Sept. 5, 2015
Cal 73, Grambling 14

Grambling brought "The World Famed Tiger Marching Band:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeBmMFzE86w

Buddy of mine is a baseball fanatic here in the Sacramento area. He used to umpire in both high school and Little League, now just Little League. He says the league basically lost two years of players in the pandemic. Trying to get that mini-generation back on the diamond has been difficult.

David Patrick's hiring at Sac now official:
https://www.hornetsports.com/sports/mbkb/2021-22/releases/20220405jc5awe

Sac Athletic department did Coach Laird wrong in the way it handled this, but he extended his thanks and best wishes to the school community: https://www.bigskyfans.com/hornets/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5571

Former head coach Katz chimed in: https://www.bigskyfans.com/hornets/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5572

Granite Bay may be a public school, but the neighborhood is pretty expensive.

He doesn't seem to stay in one place very long and has a prior relationship with Sac's current AD.

Hope Laird lands on his feet in a good spot.

Report: Sac State set to hire new men’s basketball coach
BY JOE DAVIDSON APRIL 02, 2022 10:45 AM
Sacramento State is closing in on hiring its next men’s basketball coach in Oklahoma Sooner associate head coach David Patrick, per multiple reports and first reported by national college basketball analyst Jeff Goodman of the website Stadium.
Sac State as of Saturday afternoon did not comment. This comes a week after false reports circulated nationally that one-time Kings star guard Mike Bibby had been formally interviewed for the Hornets opening with the next step being a campus visit.
Unlike Bibby, Patrick has a resume that makes his coaching hires over the years make sense. Raised in Australia before enjoying a standout senior season of high school basketball in Louisiana in 1995, Patrick was an assistant coach at a six colleges and the head coach at UC Riverside from 2018-20, where in his second season, the Highlanders went 17-15.
Patrick’s other stops as an assistant: Nicholls State (2005-06), Saint Mary’s of Moraga in the Bay Area (2006-10), LSU (2012-16), TCU (2016-18), Arkansas (2020-21) and Oklahoma.
From 2010-12, Patrick was a scout for the NBA’s Houston Rockets.
While at Saint Mary’s, Patrick worked with Mark Orr, then with the Gaels’ athletic department administration and now Sac State’s fifth-year athletic director, who told The Bee last week about this hiring process, “We have a search committee, and we’re working diligently to identify that coach, the right coach for us.” He added, “We’ll get it right.”
Sac State is coming off an 11-18 season in which the Hornets under interim coach Brandon Laird surged late and then went 1-1 in the Big Sky Conference Tournament. Laird for 10 seasons worked under Brian Katz, the winningest coach in program history who stepped down on the eve of the season due to health concerns.

https://www.sacbee.com/sports/college/article260049030.html

Posted April 1st, eh?

Aggie women defeated Sac, 5-0, in beach volleyball at the Big West Challenge hosted by Long Beach State. Unofficial running score of the unofficial 2021-22 Causeway Cup is UCD 37.5, CSUS 25. Next scheduled event is between the men's golf teams when they both compete at the El Macero Classic on April 20-22. Then on the 23rd (Picnic Day!!) both beach volleyball and women's tennis teams compete in Davis.

Tittle passed away in 2017, a few weeks short of his 91st birthday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y._A._Tittle
He was involved in some sort of summer camp for boys in the north bay area, possibly in the southern part of Sonoma County. My parents sent me there the summer after I was in 6th grade. That might have been the last year he had anything to do with the camp because it was about the time he was traded to the Giants. He was only at the camp on weekends. I met him the first weekend and out of the blue he looks at me and tells me he expects me to keep another camper from getting homesick. Week went by without any problems, and on the following weekend Tittle asks the kid something and for the first time the other kid ever got sad and weepy. Then Tittle rolls his eyes at me. I recall him standing on whatever passed for a football field at the camp and throwing footballs through tires suspended from goal posts that seemed like they were a mile away.

St. Mary's and Santa Clara used to pack Kezar for the Little Big Game.

No real surprise here as the women's golf team has finished in last place or next to last in most of the events they have entered this year. They finished in 15th place with a score of 924 at the Fresno State Classic. Sac finished with 893 strokes and tied for 7th.

As I noted in an ealier post, Davis is a very young team. Four of seven golfers are true freshmen. One is from Kyiv, Ukraine and according to her bio still competes for the Ukrainian national team, or did recently. The current situation there has to effect her mental game, but then how much of golf is mental?

The tournament was a good indicator of the Big West competition as seven of the nine conference teams competed in Fresno.

Unofficial running score for this year's faux-Causeway Cup is UCD 35, CSUS 25. Next event is a scheduled beach volleyball match at the Big West Challenge next weekend in Long Beach.

"Kezar stadium has fresher air."

It had fresh air during the "Summer of Love" and the Haight-Ashbury days.

It was a tough weekend to be an Iowa fan. Both basketball teams, coming off of Big 10 tournament titles, were upset. Creighton women shut down Iowa's talented guard. Wrestling team underperformed in the NCAA tournament. Softball team lost to top rated Oklahoma, 20-0, in a game called after five innings....

...but back to basketball, one of the stars for Creighton played for Iowa last year, then had a starring role in the upset in front of a sold out Iowa crowd.

Not sure UOP would have been a viable alternative even with a stadium. A couple of years ago (or more) at the height of one of our smokier periods my wife and I were traveling to Yosemite from Sacramento and the smoke was as bad, or worse, in Stockton as it had been in Sacramento.

UOP tore down their stadium. It was in pretty bad shape and refitting it would be too expensive, particularly if the school no longer had football.

The site now houses a tennis facility and soccer pitch. It was the home field for UOP's short lived field hockey team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagg_Memorial_Stadium

I recall Sochor saying that he was concerned about rumors that UCSB was going to move it's then D-3 football program to D-2. As he said, once a recruit visits Santa Barbara we'll never get him to Davis.

For their efforts Fullerton gets Duke in Coach K’s last tournament.

As usual, I learn a lot from your posts. After reading a comment you made on another post about Slack defeating "No. 6" Long Beach, as well as this thread, it is interesting to read the different rankings included in the Slack State post about their own national ranking. A week ago the Hornets were ranked at four different positions (20, 23, 24, 25) in four different polls. Not one of those polls had Long Beach as No. 6 in their "Previous" column. I think the highest anybody had the Dirtbags was #10. It's also worth noting that pre-season and early season polls don't mean much, and I bet a couple of years of a pandemic have not helped. Slack has gone 1-5 since they were ranked. Life's too short for me to search for updated rankings, but I doubt anyone has them in their top 25 now.

Somebody's thoughts on betting the Big West tournament. He thinks six teams have a chance of winning. Ags are not any of them.
https://sports.yahoo.com/ncaa-basketball-betting-big-west-has-six-teams-that-could-win-the-tournament-170004519.html

Great article and a nice reflection on UCD, but the life of an assistant coach or coordinator at the college or pro level is a tough one. They don't stay in any one place for very long.