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Volleyball streak ends in STL

Paul Moeller
Associate Sports Editor

As the English proverb states, ‘all good things must come to an end.’

The Xavier volleyball team’s nine match winning streak and undefeated conference record was snapped on Friday at Saint Louis.

After beating the Billikens 3-0 at Cintas earlier in the season, the Musketeers did not have the magic touch in the Gateway City, dropping three straight games to the defending Atlantic 10 champions.

Sophomore Kelly Ruth and senior Jill Quayle turned in solid performances in the losing effort.

Ruth led the team in digs with 12 while Quayle notched two solo blocks. Each smashed nine kills on the night.

Freshman Claire Paszkiewicz served up two aces for the Musketeers while senior Jenni Horvath had nine digs.

The Xavier netters rebounded two days later as they traveled to Duquesne University for a Sunday afternoon match.

The Musketeers had little trouble with the Dukes, defeating them 3-0 and completing the season sweep of their Pittsburgh foes.

It was an outstanding day for Paszkiewicz, who achieved her third career double-double to the tune of 12 digs and a career-high 40 assists.

Sophomore Hillary Otte rocketed a team-high 14 kills while Ruth was just one dig shy of her career high, getting under 19 balls.

The senior duo of Quayle and Horvath each smashed 10 kills, while solid minutes were turned in by freshmen Chelsea Campbell and Emily Vassil.

Campbell notched a career-high six digs and Vassil, who has spent the season battling an injury, assisted one block.

Winning by the scores of 30-26, 30-15 and 30-28, the Musketeers record now sits at 21-7 overall and 10-1 in the Atlantic 10.

The volleyball team will have plenty of time to prepare for their final two matches of the season.

Their next game is away on Nov. 8 against thier bitter rivals at the University of Dayton.

The Flyers will undoubtedly be looking for sweet redemption after the Musketeers handed them their first loss of the season two weeks ago.

X-treme Fans is in the process of arranging a coach bus to Dayton for the rematch of these A-10 volleyball powerhouses. Details have yet to be finalized.

The final home match of the year, senior night, will be the following night against the visiting Rams of Rhode Island.

The Rhode Island coaching staff is not very appreciative of the hostile Cintas Center playing environment, and has considered appealing to the Atlantic 10 for possible disciplinary action.

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Lavender in the hunt for two more awards

Doug Tifft
Associate Sports Editor

Senior point guard Drew Lavender was named a candidate for two of college basketball’s most prestigious awards on Tuesday.

The Atlanta Tipoff Club announced that Lavender was among 50 players put on the watch list for the 2007-08 Naismith Trophy presented by AT&T, which is given annually to the best player in college basketball.

The Naismith Trophy is considered the preeminent award in college basketball.

Starting with 50 candidates at the beginning of the season, the field is narrowed to 30 in January.

AT&T will work with sports writers to determine the winner of the award by allowing fans to comprise 25 percent of the decision through voting available by text messaging.

The winner is recognized every year at the Final Four, which this will take place in San Antonio this season.

Ironically, the other nomination also contained the name of the legendary “Wizard of Westwood,” that being the Frances Pomeroy Naismith Award, named after the coach’s daughter-in-law.

The award is given to the best player in college hoops under six feet tall, for which Lavender qualifies at a height of 5’7.

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Ramjammed: Club Ultimate goes 7-1 in “Rabbit Hole”

Aaron Armbruster
Contributing Sports Writer

This past weekend was one of epic proportions for the Xavier Ultimate team.

In its sixth year of competition, the club had its best ever finish in a tournament, coming in third place out of 23 teams with a 7-1 record at Denison University’s “Back to the Rabbit Hole” disc tournament.

Losing only to Kenyon Ramjam, the club topped its previous best of a 5-2 weekend at Wright State two years ago.

Saturday was the best day in club history. The Xavier squad went 4-0, beating a solid lineup of Ohio State’s B-team, Wittenburg, Toledo and Muskingum.

XU Ultimate combined the outstanding hustle defense of junior Peter Covino and sophomore Zach Dehaemers with a strong deep game anchored by junior Chad Solik and sophomore David Cranston to finish with its first undefeated day in history.

The team’s smallest margin of victory was three points, and had a high point 15-5 win over Wittenburg.

Still, the best was yet to come on the second day of the tournament.

The team started the day with an unbelievable shutout of Denison-B, 15-0, to reach the bracket of the final eight teams.

In that bracket, the Muskies were matched up with Case Western Reserve University, which has been very successful against Xavier in the past.

The beginning of the game gave indications that Case’s domination would continue, and they jumped out to a 4-1 lead due to some mental mistakes by the Xavier team.

A smart timeout refocused the team, and Case would not see the endzone the rest of the game.

Xavier went on an 11-point run, during which a stifling defense got the patient, controlled offense a lot of time with the disc.

A couple of stellar diving plays by Cranston, both on offense and defense, and beautiful hucks (Ultimate lingo for deep throws) by freshman Adam Baker gave the momentum, and ultimately the game, to Xavier.

The only downside to the weekend came in the loss to a deep, talented Kenyon team.

Kenyon used their speed, depth and field awareness to work Xavier’s previously stout zone defense.

Kenyon took a 14-4 lead but the Musketeers never quit.

They cut the lead to 14-9 in a display of heart and desire before the Kenyon speed proved to be too much.

