Koch mojo

As any Boston Red Sox fan knows by know John Lester threw a no-hitter last night against the Kansas City Royals.

What they might not know, is that Sam Koch, the UMass men’s soccer coach, threw out the first pitch.

How about that for some pregame mojo?

From CSTV:

Koch’s pitch was a strong one, a bit high, but was still memorable for the Concord, Mass., native and his family. When talking about the moment, Sam said “It’s amazing when you get out there. You don’t hear a thing; you don’t see a thing except for the catcher’s mit in front of you. It was so surreal.”

It’s been a great year for Koch. Congrats on the honor … and the mojo.

Behind the Bill

There’s a little behind the scenes actions via the Collegian today.

Chase Wheeler put together a pretty good article on all the stuff fans don’t see at the Mullins Center. It gives some good insight on the new(ish) video boards and the folks that help to run them.

“After working professionally for so long, this job is quite an adjustment. Here I’m in more of a teaching role, showing [the student crew members] the trade,” he said. Justin Hicks, in his second year studying at UMass and working in the video board room, said that “it’s cool to be behind the scenes and see the game from a different perspective.

While at UMass I worked in several (albeit brief) capacities in the Mullins Center including flying the blimp and working a few changeovers. Scott Neas, a former UMass rugby player and a foreman for the Mullins Center, helped get me those jobs.

The people that work there work hard and are an integral part in the sports ambience we all enjoy so much.

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Brandice Balschmiter, a pitcher for the UMass softball team, was named the A-10 pitcher of the week.

Via CSTV:

The righty owned a 0.33 ERA and a 2-1 record in the opening weekend after allowing 10 hits in 21 innings while striking out 23. She gave up just three hits and struck out nine in a 1-0 loss to No. 12 Michigan (2/8). Balschmiter then threw a complete game shutout in a 2-0 win over South Carolina (2/9) giving up just four hits for her first win of the season. She struck out eight while surrendering just three hits in a 5-2 win over Florida Atlantic (2/10). Balschmiter is now just eight strikeouts away from moving into second on the UMass all-time career list with 588.

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CSTV also had a bit of a chat with Travis Ford:

I don’t know if I was surprised, but disappointed, at the fact that I had to have a talk with my guys at this point in the season. This is not the time of year you should have to be motivating your team to play harder, but that is the nature of the game.

Should they stay or should they go now?

Greg Hansen, a columnist for the Arizona Star, had an excellent article on the state of Chris Brown, Doug Rappaport and the UMass men’s soccer team in general.

Both players will graduate this year but have another year of eligibility. The problem is that they will basically have to pay their way for another year.

Rappaport, who plans to attend medical school, and Brown, whose tentative career goal is to be an investment banker, are about to go pro. Or maybe not.

There are some finances involved.

Incredibly, UMass played its way to the final weekend of college soccer with a budget that included the equivalent of 2.3 scholarships. Coach Sam Koch somehow split that relatively small amount of tuition/rent/ food money over a squad of 25 players. Brown, for example, was granted $2,000 for the entire year, which probably covered a half-year’s apartment rental.

Then there was this interesting statistic:

The NCAA allows each men’s soccer team 9.9 scholarships. UMass, which attempted to kill off its men’s soccer program as recently as 1991, had an operating budget of $98,000 for the 2006-07 fiscal year. By comparison, Arizona’s women’s soccer team is allowed 12 full scholarships and worked on a budget of $170,000.

Brown’s defense and Rappaport’s ability to make plays in the midfield will surely be missed by the Minutemen if one or both decide to move on from their days in the Pioneer Valley. Of course, the financial situation isn’t exactly conducive to retaining athletes that have already paid their dues in the classroom.

Either way, I wish both of these guys the best in the future. Even if they do venture off into something new, they should not look back with any regret. They gave UMass fans the best season in team history, and they made us all proud to be Minutemen.

Via Brown:

“…the great thing about UMass is that the people there are the people who want to be there. It’s a good family.”

Koch up for honor

Sam Koch is up for coach of the year.

The UMass soccer coach has been named a finalist for the NSCAA/adidas National Coach of the Year Award. What an amazing honor this would be for Koch, especially since he didn’t even get Coach of the Year honors in the Atlantic 10.

From UMassAthletics.com:

The Concord, Mass., native has led the Minutemen to three regular season Atlantic 10 titles, two Atlantic 10 Tournament titles, two NCAA Tournament appearances, and one NCAA College Cup appearance. During his tenure in Amherst, the 23-year head coaching veteran has produced two All-Americans in Jeff Deren (2001, 2002) and Zack Simmons (2007), a College Cup All-Tournament selection, a two-time Atlantic 10 Offensive Player of the Year, two Atlantic 10 Rookies of the year, two Atlantic 10 Tournament MVPs, 17 All-New England selections, 53 All-Atlantic 10 players, 25 Academic All-Atlantic 10 honorees, and 20 Atlantic 10 All-Tournament picks.

