Sports Editor:
Peter Hockaday
peteriiockaday@dailyemerald.com
Wednesday, May 14,2003
-Oregon Daily Emerald
Sports
Best bet “
NHL Playoffs:
Minnesota at Anaheim, Game 3
6 p.m., ESPN
UO’s savior?
Look no
further than
‘K.O. Kathy’
Oregon isn’t the first program Kathy
Arendsen has turned on its head, but it
might be her most dramatic revival.
Arendsen, Oregon’s first-year head soft
ball coach, turned a team that finished the
2002 season with a 2-19 Pacifie-10 Confer
ence record into a Pac-10 third-place fin
isher that earned a No. 3 seed in the 2003
NCAA Regionals and
won 10 conference
games.
Thats one more
Pac-10 win than the
team’s five seniors
earned during their
first three years on
the squad.
Arendsen has led
four different soft
ball programs, start
ing with Western
Connecticut in
1983, then Eastern
Illinois in 1990 and
1991.
Mindi
Rice
The girl
and the game
Her only losing season as a head coach
was Yale’s 12-26 campaign in 1992.
Arendsen spent three more years at Yale
before six years rebuilding Mississippi
State’s program.
Arendsen’s first team to make the NCAA
Regionals was the 2000 Mississippi State
squad. The 2001 and 2002 Bulldogs also
took Arendsen to the regional tournament.
Arendsen calls this Duck squad a
“team of destiny,” but it’s possible she
may be a coach of destiny for Oregon’s
struggling program.
“When we play together and confi
dently, we can beat anybody,” Arendsen
has said after multiple wins this season.
As a pitcher for 15 years, Arendsen beat
anybody who came up to bat—even base
ball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson—as she
struck out 4,038 batters in her career. She
struck out Jackson three times in an exhi
bition on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
And some wonder why they called her
“K.O. Kathy.”
Arendsen took a side trip to Michigan
on Monday, leaving on an early morning
flight, as she was inducted into the Michi
gan Hall of Fame along with former De
troit Lion Barry Sanders and five others.
She returned Tuesday on a second early
morning flight to meet her team and fly to
Fullerton, Calif., for the regionals.
Arendsen originally planned to fly east
Sunday, but changed her plans when the
team clinched a .500 record and a likely
trip to regionals.
Instead, she and the team hosted a
public selection-show gathering where
friends and family congregated for the re
gional announcements.
Arendsen talked all season about fan
support and how important it was for
Howe Field to be the softball equivalent
of McArthur Court or Autzen Stadium.
In the final homestand of the season,
two games were broadcast live on KSCR
while the band also made a softball debut.
For a program perennially at the bottom
of the Pac-10 pit, Oregon’s last homestand
— and ninth and 10th Pac-10 wins of the
season—was a big time event.
Arendsen wouldn’t have had it any
other way.
“This is going to set the stage for
teams to come,” Arendsen said after
Saturday’s final game.
Arendsen is very team focused in her
Turn to Rice, page 12
Beaver ball
The Oregon State baseball program has had
problems this season but is still going strong
Baseball in Oregon
Hank Hager
Sports Reporter
CORVALLIS — The baseball gods were smiling on the
uregon otate Beavers.
After watching the rain come
in buckets during the weekend,
the Arizona State and Oregon
State baseball teams got lucky
Monday. The sun shone bright
and beautiful at Goss Stadium at
Coleman Field.
It has been that kind of a sea
son for head coach Pat Casey
and the Beavers. A season or high expectations but a year
that has brought, among other things, enough rain to last for a
decade, in baseball years.
Oregon State is 21-24 overall, but the Beavers are 5-13 in
Pac-10 play, tied for last in the nine-team conference before
Monday’s game.
Ignoring the records, the Beavers are on solid ground.
Oregon State is one of the few four-year baseball programs in
the state of Oregon and is the showcase of the Beaver state.
“You take pride in that,” Casey said. “I think we should feel
like that, and we should represent our state. Anybody that plays
big college baseball should. It’s a situation where we feel that
we are the only Pac-10 team in the state, and we should be the
marquee program. ”
The marquee program has seen its share of problems this sea
son, highlighted by poor weather in Corvallis. With heavy rain
drenching the area into early May, crowds have been sparse.
The biggest crowd of the season was 1,077 when USC visited
on April 27. In years past, that number would have ballooned to at
least 1,700 a few times a season in the 2,000-seat ballpark. Mon
day, 1,206 entered the turnstiles at Goss, only the second time
this season more than 1,000 have watched a game in Corvallis.
Yet, support for the program has not waned.
“Our institution does a great job for us,” Casey said. “I’ve
got nothing but good things to say about that. It’s like any
thing else; the more you win, the more they show up.
“We’ve got a great ballpark and great fans. ”
“It’s a good program,” former Beaver player Pat Stevens said.
Turn to Beavers, page 10
Part 1 of 2
Today: Baseball
at Oregon State
Thursday:
Baseball at Oregon,
past and future
Adam Amato Emerald
Ryan Flaherty said "this is the year" the Ducks will win the Pac-10.
Barry Schwartz Oregon State athletic department
Jake Postlewait, one of three Corvallis natives on the Beaver squad, is 3-0 this season.
Pac-10 looks tough
as L.A. finale looms
The Ducks sit fourth in the
conference race, right where
they did last year, as the
Championships near
Men’s track and field
Peter Hockaday
Sports Editor
It’s that time of year again.
Nope, it’s not time to break out the
shorts. Not time to eat ice cream. Not
time for daisies to pop up across campus.
It’s time for Revenge of the
Track Nerds.
The next few weeks mark the postsea
son for NCAA track and field. One of the
oldest practices in college track is what’s
called “scoring,” which essentially in
volves taking everybody’s best marks
from the season and asking “If the meet
happened exactly according to the sea
son’s best marks, who would win?” With
the Pacific-10 Conference Champi
onships coming up this weekend, it’s
time to score the Pac-10 meet.
It’s an inexact science, to be sure, be
cause athletes never perform to either
, their absolute best or absolute worst.(
Last season, we here at the Emerald
scored the meet and came up with a top
four of UCLA, Stanford, Arizona State
and Oregon, in that order. The actual
meet ended up going Stanford-Oregon
USC-Arizona State.
But the idea remains valid. By taking
everybody’s scores so far this season, we
can get an idea of which teams will con
tend and which teams will pretend this
weekend.
With the meet all scored out, Stanford
looks like it will dominate the distances
again and could dominate the meet. The
Cardinal score 164 points, while USC
uses seven individual event leaders to fin
ish second with 149 points. UCLA is
third with 135 points, and Oregon is
close behind with 124, The nearest team
to the top four, Arizona State, scores only
72 points.
The Ducks are confident they’ll break
the form like they did last year.
“Jason Hartmann and them are going to
break (Stanford) up,” middle-distance run
ner Ryan Flaherty said. “All the distance
runners, they can do it. In the 1,500, I
know UWsgoing to break ‘em up.
“The mentality of the team is to go
down there and do the best we can and
take this thing this year. This is the year
it’s going to happen.”
Turn to Track, page 12