Good morning. I am back. If you would like to see how things went this week while I was out, you can check out this X/Twitter thread. If you are interested, Yo’s team did win the championship, he scored 30 leading up to the championship game and 23 in the championship game. He was a tough one to stop this weekend. I’m going to just hit the highlights of what I’ve missed.
On the Diamond
the biggest news while I was out was that Texas Tech signed the National Player of the Year, NiJaree Canady in softball. Canady played at Stanford last year, was 24-7 with a 0.73 ERA and head coach Gerry Glasco said that she also wants to bat, which I’m absolutely fine with.
“NiJaree is obviously a tremendous softball player,” Glasco said. “But I came to realize, during the recruiting process, that she is an excellent student and an outstanding person with extremely high character. She is patient, kind and thorough, and everything that she did during this process reflected that. It is an honor and a privilege to be able to know that we will be sharing the same field and dugout in the coming years.”
On the Court
Texas Tech head coach Grant McCasland met with the media for about 10 minutes last week and as a short summary, McCasland talked about how good TJ Toppin has been, how Chance McMillian and Kerwin Walton are elite shooters, Christian Anderson has been really good, Eemeli Yalaho has made improvements, and Devan Cambridge is motivated.
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal’s Nathan Giese wrote about how TJ Toppin wound up at Texas Tech. I’ve mentioned before that his little brother played on the same AAU Team as Youssouf and his mom is great.
“I knew a few days after the combine I was coming to Tech,” Toppin said. “I wanted them to know so I didn’t have them guessing.”
After that, it was all about whether he’d be in college at all. The draft combine wrapped up on May 19 with Toppin projected somewhere in the second round or going undrafted. Nine days later, Toppin withdrew from the draft, publicly committed to Texas Tech and had his signing officially announced all in about a five-minute span.
“I think his focus really was how does he get in the NBA,” McCasland said, “and he was really close. I believed he was gonna be drafted. Now, where? I think him deciding to come back to school, he’s got an awesome family. He’s got a great high school coach. He’s got great people around him. His mom’s amazing. I just think they in the end felt like this was the best way for him to continue to grow, improve.”
On the Gridiron
Just wanted you to know that preseason camp starts on Wednesday.
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal’s Don Williams writes about the football captains, Behren Morton, Tahj Brooks, Caleb Rogers, Jacob Rodriguez, and Bryce Ramirez, and this offseason, they met face-to-face with the roster this offseason:
“It was kind of just like, ‘We can’t continue to do the same thing we’ve been doing,’ ” Rodriguez said. “We have to find something else we could do, and so I think going back to square one is kind of identifying who on the team needs to fit in what roles. And so meeting with players, going down the roster and talking about if we like this guy, if we don’t like this guy … I’m not talking about personally. I’m just talking about how they fit, what kind of roles they can improve on, where we want them to move to, or stay how they’re doing. We think they’re doing a great job.
“Stuff like that. How can we get better as a team? How can we jell better? How can we get guys who have similar backgrounds to mesh and bring guys along? Because everybody comes from a different walk of life.”
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal’s Don Williams writes about the possibility of a reduced roster, with Joey McGuire’s preference being 105 as the best number, thinking that 20 or so being freshmen and not at all ready to play, so that’s 85 or so as a roster of players that are ready. Remember there’s a lot of negotiating with NCAA vs. House case that’s set to happen.