Sports Briefs Men’s basketball The Lobos received a commitment from Nikola Scekic for the 2015 recruiting class last week. Scekic, who is originally from Serbia, is a 7-foot, 245-pound center and will join UNM after playing at MMG Academy in Florida.
The ‘i’s have been dotted and the ‘t’s crossed for months now, but the paperwork has finally become official on head coach Yvonne Sanchez’s four-year contract extension through May of 2019. The deal, signed by Sanchez and UNM Athletics Director Paul Krebs back in April, will net the New Mexico women’s basketball coach an annual salary of more than $266,000 for each of the four years. “It’s been done for a couple of months now,” Sanchez said. “It definitely feels good to be here longer.”
Erica Perkins Jasper is leaving New Mexico women’s tennis on top. After leading the Lobos to their first Mountain West crown in April, Perkins Jasper has announced her decision to step down as head coach and become the new chief operating officer of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association. Perkins Jasper turned the women’s tennis program around quickly. Between the three seasons before Perkins Jasper became head coach, the team won just 17 matches. During Perkins Jasper’s three-year tenure the Lobos went 40-33 and won their first ever Mountain West title.
The flow of the game has always seemed to be an issue in college basketball, and the NCAA has taken some steps to rectify that. In an attempt to fix the pacing of the game, the NCAA approved a change from two 20-minute halves to four 10-minute quarters starting this upcoming season for the women. “They’ve been debating them for a couple of years now, so I knew something was going to change,” UNM head coach Yvonne Sanchez said. “I really like it. It gets us more toward more global basketball. In FIBA rules (for international play), it’s four quarters.”
ollowing the MLB draft, New Mexico will head into the offseason looking to fill some major holes in their lineup and on their coaching staff. UNM’s junior starting pitcher Toller Boardman and junior infielder Sam Haggerty will test their luck in the professional baseball realm, forgoing each of their senior seasons as Lobos. Boardman was selected in the 22nd round (670th overall) by the Detroit Tigers, while Haggerty was selected by the Cleveland Indians as a 24th rounder (724th overall). Head coach Ray Birmingham was unavailable for comment, but he said in a statement that the program he runs at UNM sets out to get student-athletes into the major leagues.
New Mexico sent four athletes to the NCAA Championships in Eugene, Oregon this past weekend, all of whom reached the All-American plateau for the first time in school history. Senior pole vaulter Logan Pflibsen set the bar high for UNM’s track and field program after tying for a sixth-place finish in his final collegiate meet. Pflibsen’s personal-best 17 feet, 18 ½ inches breached the top eight spots of the 24 athletes. Pflibsen is only the third pole vaulter in school history to finish as an All-American.
Not long ago, the idea of a gay athlete was foreign to many. Yes, there had been athletes who ‘came out’ after their playing days were over, but their stories were relegated to the back pages of the newspapers, or not talked about at all. That long-held stance has since fallen to the wayside with Jason Collins and Michael Sam breaking barriers by coming out as gay during their careers. Collins became the first openly gay active NBA player when he took to the court for the Brooklyn Nets in 2014. Sam was the first openly gay player to be chosen in the NFL draft when St. Louis selected him with the 294th pick just last year.
All 21 New Mexico athletics programs hit the required mark of 930 in the NCAA Academic Progress Report. APR is designed to penalize teams that are not meeting the required academic standards set by the NCAA. None of UNM’s teams are in danger of receiving a penalty. Four UNM athletics programs had four-year scores of a perfect 1,000: women’s tennis, men’s tennis, women’s cross country and women’s golf. Last week, all of those programs were recognized by the NCAA for being in the top 10 percent of a particular sport in APR.
A string of injuries derailed New Mexico’s chances of winning another Mountain West baseball championship. Over the course of the season, the Lobos saw six of their nine starting players miss time due to injuries. The pitching staff wasn’t immune to the injury bug either, as UNM lost two starters — sophomore Conner Rusch and senior Colton Thomson — during the year. The Lobos were able to endure the losses, but finished in fourth place in the Mountain West at the end of the regular season. UNM’s finish is its lowest since the 2011 season, when it placed sixth.
Sports Briefs Track and Field New Mexico will send four athletes to the NCAA Championships after they qualified for the meet at the 2015 NCAA West Preliminary in Austin, Texas this past weekend. Peter Callahan, Logan Pflibsen, Callie Thackery and Alice Wright will represent the Lobos at the NCAA Championships in Eugene, Oregon this month.
The UNM men’s soccer team debuted a new player this spring, and his name is Yuri Domiciano. Domiciano, a 6-foot defender from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, is one of the six members of the 2015 recruiting class announced by the UNM men’s soccer program earlier this year. He arrived to the United States in 2012 and spent two years at Iowa Western, a junior college. In 2014 he was named a Junior College All-American and helped his team advance to the national semifinals by holding opponents to just .45 goals per game.
Former New Mexico guard Hugh Greenwood will represent Australia in the 2015 World University Games in South Korea this summer, the Australian team announced Wednesday. The Boomers are in Pool C with Lithuania, Finland, Japan, France and Chinese Taipei, and will begin play on July 3.
New Mexico’s streak of Mountain West championships came to an end Sunday. The Lobos had won either the MW regular season or tournament title the past four seasons, but that run ended with a 6-4 loss to San Diego State in the title game of the MW tournament in Reno, Nevada. UNM, which finished fourth in the regular season, lost a chance to win the MW tournament title when the Lobos were blown out by the second-seeded Aztecs 11-1. SDSU has now won the last three MW tourney championships.
An epic collapse changed the entire season for the New Mexico men’s golf team. In March, the Lobos blew a 12-stroke lead in the final round of the San Diego Classic and finished in third place. After the tournament, UNM had a team meeting and decided to change its approach.
The New Mexico women’s tennis team did not need to wait to see if it would make the NCAA tournament after taking the Mountain West Championships in a 4-1 victory over Nevada on Sunday. The Lobos will be taking on LSU after the team won their first ever Mountain West tournament title.
Garnering close wins is something New Mexico has attributed to being a young ball club. UNM is just 7-13 in games decided by two runs or less. Head coach Ray Birmingham said losing in close contests is not something that can be credited to a single problem.
When the Mountain West Men’s Tennis Championship comes around, Boise State plays at a different level. Despite winning the regular-season title, New Mexico faltered against the Broncos 4-1 on Saturday afternoon in the conference tourney semifinals. Boise State went on to win the Mountain West title with a 4-3 victory over Nevada on Sunday. The Broncos have now won the Mountain West tournament for four straight seasons. “We knew the danger; we know how good Boise is,” Lobo head coach Bart Scott said on Saturday. “We know they turn it on in the conference tournament and we were prepared for it. We just didn’t play our best, and Boise had something to do with that.”
Sports Briefs Baseball Close losses have haunted the UNM baseball team this season, and this past weekend was no different. The Lobos were swept by Wichita State and two of those losses were by just one-run.
New Mexico volleyball has its sights on the NCAA tournament this season. After releasing the 2015 schedule on Friday, head coach Jeff Nelson said he devised the schedule with the vision of a playoff run, without needing to win the conference. “It’s always the goal to win the conference,” Nelson said. “But scheduling like this, it gives us an opportunity to get a second or third (place) team into the postseason, if we can do well.”
The UNM women’s tennis team made school history on Sunday by winning its first Mountain West Championship. The Lobos claimed the 2015 title tournament after defeating the Wyoming Cowgirls, though the road to the top was far from smooth. The team had to overcome poor weather conditions, match delays and a few trips to the doctor. But those obstacles were not enough to stop them.
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