SPORTS
HAWKSTRYOUT AT NFL COMBINE
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
YOUNG BARRY
PAGE2B
Aqib Talib
KANSAS WOMEN TAKE ON LONGHORNS
WWW.KANSAN.COM
PAGE 3B
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2008
ALL IN THE FAMILY
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Jon Goering/KANSAN
Tyrel Reed, freshman guard, and his sister Lacie, Burlington sophomore and men's basketball student manager, have more than just a last name in common. Basketball has run in the Reed family. Lacie played in her younger years until a knee injury took her out of the game and their father, Stacy, coached basketball while Tyrel played in high school.
Like brother, like sister
A passion for Kansas basketball runs deep for the Reed siblings
BY RUSTIN DODD dodd@kansan.com
Lacie Reed does her little brother's laundry. Sure, she wants to be a good older sister, but Lacie, Burlington sophomore, isn't exactly doing it for free.
Lacie and younger brother Tyrel have a deal.
"We trade laundry for food." Tyrel said.
Tyrel brings his older sister a mountain of dirty of laundry, and in exchange, he takes his sister out to eat.
Older sister washes and younger brother pays. Sometimes it's Subway, sometimes it's Quiznos, or any other sandwich shop they haven't tired of.
"Something fast," Tyrel said. When you're Tyrel Reed and you're a freshman guard for the No. 6-ranked college basketball team, you don't have a lot of spare time to enjoy a sit-down lunch with your older sister. Especially when your sister is a sophomore student manager for the team and holds down a schedule almost as busy as yours.
It's not hard to tell that Tyrel and Lacie Reed are related. Tyrel, with his 6-foot-3-inch frame, towers above his sister. And you won't mistake Lacie's blonde hair with Tyrel's patch of closely cropped brown hair. But put the two in the same room and people can just tell.
"I get the twin thing a lot," Lacie said. "We
have a lot of the same mannerisms."
Walk into Allen Fieldhouse an hour before a Kansas basketball game, and you can see examples of those mannerisms.
Tyrel is the one on the floor in the No.14 jersey, shooting jump shots, and Lacie is the one sitting on the sideline, supervising the game's ball boys.
"I do behind-the-scenes type of stuff," Lacie said.
But spending time in the gym together is nothing new for the Reed siblings. They've been doing it their whole lives. The ball, the basket, the wood floor — that's just who the Reeds are.
It's not that Tyrel and Lacie have trouble remembering their childhoods. That's easy. But ask them about the memories that don't involve a round leather ball and an iron rim, and it gets a little tougher.
"I get the twin thing a lot. We have a lot of the same mannerisms."
"It seems to always come back to basketball" Tyrel said.
School teams practice where their dad, Stacy. coached.
Stacy Reed coached at Eureka High School for 14 years and at nearly every practice, Tyrel and Lacie occupied the sideline.
Growing up in Eureka, the daily routine was pretty simple. Go to the elementary school where their mother, Debbie, taught; hang out in the gym after school and play basketball; then, head to the Eureka High
LACIE REED Men's basketball student manager
"You know as a coach that you're not going to have as much home time during the season," Stacy Reed said. "So that time in the
gym had to make up for that."
Sometimes the Reeds would take a break from watching practice and play one-on-one.
"Third and fourth grade it was very competitive, because I was still taller than he was." Lacie said.
Tyrel then hit a growth spurt during the fifth grade.
"Then it wasn't as fun to play," she said.
If there's one place Tyrel pays the price for having his sister as a team manager, it's at practice. His teammates, well, they can't help themselves.
"We always joke with him," freshman center Cole Aldrich said. "Tyrel, where's your sister at?"
If Aldrich is comfortable making jokes at
SEE REED ON PAGE 4B
COMMENTARY
NBA-level Jayhawks not seeing success
Former players don't fare well as professionals
Cleveland traded Drew Gooden to Chicago on the NBA's trading deadline last week. By most accounts, his inclusion in the trade was as much attributable to balancing salaries as it was to the Bulls actually wanting him. His mental lapses and defensive inadequacies had grown to the point that the Cavaliers felt that they had to give him away in a trade. They acquired an increasingly ineffective center who has a terrible contract and can't play offense (Ben Wallace) and a vastly overpaid wing who can shoot and do nothing else (Wally Sczerbiak). Most NBA experts believed Cleveland upgraded at the power forward position simply by getting Chicago to toss Joe Smith into the deal.