Then later:

Assistant coach Jon Davy was earlier named East Region Assistant Coach of the Year and is now in the running for the National Assistant Coach of the Year as well.

Dan Donagan, Saint Louis’ soccer coach, is also on the list of head coaches and was named the A-10 Coach of the Year earlier.

Road less traveled

Tonight is the biggest game in the history of the UMass men’s soccer team, and it is appropriately getting its due from the national media.

The New York Times had an absolutely lights-out solid article about the potential disbanding of the soccer team in the early ‘90s. It also gives some good background on the school’s scholarship situation and how truly amazing this year’s run has been for the Maroon and White:

Men’s soccer at UMass is allotted only 2.2 of the 9.9 scholarships allowed by the N.C.A.A., and that money is spread among 26 players. In a preseason poll, the Minutemen were forecast to finish 10th among the Atlantic 10 Conference’s 14 teams. Only once before, in 2001, had UMass qualified for the N.C.A.A. tournament. And now it is two victories from a national championship.

From John McCutcheon:

“If all you did was submit budgets and photos of your facilities, you wouldn’t need to play the games,” John McCutcheon, UMass’s athletic director said. “But that’s what makes sports so exciting and unpredictable.”

… and a little bit of humor:

At the Atlantic 10 tournament in Dayton, Ohio, the Minutemen ate their meals at a sandwich shop inside a Wal-Mart.

“When Olive Garden discontinued the $8 Never Ending Pasta Bowl, Coach was visibly upset,” Brown, the defender, said with a laugh.

From ESPN.com, the outlook is a little less positive, but realistic nonetheless:

Alas, the nightcap between unseeded UMass and No. 5 seed Ohio State (7 p.m. ET, ESPNU) might not be as pretty to behold. The Minutemen’s run to Cary has been nothing short of miraculous, but there is no disputing the fact that they lack the top-end talent and pedigree of the three other squads. Thirteen of their 25 contests this season have been decided by a single goal, and they allowed more than one goal in a game just four times this season. So if coach Sam Koch’s charges are to upset the underrated Buckeyes, bunker ball (and another big game from keeper Zack Simmons, who was lights-out against Illinois-Chicago) is how UMass will punch its ticket to the final.

Don’t count on that happening.

Good luck tonight boys, you’ve already made any and all UMass athletics fans incredibly happy and proud, but then again:

“If we’re going,” Simmons, the goalkeeper said, “we might as well come back with some hardware.”

Frozen futbol

Hoodies, gloves, jackets and scarves are not the typical garb for a soccer game.

Then again, Massachusetts isn’t a typical soccer state.

As another New England winter slowly settled on the Pioneer Valley, soccer in Amherst kept going. The UMass men’s soccer team went to new heights, defeated old rivals and bit by bone-chilling bit made its way to the College Cup for the first time in school history.

UMass is very much an underdog and sticks out among the power from the South (Wake Forest and Virginia) and the always daunting persona that surrounds Ohio State.

The Minutemen have a nice facility, but Rudd doesn’t hold a candle to the major soccer complexes in the West and South. Coach Sam Koch has his office in the basement of Boyden, and you can smell the chlorine from the upstairs pool when you walk down the narrow concrete corridor.

Everything about the UMass program has soccer experts scratching their heads. There is a slight tradition of excellence within its region, but the Minutemen have seldom made any headlines outside the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Springfield Republican. UMass has had trouble making the Atlantic 10 tournament the past few years — the NCAAs were a pipedream.

The College Cup was simply a dream.

I don’t know where the credit goes with all of this. Obviously Koch put the team together and the team had to play the games, but how do you manufacture momentum? How does a team come together at the perfect time, with the perfect bracket and the ability to score at just the right time?

It almost seems like something is surrounding this team … like it doesn’t know the magnitude of what it’s doing or that it has already positioned itself within the conversation of the best UMass teams of all time.

The Minutemen snuck into this spot, but they did it with the cards they were dealt. UMass is the only school in the College Cup that was not ranked at the end of the season (Wake No. 1, OSU No. 14, Va. Tech No. 8), which further illustrates just how vital and unexpected this momentum is.

Koch has a week to prepare the team for Ohio State, and hopefully it can maintain its steady course toward the National Championship. Meanwhile Rudd Field will continue to freeze as the aluminum bleachers become dull under another layer of winter.

