Kunal Talks the Best Basketball out There, the NBA Playoffs,The Dick
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Stickey Tongued Frogs advance to Nationals For the second consecutive year, the Women’s Ultimate Frisbee team made it to Nationals. This year, team Co-Captain Sarah Ervin ’11 has high hopes. “I’m really optimistic. I think we’re in an awesome position because we have improved exponentially as a team this year, both as individual players and how we work together as a team,” she said. Ervin emphasized the benefit of most team members remaining on the team for their entire time at Grinnell. “We have a very large and educated senior class which I think it definitely part of [our success],” Ervin said. “Also, we have grown so much as a team over these past four years and I think that has a lot to do with the [senior] class. And additionally, the juniors this year have just being so dedicated, and have spent so much time learning about the sport.” Paige Hill ’12 describes how much more goal oriented the team has become. “Originally, our goal for the season was to qualify for Regionals, so I think at this point we are all prepared to go [to Nationals], enjoy ourselves and play really competitively. We are not going to go say we must win Nationals. However, I think we have a really good shot at it. I wouldn’t be surprised if we won, but it’s not something we are basing our success off of right now,” Hill said. Basically, regardless of how well the team does at Nationals, they will be happy. “If we go and we play our best and we lose every game, we still achieved our goal and played our best while doing it,” Hill said. “I think that would have been a lot harder to say if we played our best and hadn’t made Regionals, because we made it a goal all season. I think in the back of our minds we are thinking we could win, because we’ve been training really hard.” Hill described how much these new goals have changed the team’s mentality, not only in improving their seed, but in creating a more successful approach to games. “We really started believing that we could go to a National Championship, and do good there. We started thinking of ourselves as a much more competitive team. I think a lot of it has to do with, when you think of yourself as a team that is losing but can win you start to approach things differently. You organize your practices differently, you approach tournaments with a different mentality,” Hill said. When describing how this season has compared to other seasons Ervin pointed out how much the team has committed to always improving. “I think one thing that been really noticeable about this season is the incredible amount of improvement we’ve had over the year,” Ervin said. “We have a lot of first years that don’t come from an athletic background, but who have worked so hard to figure out the general aspects of the game and have come to almost every tournament performing well.” There’s been more than just physical improvement this year. “Technically, we’ve also played way smarter this year. There are just more people on the team who know more about ultimate strategy than in any other year and this has made a huge difference. It has helped us really outsmart a lot of opponents this year,” Ervin said. Division III Ultimate Nationals will take place in Buffalo, New York during the weekend of May 20. Track and Field teams take second place at home The Grinnell Track team hung with the competition at the Dick Young Classic this past Saturday, April 29, as both the Men’s and Women’s teams took second place. David Garwood '13 starts strongly out of the blocks during the 400m dash on Saturday of the Dick Young Classic. Photograph taken by Andrew Kelley. Propelled by a slew of top three finishes on both teams, the men finished with 190 points and the women with 151 points. The men had five first-place finishes, including two by Sam Goldstein ’11, who won the triple jump with a skip, bound and leap of 41’-4½’’ and was a member of the 4×100-meter relay, which won in a time of 43.90 seconds. Goldstein was quick to downplay his triple jump success. “There [were] only five people in the triple jump,” Goldstein said. “But what is really important for me is I jumped better than the week before and so if I can jump better than I did the week before than I’m happy with how I did.” No one was downplaying their relay victory. They struggled both to win and even to get a full team. “For a while we didn’t have a person for our fourth leg. So, we did some trial runs at our last meet and Sam was the guy we decided,” said relay team member Scott Phillips ’11, who also placed third in the 100-meter sprint. That trial run, as Goldstein describes it, was more like a try-out on a very public stage. “At the Tim Duncan meet in Des Moines, [Coach Freeman] had me, Andy Hirakawa [’12] and Davis [Herman ’11], all entered in the 100 [meters] to fill out the last two sports, and everyone else scratched out of that heat, so it was just us three and I ended up getting first,” Goldstein said. Though a young quartet, Phillips has high hopes for the rest of the season. “I think we still have some things we could work on, but overall we’re close to being a good competitor come Conference,” Phillips said. Also on the men’s side, Noah DeLong ’11 won the 800-meteres in a time of 1:59.56, Gavin Warnock leaped 20’7.25” to victory in the long jump and Jake Lindstrom vaulted 12 feet seven and one half inches in the pole vault. DeLong recounted his victory. “I think I came through the first lap in 57 [seconds]…on the way around I think was I pretty tired,” he said. “My arms were pretty dead. I’m not sure what would have happened if there was someone to push me more, if I would have been faster or not, but I pushed it pretty hard through the end.” The women were led by Christine Ajinjeru ’14, who earned Midwest Conference Performer of the Week honors for her victory in the 400-meters with a time of 60.13 seconds and her role on the once-again school record-breaking 4×400-meter relay team of Elena Gartner ’14, Sarah Burnell ’14, Isabelle Miller ’13 and Ajinjeru, who took second with a time of 4:03.82. Coincidentally, the relay team has found their formation less than ideal. “There’s three of us that usually do the relay. There’s Isabelle, Sarah and [myself], so the entire outdoor season we’ve been trying to find a fourth person to start off the race and this time around the combination worked well,” Ajinjeru said. Gartner, the fourth piece, tells the tale of formation as though it were quite serendipitous. “It sort of happened as an accident. I hadn’t been on the relay to begin with, and I was just filling in for someone and the day that we did that we all had really good races and broke the record for the first time,” she said. The women hope to give the MWC’s top relay team, Monmouth, a good challenge at the Conference Meet. Also putting out an impressive day were Burnell, who won the 1500-meters (4:55.81) and took second in the 800 (2:23.48), Gartner, who placed third in the 800 with a time of (2:26.04), Leah Russell ’11, who took third in the 1500 in 5:04.89, Cassidy White ’14 who placed second in the 3000-meters (20:03.95) and Sachi Graber ’12, who pole vaulted to second in 9’-2 ¼” and was on the second place 4×100-meter relay team along with Emily Clennon ’14, Ajinjeru and Miller. For the rest of the season, Goldstein is confident. “I think that we’re progressing really well and I think we’re looking pretty good for Conference,” he said. This Saturday the squad will compete at the Kip Janvrin Invite in Indianola, IA. Kunal talks the best basketball out there, the NBA playoffs The NBA Playoffs are a spectacle to behold. The regular season is a grueling 82 games. It is well known that hardly any player is playing with maximum focus and intensity for every single one. Sure, the NBA is comprised of the best basketballers in the World, and star players like Derrick Rose are seemingly always playing at full-speed. However, even Rose had moments this season when his head was not fully in the game; for example, in a 107-78 loss to the Magic in early December, Rose had 15 points on 5-13 shooting from the field, four assists, no rebounds, no steals, three turnovers, and was a -24 for the Bulls when he was on the floor. He also went 3-6 from the charity stripe, which might be the statistic most revealing of the career 82 percent free throw shooter’s mindset. The Playoffs are a totally different animal. In the Playoffs, because the stakes are so high (“win or go home” is the NBA’s cliché of choice), every player is playing with maximum intensity all the time.