For me, this further increases the disappointment of current Jayhawks in the NBA. We have one of the premier programs in college basketball, but only one player who is currently a key player on a good NBA team. And even Paul Pierce was a merely a good player on a terrible team until Boston imported Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett before the season.
Is anyone else slightly disappointed?
My buddy C.J., a former Kansan sports columnist, is a huge basketball fan and Jayhawk fanatic. As a Kansas native without a local NBA squad to support, he roots for teams based on former Jayhawks that the franchise employs. He has been a Bulls advocate for the last few years because of Kirk Hinrich and he has also rooted for the Celtics because of Pierce.
I am from Minnesota and therefore am a diehard Timberwolves fan. Because my team decided to trade Garnett before the season and tank to acquire a high draft pick, I knew I had to root for losses for the good of the team. So I decided to try a form of the "C.J. Method" of NBA fandom.
Instead of rooting for teams, which would have amounted to sports bigamy and a form of cheating on my Timberwolves, I threw my allegiances behind Hinrich, Pierce, Gooden, Nick Collison, Raef LaFrentz, Scot Pollard, Jacque Vaughn, Wayne Simien and Julian Wright.
What a disappointing year it has been for C.J. and me.
Outside of Pierce and the Celtics, it hasn't been pretty. And if the T-Wolves haven't been stupid enough to botch KG's prime by surrounding him with mediocre players before giving him away bargain-
style, it would be a lost season for Jayhawk NBA fans.
Cleveland has grown tired of Gooden and it is far from certain that he will fit in with the defensive-minded Bulls. Hinrich has inexplicably turned into a below average player on the NBA's most disappointing team. His points per game are at their lowest since his rookie year, his assist numbers are the lowest of his career and his outside shooting has been bad. 32 percent from beyond the arc, by far the worst of his career.
The rest is merely mediocrity, or worse: Nick Collison is a decent backup post player on one of the NBA's worst teams, Seattle, and hasn't shown many signs of being able to turn the corner into a good starter. LaFrentz showed evidence early in his career with Denver that he could be developed into an All-Star player, but injuries robbed him of his athleticism and stamina and he hasn't been an effective player in six years. The former Jayhawk star hasn't seen the court much as an off-hurt backup center on Portland the last two years.
Vaughn and Pollard are longtime backups. Pollard, an NBA journeyman, cheers Pierce on from the bench with the Celtics. Nobody knows what kind of player Julian Wright will turn into, but he will have to significantly improve his shooting and ball-handling to turn into an effective player. Simien was released by the Timberwolves, the second-worst team in the league, after being a throw-in on a trade from Miami right before the season started. He is unemployed and his NBA future looks bleak.
I doubt this trend will reverse soon. The odds seem high that Darrell Arthur, Brandon Rush, Sherron Collins and other NBA hopefuls on the Jayhawk roster will eventually become nothing more than role players in "The League." Until Bill Self starts heavily recruiting those "one and done" type prospects such as Kevin Durant, Greg Oden or Michael Beasley, I would expect that to continue.
I suppose it is selfish to be disappointed in the current crop of professionals. We do, after all, have Pierce and the Celtics to root for. Boston is 43-12; the best record in the NBA.
But I can't help but feel a bit of indignation that the other Jayhawks haven't come through in my time of need. With Hinrich and Gooden's regressions, Wright's inability to crack the Hornets rotation, and the others' mediocrity, it has been a long year for Jayhawk NBA fans.
Hawk Nation now has only one hope for its professional basketball fix; a lengthy playoff run by the Celtics that pushes Pierce further into the NBA spotlight.
BASEBALL
—Edited by Madeline Hyden
Heading to Arkansas
BY SHAWN SHROYER
shroyer@kansan.com
The sunny weather hasn't followed Kansas home from Hawaii. However, the Jayhawks will consider it an even trade, so long as their poor play doesn't carry over from the Big Island to the mainland.
After losing a series with Hawaii-Hilo for the first time in program history over the weekend, Kansas (2-3) heads to SEC country today for a midweek clash with Arkansas (3-0). The undefeated and uncharacteristically unranked Razorbacks reached the NCAA tournament last season, hosting a regional, which has added even more luster to Kansas' match up with the SEC powerhouse for.
"That's a huge RPI game any time you get to play an SEC game," coach Ritch Price said. "We've been there four times since I've been here and we've lost (two) one-run games."
