Thursday Cardinal Couple

THURSDAY CARDINAL COUPLE

(Jeff McAdams covers the past, present and future of UofL women's sports in today's column. Hardly Bill Murray or Ebenezer Scrooge, he still manages to give us a great look at basketball, softball and his favorite...volleyball. I just hope he doesn't expect me to be Tiny Tim in his scenario...)

 

3 Seasons of Sports

Spring sports are coming to a close, that means its time for student-athletes to find other ways to do the work of preparing for the sports seasons of the next academic year.  As we've heard, many of the women's basketball players have been putting in a lot of hours in the gym, putting up shots, practicing as individuals and with each other.

Other avenues of practice and work are available to student-athletes, though.  The college years provide the best student-athletes the opportunity to start working with the various US National Sports programs, to play against the elite players in their sport and to get extra training and instruction with some of the best coaches in the land.

Volleyball

Three VolleyCards were selected to participate in the A2 USA National Volleyball team, Brooke
Mattingly, Hannah Kvitle and Caitlin Welch.  This team of 48 players is selected from college volleyball players who still have college eligibility remaining for the upcoming season.  They will be assigned to four different teams and practice and compete against each other, as well as the top four Premier Volleyball League teams.

To place three players among the 48 total players nationwide selected is quite an honor for UofL Volleyball and is a school best.  Only five other schools had 3 players selected for the A2 program, and only Purdue had more players selected (with four).  Around 250 players tried out for the US National team programs, so competition is fierce.

I'm sure Brooke, Hannah and Caitlin will represent the UofL program well.

Basketball

Basketball, too, has National Team programs in the works.

Three of the "S" squad...Shoni Schimmel, Sara Hammond, and Bria Smith...have received invitations to participate in the USA Basketball Women's World University Games Team trials.  This mouthful is a selection of 31 US citizen student-athletes with remaining eligibility that will try out later this month at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Spring, CO.  A squad of 12 will be picked from the 31 on May 19th to train in late June, again at the USOTC, then will travel to Russia to represent the US in the World University Games.

Again, as you can see, the competition here is fierce, and even to be selected to be one of the 31 trying out for the squad is an amazing honor.

Softball

While we're talking about most of the athletic teams in the past tense for the 2012-2013 academic year, Softball (and Baseball) are still competing.

The Softball team is in sunny Florida to participate in the Big East Conference Tournament.  Play gets under way today (Thursday) at 10am.  Louisville is scheduled to play at 4pm against Syracuse.  While later start times in tournaments like this can shift, there is a significant break scheduled between the 2nd game and the 3rd game in which Louisville will be playing, so the start time should be pretty accurate.  The Thursday and Friday games will be streamed via the Internet on BigEast.tv.  The stream for the Louisville game should be available, when the time comes, through this link.  The championship game will be at 4pm on Saturday on ESPN2.

The Tournament Banquet was held Wednesday night where all of the conference awards were announced.  Louisville Softball placed an amazing nine players on All Big-East Teams this year.

Katie Keller, Katelyn Mann, Jordan Trimble, and Alicja Wolny received first team honors.  Jordan Trimble and Alicja Wolny were unanimous selections.

Whitney Arion, Caralisa Connell, Hannah Kiyohara, and Rachel LeCoq got second team selections.

Maggie Ruckenbrod was picked for the third team.

Congratulations to UofL Softball for on the All Big-East Team selections.

Cardinal Couple Radio Hour

They haven't kicked us off the radio yet, so we'll be back in the studio live this week for the http://www.crescenthillradio.com/cardinalcouple.html.

Cardinal Couple Radio Hour Saturday at 11am on 

Crescent Hill Radio.
 

Paulie apparently has a good interview with Softball Coach Sandy Pearsall, so you won't want to miss that.

We do have our twitter account for the Radio Hour that you can tweet comments, questions, and marriage proposals to, @CardCoupleRadio.

-- Jeff McAdams

( Great information from Jeff today! The marriage proposals mentioned above should be directed pretty much to him...his requirements are very simple...prospective spouses should be wealthy, attractive, broad-minded, a sports fan, a beer consumer and unafraid of chimps. Line up, ladies...and it's probably a good idea if you know a thing or two about technology communications and jeeps. Timmy the Intern can get you priority dating status...for a fee, of course)

-Paulie

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