A few assorted sports notes.

Last weekend was a big weekend for people around me who suddenly become big fans of sports they don’t usually follow. For us Jayhawks, our women’s track team won the national championship, the first-ever national title for a women’s team from KU. A big part of their championship was Lindsay Vollmer’s solo national title in the heptathlon, another KU first.

Locally, IU advanced to their first-ever College World Series by going to Tallahassee and winning two straight games over host Florida State.

I was following the track action pretty closely all three days of the meet, including using a couple sites that projected points for future events so you could plot out how the team competition might shake out as events went final. Saturday I had ESPNU on to watch the action live.1 Which made this pretty much the first time I paid attention to track and field since last summer’s Olympics and likely until the next summer games.2 I’m sure there were plenty of Hoosier alums and fans around here that never pay attention to college baseball but were suddenly doing so with great zeal last weekend, too.

Go ahead, mock me for my sudden interest in college track and field. I’ve certainly made fun of friends who, for example, spent most of a visit to Indianapolis trying to follow the NCAA golf championships from afar.3 But, as David Puddy said, you gotta support your team.

Rock Chalk, bitches!

A girl I covered this season won the state singles tennis championship last weekend. I didn’t cover the finals, but still followed her match online as well. It’s pretty cool to see kids I’ve watched all season do great things when the state tournament rolls around.

I wish I could say I’ve paid close attention to the NBA Finals. I have not, though. Thus I’m a little surprised to see that San Antonio blew out the Heat last night and now own a 2-1 lead in the series. How the eff is that collection of old men containing the Fighting LeBrons? I suppose that means LeBron is getting no help at all and with the Spurs able to key on him, he can’t get loose either. Cue the columns about how he’s overrated, will never be as good as Kobe or Jordan, and how the Big Three experiment is a complete failure.

Another random event I followed last week was the epic semifinal in the French Open between Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. I don’t watch nearly as much tennis as I once did, but it seems like when I do some combination of Nadal, Djokovic, and Roger Federer are offering up a match that you have to drop everything you’re doing to watch. I missed Serena Williams’ amazing run to her title, which I need to do better about. We signed the girls up for tennis lessons that begin in two weeks, so Wimbledon seems like a good excuse to sit around the TV for hours together each morning.

I don’t pay attention to the Royals for three weeks and when I turn on a game last night, their six-game winning streak ends. Seems about right. Someone wake me when Hosmer and Moustakas have a decent week.4

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  1. Which was an interesting exercise in creating drama that wasn’t there. If you had Twitter up, or were following one of several newspaper sites that had live scoring, you knew that KU clinched the team title around 5:50 EDT. But ESPNU had over an hour of action to still cover, so kept suggesting that Oregon, LSU, and Texas A&M still had a chance to win. Like I said, interesting. ↩
  2. Well, I did follow the NCAA Indoor meet a couple months ago, where KU finished second. But I didn’t do so nearly closely. ↩
  3. What up, Billy?!?! Worth noting it’s much easier to follow lower profile events now than it was five or six years ago thanks to Twitter. ↩
  4. Hosmer’s recent tick up doesn’t count. Still no power. ↩