The team with the coolest nickname in college sports hoops it up during the annual Division III basketball tournament in Las Vegas.
Basketball
With point guard Nikki Wheatley watching in a knee brace, UNLV fails to penetrate Colorado State’s zone defense and loses its Mountain West women’s basketball opener at Cox Pavilion.
Once proud basketball programs at DePaul and UNLV, on display in crosstown games in Las Vegas, have fallen from college basketball grace with a thud.
C.J. Watson, former Bishop Gorman and Tennessee star, gets up early to give basketball tips to youngsters at Doolittle Community Center.
Tennessee women’s basketball coaching legend Pat Summitt, who died Tuesday from Alzheimer’s disease at age 64, visited Las Vegas to support her son in 2013.
Shane Christensen played high school basketball for Bishop Gorman, and college basketball for Montana. More recently, he has been spinning the basketball on his finger, nose, face and head for the world famous Harlem Globetrotters.
When word got out that Chris Beard was going to be the new UNLV basketball coach, a 45-year-old man from Las Vegas named Che’ Jones wrote a letter and attached a resume about his dream. He wants only to be an assistant basketball coach at UNLV.
They made Chris Beard sit there for more than two hours while they discussed whether he was worthy of making $900,000 next season for drawing up X’s and O’s on his now famous dry eraser board, and $1.4 million a couple of seasons down the road, provided he is as successful here as he was at Arkansas-Little Rock last season.
Musiette McKinney from The Center for Academic Enrichment and Outreach heard that Chris Beard, the Arkansas-Little Rock basketball coach, was in town to interview for the UNLV job that Cincinnati’s Mick Cronin didn’t want and she was so excited.
One of the first reports out of Cincinnati said little Sammi, the 9-year-old daughter of Mick Cronin, weighed heavily in his decision to stay at the school. Of course she did, and you would think UNLV would have realized this before putting all eggs in Cronin’s basket.
The Mountain West was granted an automatic tournament bid in 2001. That meant to keep a tidy 64-team bracket, one of the small-fry conferences had to lose their automatic in, or one of the at-large bids would have to be sacrificed, which would mean that somebody such as Michigan or Syracuse might have to play in the NIT.
If those who would crack wise at the Vegas 16’s expense will do the math, they will discover Las Vegas’ inaugural postseason college basketball tournament for teams with directions and ampersands in their name has the highest average power rating of the three non-NCAA supported tournaments.
Now, San Diego State will be relegated to watching on TV when the NCAA Tournament brackets are announced Sunday. Steve Fisher, the venerable Aztecs coach, didn’t sound too optimistic the Selection Show would end well for his guys. The team definitely is on the bubble.
Chicago State’s record fell to 4 wins, 28 losses, which sounds dire, until you learn Chicago State has declared “a university-wide state of financial exigency.” What this essentially means: Chicago State is broke.
The Vegas 16 is the latest edition to the roster of college basketball postseason tournaments. You have the Big Dance, which is the NCAA Tournament. You have the NIT, the CBI, the CIT, the Vegas 16. These are Little Dances, lovely parting gifts, the home game of “Concentration.”
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