Perhaps this whole season was a flash in the pan, but who is going to complain? The soccer team is giving us something to watch and hope for while the other fall teams sit and wait for next year.

At some point Koch is going to walk down the dark, musky hallway that leads to his office and think about all of this. He will think about this season and what it means to his school and his already-illustrious career in Amherst. He and those that have paid attention will remember 2007.

It was the year the frozen New England basketball school made good and caught momentum’s tiger tail all the way to the history books.

Soccer savior

Leave it to the soccer team to clean up a pretty disappointing weekend.

Sam Koch and the UMass men’s soccer team played through icy conditions at Rudd Field to defeat Central Connecticut State and move on to the NCAA Quarterfinals for the first time in school history. I watched the interviews on UMassAthletics.com and Sam Koch, in typical fashion, was brief and to the point.

We’re in New England and fields freeze when it goes below 32 degrees and to not play, I didn’t really understand, but I was going to do whatever they told me to do. We were ready to play right now, we wanted to play right now, but if we had to play tomorrow we would have done that as well.

What threw me off was the quote from Central Connecticut’s side, more specifically Sean Green:

UMass definitely deserved to win today; they were the better side today. I don’t think the game should have been played today, I thought the referees initial decision was a correct one, not to play the game because of the surface it certainly deteriorated our performance from the first whistle to the last whistle of the game. We had to totally change our style of play. The footing for our players was certainly different from the footing of their players. They were prepared for a hard surface, we were not. Not to take away from their performance, I think that UMass played exceptionally well and they had a great game.

Not sure how one team can have better footing than another. Either way good win and a solid chaser after football and basketball fell in the Midwest.

Orange eclipse

Every once in awhile, the planets align perfectly and leave us in a state of ecstatic bewilderment.

It happened last night — twice.

On the same evening that the UMass men’s soccer team beat Boston College to move on to the third round of the NCAA Tournament, the men’s basketball team added a signature win to its resume.

Beating Syracuse is different than the marquee wins of years past. When the Maroon and White beat UConn in 2004, it was a slower, Lappas-style game and the win ended up being nothing more than a line on Steve’s resume (and a wonderful college memory for me). Last year UMass needed to beat Louisville to prove that it was something more than a twin-tower-team beating up on the bottom-feeders of college basketball.

Last night, we were all given a firm affirmation that Travis Ford’s offense works, that his conditioning works and — most importantly — that his style can win when implemented. It actually worked so well that it broke a Carrier Dome record for points by an opposing team (107).

While the defense was lacking, UMass exhibited exactly what it’s going to bring to the table. It’s going to run to a point where its fans are uncomfortable, and yelling, and swearing — or maybe that was just me.

The win in the Carrier Dome confirmed that anything is possible for this team, that preseason stipulations are null and void, and that UMass may have reloaded when it lost Rashaun Freeman and Stephane Lasme … it didn’t just start over again.

But, then again, maybe the Minutemen did start over in some regards. UMass has a slew of new faces, a new system and a tempo I still can’t believe. Never did I ever expect a UMass team to put up 100 points.

Not even against the Jacksonville States of the world.

Beating Syracuse also made UMass relevant again. Some may argue last year’s NIT run helped, but even the announcers couldn’t remember who we beat (at one point Jarvis said UMass LOST to Alabama). The Minutemen went into the Carrier Dome and proved that they are one of the best teams in the Northeast, and 20,000 Syracuse fans and anyone watching Sportscenter learned that firsthand.

Perhaps the most fitting part about last night’s win was that it was on ESPN Classic. Nov. 28, 2007 may be a day UMass fans look back on with a knowing smirk. We were given a glimpse of potential and what happens when a fun, athletic style is brought to the Pioneer Valley.

The UMass proud got to see Gary Forbes step up, Dante Milligan play beyond his size and the continued progression of Ricky Harris, who, in my opinion, plays like a combination of Anthony Anderson and Shannon Crooks, which is nice… real nice.

Now it’s off to Indiana to play an IUPUI team that UMass should beat. But there lies the rub in all of this. Can Ford maintain momentum, keep on the press and put away the teams he should? Or is it possible that UMass is the same team we’ve grown to love and hate — the team that gives us rollercoaster seasons with unfortunate and unforgivable losses?

I can only hope, but that’s the best part of being a fan. That hope is what wakes the neighbors on random Wednesday evenings when all they can hear is solitary screams from the next-door basement.

It’s what adds an extra skip to your step as you stare at the sky and hope the planetary eclipse stays true just a little bit longer.

