sutomcat
No recent Cali or Iggy awards; Mr Irrelevant
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Welcome to Jackie Robinson Day!
April 15 has a lot going on — it’s tax day and Patriot’s Day — but in baseball it’s most significant because it’s Jackie Robinson Day. Sixty-six years ago today Robinson became the first black man to play major league baseball in the modern era.
Players will wear 42 on their jerseys today. Just about every columnist you read will have a remembrance or retrospective of the man today. Even if you’ve read a lot of these and know the general story, you should take some extra time to reacquaint yourself with it again. Or, maybe even better, go check out Jackie’s Baseball-Reference.com page. I sometimes feel like we spend so much time on talking about Robinson’s breaking the color barrier that we forget he was a hell of a baseball player and would have been Hall of Fame worthy regardless.
Also worth checking out are some things about Robinson’s post-playing career, which includes a lot of important work in the civil rights movement and which is often overlooked.Here’s a nice start to that.
Robinson was a complex and interesting man and that often gets lost as so much time is spent on the well-known and well-told parties of his story.
SU News
Tyler Jost (77)
Libertyville OL Tyler Jost Commits to Iowa State (chicagotribune.com; Narang)
Tyler Jost continued Libertyville's parade of players to the Division I football ranks Thursday, when the junior left tackle committed to Iowa State.
Jost became the fourth Wildcat in the past two school years to commit to a Division I program, joining seniors Riley Lees (Northwestern) and Ben Kimpler (Miami of Ohio) and classmate Ryan O'Malley (Illinois).
Libertyville coach Mike Jones, whose team finished second in Class 7A in November, is pleased with the run of talent he has enjoyed.
"These (college commitments) are kind of nice because for a while we didn't have any," Jones said. "It kind of ebbs and flows. Most schools don't have them all the time. It's been nice."
The 6-foot-6, 270-pound Jost, a three-star recruit, chose the Cyclones over a list of offers that included Syracuse, Wyoming, Ball State, Bowling Green, Central Michigan, Toledo and Western Michigan.
Lees said Jost developed into a solid offensive lineman during his first stint on the varsity last season.
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AA Sprinter Named 2015-16 All-Greater Rochester Runner of the Year, Plans to Attend Syracuse (D&C)
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Kelly Brown III – “KB” to his family and named after his deceased father – is an honors student and state 55-meter and national 200-meter champion who refused to lose, to life.
Approaching June graduation with a 3.6 grade-point average and hopes of college at Syracuse, Brown leads the 20-person boys indoor track and field team as its athlete of the year. Along with coach of the year David Copp of East Rochester, whose team won its sectionals for the first time, the group includes three repeat selections (Brown is one) and eight underclassmen.
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Bull Run's Interview with Buffalo AD Allen Greene (ubbullrun.com; Johnson)
After learning news of Buffalo's newest branding initiative, we got a chance to sit down and talk to UB's Athletic Director Allen Greene about people's concerns and the state of the athletic department. Below, you can find the full interview:
Robby Johnson (Bull Run): So how did we get to this point and what is purpose or vision in all of this?
Allen Greene: I think how we got to this point was through a twelve month process from the university side. I was involved in that from day one while in my previous position understanding that it's long overdue for the university to have a platform to tell our story in a compelling way. So as a part of that, it just it made sense that we all did it from one cohesive messaging standpoint. So that includes athletics, the law school, and architecture and planning. Their vision doesn't change. Our goal is to leverage athletics to raise the profile of our university. You do that by graduating students and by winning championships.
RJ: So one of the biggest concerns I've seen since the news came out is state money being wasted to switch over to this new brand. We have a football field and a basketball court with New York branding, so what is going to happen to that?
AG: I want to squash the concern over wasting state money. The circumstance with the football field is that it needed to be replaced last year and it just so happened to coincide with the second year of the New York centric word branding. If you remember the first year we actually spray painted some stuff on there and then we had the really bad winter. The lifespan of the turf had been exceeded. So that was a necessity, we were going to do the turf no matter what. The basketball court gets repainted every couple of years. It isn't money wasted. It's money that would have been spent as a part of normal maintenance. I don't want people to feel like it's like we're wasting money. We're working on a plan to update the football field. The basketball court needs to be sanded down and repainted again so there won't be an expense to that. It's about figuring out the best way and time to do it.
RJ: What about the uniforms?
AG: Those get rotated out on a schedule. It just so happens this year is time for a new football uniforms and those will be updated at no additional costs. For basketball, we have a generous relationship with Nike and we have those expenses covered. For other sports, as new uniforms are needed, then we'll get those as well. The other option obviously is to use donations. So if there's people in the community that feel like they want to see things happen faster, then I encourage them to support and we can certainly make things happen much faster.
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Other
El Galeon Andalucia es muy suave
Fleet of 20 Tall Ships to Race Across Great Lakes This Summer (PS; Ellison)
At least 20 tall ships are scheduled to visit each of the Great Lakes this year; a fleet that includes a replica Viking longship and a 170-foot Spanish Galleon making their debut on America's freshwater seas.
The El Galeon Andalucia, a 495-ton, authentic wooden replica of a galleon that was part of Spain's West Indies fleet, and the Dragon Harald Fairhar, a replica Viking longship built in Norway, are crossing the Atlantic Ocean this year to join the Tall Ships Challenge returning to the Great Lakes in 2016.
The fleet will sail the lakes over the course of four months, with scheduled port stops and races on lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan and Superior between July and September.
The organized tall ships show last visited Michigan in 2013.
The Appledore IV set sail on Friday, April 17, making its first official voyage of the year. On board, taking part in the Science Under Sail program were about 30 children from St. John Amelith Lutheran School in Bay County's Frankenlust Township. The program allows students to learn more about ecology and the Saginaw Bay Watershed.
"In between each of the ports, they will be racing," said Erin Short, challenge manager for Rhode Island-based Tall Ships America.
Although there are numerous tall ships that are home-ported around the Great Lakes, the challenge brings them all together into a large, international fleet with a structured schedule, said Short.
The entire roster has not been announced, but the fleet will make port at least 8 times in the Great Lakes this summer.
• Toronto, Ont., July 1-3.
• Fairport Harbor, Ohio, July 8-10.
• Bay City, Mich., July 15-17.
• Chicago, Ill., July 27-31.
• Green Bay, Wis., Aug. 5-7.
• Duluth, Minn., Aug. 18-21.
• Erie, Penn., Sept. 8-11.
• Brockville, Ont., Sept. 17-18.
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