship suites say. "You can't make a good martini with bathtub gin." (Cheers and drink up, fellas!)
But Allen can count on one thing — no matter how bad it gets this season, I'll be there suffering along with him for every home game (at least until halftime).
✓
preter is a Lawrence graduate student in journalism.
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