Like a basketball blocking out the Orange sun.

Upstairs TV

I’m full, I’m happy, and I’m sorry.

For the past few days I’ve been home — Vero Beach, Fl. to be exact. I haven’t had the time or the means to update Between Mullins and McGuirk, and I hope my last post made that somewhat clear.

So much has been happening in the world of UMass athletics, and it would be hard to recap without stumbling over old news and items already posted on UMassHoops.com or the UMass Football Blog.

I’ve also been away from any kind of Internet radio, so I missed the soccer team beating Boston University in what sounds like dramatic fashion. I was able to get Gametracker for UMass/Fordham, but by now the ins and outs of that game have been discussed, analyzed and argued over.

It’s funny though… this whole UMass football thing. It has encompassed my life within my little cube at work, and my fandom is imminent when you step into my room (I may be the only person in the state of Colorado with a replica UMass mini football helmet). However, back home — back in the south — UMass and CS/I-AA/etc. football is basically nothing.

Since I don’t get ESPNU I was left with James Madison and Appalachian State, which was actually a pretty good game. My brother (sophomore at the University of Kentucky) and his friends (Tennessee, Florida, Auburn and Colby … yea, the last one stands out a bit) came into the living room and immediately said, “What the hell is this?”

I left and watched the game upstairs. I knew not to get in the way of SEC football, so big brother went and watched his “what-the-hell-is-this” football by himself.

While it doesn’t bother me that a group of Southern boys couldn’t appreciate a game of such magnitude, it did make me wonder why I care so much. Could it be the fact that I’m an alumni of a CAA school or that I worked for the student newspaper? Or is it that I was raised in the south, where football is king, and had to make my alma mater’s team bigger than it really is?

Probably all three.

I remember my brother’s reaction when he saw our stadium. It was pretty similar to the reaction he had to JMU/Appalachian State on the main television in our house. Of course he missed the writing on the wall — literally — which tells the tale of a program that has won, with consistency, within the realm of its size, ability and finances.

On Thanksgiving I sat with an old reporter’s notebook and jotted down things I was thankful for in UMass athletics: football team’s success, Travis Ford’s recruiting, Jack, Sam Koch, etc. I thought about publishing it, but I realized I forgot my login name for this site — at least I’m honest.

Of course everything I wrote was subjective and small scale in relation to the overall scheme of things in college athletics, but it’s my list and my school, and damnit I don’t need to be an objective journalist when it comes to that.

So, tomorrow I’ll start over again. I’ll continue to find news and add my opinions. Maybe it will get lost in the shuffle of college sports blogs, and I hope whoever reads this hasn’t been turned away due to my negligence the past week.

It doesn’t matter that it isn’t SEC or ACC because I’m all A-10 and CAA… even if I have to watch the game by myself.

UMass hangover

Wow, what a weekend. So good, I somehow vanished for an extra day.

The football team is heading back to the playoffs and once again has to face off against an always-dangerous Patriot League team (paging Colgate). The men’s soccer team is heading to the NCAA Tournament for the second time in program history. Hoops continues to play fast and somewhat effective. And hockey, well they tied and beat Boston College — and that’s better than birthday cake … especially since I saw a B.C. hockey fan at a Rocky Mountain Rage game on Saturday.

He now knows that no matter where he is, be it Commonwealth Ave. or a random hockey rink in Broomfield, CO., there will always be someone to vocalize how much “B.C. Sucks.”

Anyway, I tried to sit down and assemble this crazy, borderline emotional weekend of UMass sports and was simply baffled. If you couldn’t already tell, I have a soft spot for the soccer team and hope it can beat Boston U. at home. Coach Koch deserves this — he is by far one of the most unsung coaches and people at UMass.

Football continues to look eerily familiar to last year, just replace Lafayette with Fordham. I hope Brown isn’t looking past this Rams team. I can’t imagine he is.

I’m actually kind of excited to hear Larry Coker call this game.

As far as hoops and hockey are concerned, I can’t get a full read on these teams yet. Hockey has a different identity than years past, but it is upholding a constant progression toward the top of Hockey East, and that’s all any of us can ask for.

The basketball team has once again played absolutely nobody of merit, but this year that may be a good idea. Get the kids some confidence. Let them shoot and run against teams that are going to spend a lot of time catching up.

I wish I had more time for this, but there is just too much, and that’s a good thing. Between work and attempting to organize myself for my first trip home in almost three years, I’ve slipped a little bit on this blog, and I apologize.

UMass athletics has been incredibly special recently, and I can’t do it justice right now.

And, as weird as it sounds, I couldn’t be happier.