Having won the third place game over Towson University, the young Xavier Ultimate team will travel again this weekend to Bowling Green, Ohio, where they hope to follow this weekend’s success with another good showing.

The writer is a member of Xavier’s club Ultimate team.

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The Spectator

Weekly Commentary On the World of Sports

John LaFollette
Sports Editor

After some much-needed R and R, the Spectator is back in the hallowed pages of the Newswire, returning to pontificate in peak form.

Fans of the fastest column in sports need look no further than this week’s installment for their fix.

Speed kills, but there’s a lot of ground to cover. Here we go.

We begin with some of the worst marketing work since Michael Vick’s commercials for Puppy Chow.

The Miami Dolphins and New York Giants, two of the least talented teams in football, took their snake oil show on the road and across the pond, to plan an American football game in Her Majesty’s England.

A crowd of 81,176 filled Wembley Stadium for an inter-continental snooze fest that would have lulled actual football fans to REM sleep, let alone the European uninitiated that the NFL is trying to court.

The NFL’s plan might work out in the end, though; the Spectator has been wrongly short-sighted before.

After all, Europeans have always been fans of low-scoring football games.

Dallas quarterback, and future former Mr. Carrie Underwood, Tony Romo has agreed with Cowboys management to a six-year contract worth $67.5 million.

That means that two of Drew Bledsoe’s former backups will combine to make over $40 million in the next three seasons.

If the Spectator was in Bledsoe’s shoes, and faced his career prospects, he would hold those salaries over Romo and faux-golden boy Tom Brady until they cut him an appropriately-valued check for “services rendered.”

The Spectator is beyond excited for the upcoming college basketball season.

No other sport can boast exciting matchups and contests of epic potential for an entire season.

No matter what pundits may say (with the rare exceptions of Pat Forde and the Spectator himself, because they’re careful), it’s nearly impossible to know which two teams will walk into a gym on a given night; this is the essence of competition.

With that truth in mind, the Spectator would like to remind his devoted readership of how idiotic and conference historo-centric preseason basketball rankings are.

Seasons are shaped weeks before a single game is even played.

The Spectator is thankful that this phenomenon isn’t as pronounced as it is in college football, where clumsily anointed “experts” set up camp in a team’s corner and spend the season shamelessly promoting their pick in the proud hope of helping to fulfill their own prophecies.

Players decide who’s best; that’s why they play the games.

The Spectator’s sporting mind rests on this bedrock principle, and thus has college basketball to thank for its clarity and well-being, especially as the college football season enters the weeks of most subjectivity.

College basketball beginning also means that another grueling 162-game-plus-playoffs season of Major League Baseball has come to a close.

It seems that while the Rockies were still playing on Mountain Time, their midnight Cinderella deadline was made on Boston’s Eastern Daylight Time.

Talk of any and all Red Sox curses must immediately cease, after Boston has won two of the last four World Series and coolly accrued one of the best records in baseball over the same time period.

For this reason, Terry Francona should be known as the manager of this century, having assembled a rag-tag pack of strays, turning it into a championship team, losing key players and winning another Series three years later.

It’s not like anyone noticed, though, what for the media bombardment of all things Yankees dating back to the end of the regular season.

A team that is loaded with talent and bows out of the playoffs in the first round is a good subject for a news story.

That that team subsequently loses one manager and hires another is not news, especially when other, better teams are still playing.

The historical legacy of the Yankees is overshadowing their present underperformance, at least in media coverage.

If Notre Dame’s football team had any talent, a comparison with the pinstripe phenomenon would be inevitable.

The Spectator is most certainly aware that such a gripe is essentially a beef with baseball’s labor agreement, namely in that it dastardly lacks a salary cap to the detriment of smaller markets, but that’s for another column. Selah!

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 Briefs

Doug Tifft  
Sports Editor

A-10s good to women’s cross country

The Xavier women’s cross country team finished third in the Atlantic 10 meet last Saturday in Philadelphia. The girls went in to the weekend seeded sixth in the conference, but outran higher rated opponents Charlotte, Duquesne and Saint Louis to claim third.

This marks the highest that the program has finished in recent years, after finishing a previous high of fourth last year.

The team was led by A-10 Rookie of the Year Christina Schneider who placed third overall with a time of 18:46. She was backed up by Caitlin Thomas, Amanda Brown, Bethany Moore and All-Conference performer Becky Clark.

The girls move on to NCAA meets next with the NCAA Regional on Nov. 10 in Bloomington, Ind.

Men’s golf takes seventh in N.C.

The Xavier men’s golf team finished seventh at the Landfall Invitational at the Country Club at Landfall in Wilmington, N.C.

The team was led by Senior Andy Connell who finished 14th at five over 221.

Sophomore Kieran Lovelock chipped in with a 10 over par 226, and junior Michael Beausejour added a 12 over 228.

Basketball tickets available Nov. 5

The Xavier men’s basketball team will open its 2007-08 season with an exhibition game against Georgetown College at 7 p.m. next Tuesday at Cintas Center.

Student tickets for both that game and the regular season opener against SE Missouri State at 7 p.m. on Nov. 10 will become available on Monday, Nov. 5 at 1:30 p.m. at the Event Ticket Office, located on the south side of Cintas Center.

Each student may pick up one ticket with his or her All-Card, and may also present one fellow student’s All-Card to pick up a ticket for that person.
Tickets will be distributed on a first-come, first served basis, with the best seats distributed first.