That has Kansas looking for a bit of payback. One of those one-run losses came last season during a three-game Arkansas sweep. Of course, Kansas has had some bad luck with one-run games more recently.
In the process of losing three of five games to Hawaii-Hilo to open its season, Kansas suffered two one-run, extra-inning losses.
"Obviously were extremely disappointed in the win-loss record coming home, but everything we didn't do well we can fix". Price said.
Kansas had 40 strikeouts and 10 errors in the series, so the Jayhawks will need to find quick fixes to hang with the Razorbacks.
Looking to keep the Kansas bats cool will be Arkansas freshman right-hander James Mahler (0-0). Mahler pitched 1.1 innings of relief in Arkansas' three-game sweep of Wright State over the weekend, allowing four runs on five hits and a walk, and striking out none.
Arkansas outscored Wright State 21-11 in the series with the help of junior third baseman Logan Forsyth, freshman first baseman Andy Wilkins and senior outfielder Aaron Murphree. Forsyth hit .500 in the series and led the team with five runs. Wilkins and led the team at a home run and knocked in six runs as Murphy led the team with a .600 average.
However, after a 16-4 shellacking of the Vulcans in game five, the Jayhawks may have started hitting their stride. Most notably, junior first baseman Preston Land capped off his weekend with a 2-for-3 performance, scoring two runs and hitting a three-run home run.
Kansas sophomore left-hander Wally Marceli (1-0) will try to harness the Arkansas offense after a strong start on Friday. Throwing on a pitch count to make sure he'd be fresh for today, Marceli struck out four in six innings, allowing just one run. Today will mark Marceli's first start in an SEC venue, but the youngest starter in Kansas' rotation isn't intimidated.
"The SEC has a lot of good teams and Arkansas is a very good team." Marceli said. "I watched them, I didn't get to pitch against them last year, but hopefully I'll have a good game against them and just show them a new thing."
Edited by Russell Davies
WOMEN'S BASKETBALL
Team enters final stretch with concerns
The starter's gun for the marathon that is a college basketball season went off on Nov. 11 for Kansas.
Now the jerkwawks in to the finish line as they wrap up their regular season with three games in the next eight days. The first of those three is tonight's clash with Texas at 7 in Allen Fieldhouse.
BY TAYLOR BERN
tbern@kansan.com
Now the Jayhawks are in a dead sprint
Afterlosingtwogames in a row to the 11th and 12th place teams in the conference (Texas Tech and Missouri). Kansas has a laundry list of
problems to fix before the game.
"We've got to limit our turnovers and do the small things that really matter," sophomore guard Danielle McCrav said.
particularly to start the second half.
"We need to just play as hard as we can in these last few games in hopes of going to the tournament."
Senior forward Taylor McIntosh added, "Around this time of year defense is winning games because the competition steps up. It's important for us to stay focused defensively and let our offense come to us"
In the last two games, the Jayhawks' opponents used runs of 12-2 and 18-4 out of halftime to either erase or lengthen leads. What Henrickson can't figure out is why her team continues to come out flat.
Coach Bonnie Henrickson admitted that turnovers had been a problem for her team, win or lose, all year. She said she was more disappointed in Kansas' lackcluster defense.
TAYLOR MCINTOSH
Senior forward
"That's the million-dollar question; that's
the one that's been agonizing the staff all year," Henrickson said. "Unfortunately I don't have an answer and I don't think these kids have an answer, either, but it's something we've got to fix right away."
That mentality has been passed down to her players, who, despite the recent setbacks, understand what's still ahead of them.
This has been one of the most competitive seasons in Big 12 history, according to Henrickson, and its inevitable end means it is gut check time for every team.
It's not all bad news for the Jayhawks. They only lost by three in Columbia, Mo., with freshman center
"The reality is that we still have a chance
Krysten Boogaard accounting for just six points. The colossal Canadian won't get shut out like that at home, and backup point guard LaChelda Jacobs tends to play better against teams from her home state, Texas.
Weston White/KANSAN
Freshman center Krysten Boogaard puts up a shot that was blocked by Missouri guard Alyssa Hollins. Boogaard finished with just six points in 33 minutes during a 59-62 loss Sunday at Mizzou Arena.
to reach our goals," McCray said. "Everyone knows what's at stake right now," McIntosh said. "We need to just play as hard as we can in these last few games in hopes of going to the tournament."
—Edited by Matt Hirschfeld