Tennis

USA Today’s Josh Peter reports that former women’s tennis head coach Todd Petty alleged mistreatment:

Now, nine former tennis players who competed on the team between 2014 and 2021, parents of two players and a former Texas Tech employee familiar with the allegations have talked to USA TODAY Sports about similar allegations of mistreatment by former head women’s coach Todd Petty. He resigned in June and denies the allegations.

Katelyn Jackson, who helped lead Texas Tech to four straight Sweet 16 appearances in the NCAA tournament from 2015 to 2018, said Petty violated the players’ personal space during outbursts.

“He would come running up in my face and say, ‘What the (expletive) are you doing? Are you (expletive) kidding me?’” Jackson said. “I remember one time he was so close to my face that I snapped back and I was like ‘I’m trying.’ And he was like ‘You’re not (expletive) trying.’ ”

There is a more extensive article from USA Today that details everything, but it is behind a paywall. There is reference in this article that Petty received a letter of reprimand in 2020 about how he allegedly treated players and committed NCAA violations. This comes on the heels of Lady Raider head basketball coach Marlene Stollings and head softball coach Adrian Gregory being relieved of their duties for alleged mistreatment of players.

I hate that this happens anywhere and especially at Texas Tech. I don’t have anything to say other than there’s a line between hard coaching and abuse. I am using the term “allegedly” because I don’t want to be pulled into anything other than relaying what others have reported. People often ask me if I consider myself a reporter and absolutely not. Reporters do real work, I’m definitely not doing real work and am definitely not a reporter. Blogger for sure, but reporter, no.

Big 12

Lubbock Avalanche-Journal’s Don Williams was able to spend 5 minutes with new Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark. There’s a lot there, but given yesterday’s news of the Big Ten finalizing their deals with CBS, FOX, and NBC, television rights are obviously a big deal:

Yormark: I don’t have a crystal ball for that. But if you’re asking where I would like to take the conference, where we would like the conference to go — listen, we want to be the most vibrant Big 12 that we can be. If that means expansion, geographically having a presence in the most important markets, that’s certainly going to play a major role in what we look like in five years. Certainly, when you think about the multimedia rights deal — and I’m very much focused on it — the ESPNs and the Foxes of the world are very important partners to us, giving us the broadest reach possible, especially when you think about being national and relevant.

Obviously, a digital partner makes sense because the young consumer today, you need to reach differently. But being with an ESPN and a Fox and a broad-based distributor is going to be very much part of our future and hopefully in five years from now, post our next TV negotiation, we will be with the biggest and best distributors in the business. We hopefully at that point in time will also have experienced some further expansion, which I think is critically important for us.

Football

Red Raider Sports’ Justin Apodaca summarizes the post-practice scrum with the two coordinators, Zach Kittley and Tim DeRuyter. Here’s a bit on DeRuyter, but there’s more there:

DeRuyter spoke a bit about his scheme, echoing the sentiment that the defense will have lots of looks and be relatively complicated to the regular college defense.

“What were going to do is base out of three and four down fronts, we’ll have the ability to bounce back and forth between the two with the same personnel,” DeRuyter said. “We’ll play multiple zones, multiple mans, sometimes we’ll rush five, six, seven, sometimes we’ll rush eight.”