Intramural basketball isn’t for the faint of heart.
Wednesday night in the Sullivan Gym, I found this out first hand.
And while my fondest memories of intramurals from high school include goofy uniforms and shoddy officiating, my newly-acquired impressions are vastly different.
Year: Senior
Major: Athletic Training
Sport: Men’s Track
FP: How many sports did you play in high school?
Adam: I did soccer and indoor/outdoor track
FP: When did you start to become really serious about pole vaulting?
Adam: I started to pole vault my first year of high school, I followed in my big sister’s footsteps.
Men’s Basketball
2/16 – Rhode Island College 79, USM 72
2/19 – Plymouth State 54, USM 53
2/23 – USM 75, Western Connecticut 65
2/26 – USM 79, Eastern Connecticut 69 (Little East quarterfinal)
2/29 – Umass Dartmouth 75, USM 69 (Little East semi-final)
Men’s Hockey
2/16 – Connecticut College 3, USM 1
2/22 – New England College 3, USM 2
2/23 – Saint Anselm 4, USM 2
3/1 – New England College 5, USM 2 (ECAC quarterfinal)
Men’s Indoor Track
2/16 – Little East Championships – #1 Keene State 169, #2 USM 148.
Friday’s game versus Eastern Connecticut meant more to the women’s basketball team than most — it was senior night.
Senior night, usually one of the last home games of the season, is one of the toughest moments in an athlete’s career. It signifies the end: unless you’re going professional, which few Division III athletes do, your career as an athlete is over.
Stephen Holt is USM’s only male cheerleader. Choreographed into routines with nine women, he provides strength and balance to their aesthetically-focused routines: in any given human pyramid, Holt will be found at the bottom center position.
Despite stereotypes surrounding cheerleaders, the last decade has granted cheerleading national recognition and respect for being a physically demanding sport on par with the football and basketball teams they cheer for.
They are among the most the most successful sports programs at USM, right up there with baseball and women’s basketball. And they have been entirely ignored.
“They” are the USM women’s track team.
What exactly constitutes a great team or program —- character? hard work? determination? the ability to succeed when all the odds are against you?
These women, 38 of them this season, don’t complain about the coverage that they don’t get, they just go out and do what they do best — winning.
Led by senior captains Hattie Landry (Wells), Christa Hutchinson (Gorham) and Emily Poliquin (Lisbon Falls), the women’s indoor track team put a big win under their shoes and grasped the program’s third state championship. Other standouts included sophomores Sarah Hale (Naples) and Emily Artesani (Orono).
Even before he was coordinating 23 sports teams and their facilities, USM Athletic Director Al Bean was doing yeoman’s work for the school. A 1977 USM graduate, Bean was a workhorse on the baseball diamond, compiling a number of records and accolades as one of the school’s best pitchers of all time.
Seldom have the paths of sports and government crossed with much regularity, but now, more than ever, government officials are consistently overstepping their bounds and trying to micromanage the sports world.
Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter recently called for a full-fledged investigation of the Patriots.
Men’s Hockey Huskies down foe Bowdoin 4-2 The USM men’s hockey team used a solid goaltending effort by junior goalie Jamie Gilbert (Lewiston) to skate past the Polar Bears 4-2 in hockey action at the USM Ice Arena on Feb. 2. The win lifted the Huskies to a 12-4-3 and a 6-4-3 mark in league contests.
Year: Senior Major: Health sciences Sport: Basketball FP: How many sports did you play in high school? Jo: I played soccer for three years then ran cross country my senior year. And I did track for four years in the spring time, along with basketball for four years.
After a dazzling high school career at Deering High School, Jamaal Caterina has been wandering the country with basketball as his only compass.
His college career has been spent in search of a place to play his own brand of ball, and it hasn’t been easy.
Women’s ice hockey is going through a tough stretch, admitted head coach John Lauziere after their game against Holy Cross last Friday. Their overall record stands at 4-13-1, but their last seven matches have gone 0-6-1, which made Friday’s game even more disheartening.
Taking to the ice last Friday night in hopes of a victory to put themselves back into a winning streak, the Huskies faced off against the Colby College Mules. A local rival as well as a perennial playoff opponent, the Mules (10-6-0) came to Gorham to avenge their 3-4 loss to the Huskies earlier this season.
With New England on top of the sports world, sometimes I have to find something negative to opine about, lest I become complacent and ungrateful for all of the greatness.
Very seldom does Theo Epstein bite the proverbial big one, but since the Twins’ pitcher Johan Santana is now headed to the Mets, it seems as though he finally has.
Year: Senior
Major: Therapeutic Recreation
Sport: Women’s Track
FP: How long have you been running track, and what made you want to do it in the first place?
Hattie: I started running track in the 4th grade with an after-school program. I soon realized that I was pretty fast, and enjoyed getting the little ribbons if you won.
Men’s Basketball
Huskies get fifth straight against Plymouth State
1/29 – The USM men’s basketball team recorded their fifth straight win with a
New semesters bring with them fresh starts, especially for the USM men’s basketball team. The spring term brought with it the return of three seniors who were forced to sit out the fall semester due to NCAA requirements.
Foster Oakley (Mt. Vernon), Nick Gooding (Concord, CA) and Jamaal Caterina (Portland) have all rejoined Coach Karl Henrikson’s Huskies and have proved to be valuable additions, leading the team to five wins in their last six games and changing the team’s entire make-up.
After an 11 game undefeated run that made them the number seven team in the Division III nation, the men’s hockey team is in a slump, going five games in a row without a win.
The streak began with a 1-3 loss to Trinity College, and continued as they tied Wesleyan 2-2 and Amherst 3-3, lost 1-6 to Hamilton.
Upon hearing that the showers at the Sullivan Gym are solar-powered, I had to investigate. So I worked up a good sweat, grabbed a towel and jumped in to see how the water was.
And although the water doesn’t whistle through the showerhead like a teakettle, it is adequately warm and stays so throughout the bathing process.
The thought of the next Paul Pierce or Kevin Garnett playing at the Portland Expo is a nice one. It’s filled with fancy and hope and dollar signs, but it’s a notion that couldn’t be farther from reality and it could ruin an already good thing for the city of Portland.
Year: Junior
Major: Business
Sport: Men’s Track
FP: How long have you been running track?
Jimmy: I’ve been running track since the 7th grade. When I got to middle school I didn’t feel like trying out for baseball and basketball. The two sports that I didn’t have to try out for were football and track.
February 2 & 3
New Hampshire Ski/Snowboard Weekend Trip to Cranmore and Attitash- While the semester is young and your procrastination has not yet caught up with you, let’s get away for a weekend of downhill fun! We will visit Cranmore Mountain on Saturday, perched above Conway, New Hampshire; and hit Attitash Mountain on Sunday to experience another piece of the White Mountains.
Power outages delayed both the men’s and women’s basketball games last Tuesday night, nearly canceling the men’s game entirely. John Carroll, the public affairs manager at Central Maine Power, said that the outage, which began at 7:04 p.m., was triggered by an equipment failure on a transmission line in Standish and affected the USM campus in Gorham, as well as several nearby towns.