April 2013
4 posts
Herbster discusses his promotion
David Herbster is now the permanent athletic director at USD. He can have the job as long as they want to have him, or he wants to have them.
His hiring confirms he did his job well enough during the interim period in President Jim Abbott’s opinion to be promoted. The audition isn’t over, of course. It’s just beginning.
His predecessor’s two-and-a-half year tenure at USD was marked by the...
Coyote men to announce two additions
Today was the late national signing day for basketball and the Coyotes have been busy in pursuit of players over the last few months. The program will likely announce those signings at the end of the week. A while back, I retweeted what looked to be a commitment to USD from Rashawn Thomas, a 6-7 high school player in Oklahoma. Though Thomas was recruited by the Coyotes and visited Vermillion, his...
Coach Morris talks about Pomlee...
Jim Morris, longtime basketball coach at Iowa Western, has seen quite a few really good basketball players go through his program. Some of them have ended up at USD, including men’s assistant coach Joey James.
Last week, Tavian Pomlee, a 6-5, 206-pound forward, verbally committed to the Coyotes and will sign next week. Pomlee follows Charlie Westbrook, who played two years for the Coyotes...
Sioux Falls USD football scrimmage
The rain and wind did not make for a real productive morning for USD football team during a scrimmage at the USF complex on Saturday, but you were able to pick up on a few things.
Josh Vander Maten will have a No. 7 on his jersey this year, rather than a 14. That’s one thing I picked up on, being the astute football mind that I am. Several other players, most of whom were redshirted last year,...
March 2013
7 posts
Coyotes getting a pair from Oklahoma
The Twitter accounts of a pair of highly regarded Oklahoma high school basketball players reveal that the Coyotes will be making at least two additions to next year’s roster on the late signing date.
Rico Thompson is a 6-2 or 6-3 point guard from Stillwater, Okla., who I’d expect will get in there right away next season…..you can read about him here and here and here and watch...
More from today's SDSU and South Carolina press...
Items of interest regarding the South Dakota State – South Carolina game.
Though the Colorado Buffaloes play in the Coors Events Center, it’s the Russell “Sox” Walseth Court. Walseth coached at SDSU in 1956 and 1957. Aaron Johnston was asked about it at the press conference with the question posed as whether the potential was there for the Jacks to pick up on some “mojo”.
“I don’t know, I...
Coyotes win this time
A few months after collapsing in historic proportions in Logan, Utah., the Coyote women fought through miserably concentrated offensive woes and defeated Utah State on the road on Thursday night to reverse an earlier one-point regular season loss to the Aggies.
Utah State was the second-best team in the WAC this year with a 14-4 record. I submit this as evidence that Utah State got better as...
Summit finals
It was a funny moment on Monday when USD women’s coach Amy Williams was describing watching the Jackrabbits play in the NCAA tournament last year. Williams was the coach at Rogers State and her sister, Emilee Thiesse, was an assistant coach for Aaron Johnston at SDSU.
“When they’d hit a 3 to put it into overtime I was just beside myself,” Williams said. “And now here...
Bison apprisin'
The NDSU team that the USD women will play on Sunday afternoon has been a very difficult matchup for the third-seeded Coyotes for three of the four halves of basketball they’ve played against each other this season.
In the second half of the first game up in Fargo, the Coyotes overcame a halftime deficit by outscoring the Bison 42-15 in the second half on the way to an easy win. The game...
Leathernecks next up -- again
Another close loss to Western Illinois is not anything new for the USD men’s basketball team. The squads had two two-point games this year with the Leathernecks winning both and the second game between the two teams last year was also a two-point USD loss.
All three of those games were tough to deal with – the close losses the last two years keep piling up – but it would also seem to confirm this...
Coyote seeding
The women’s basketball team finished the regular season with a 10-6 record in Amy Williams’ first year as head coach. They went into the season picked to finish sixth, so by that measure the Coyotes overachieved. Regardless of what happens in the tournament, the Williams II era has gotten off to a promising start by earning the third seed. They know their first game will take place at 2:30 p.m....
February 2013
7 posts
Additional recruits...
USD announced the signing of junior college linebacker Auston Johnson on Thursday. Johnson, 6-1, 237, was a three-star recruit who, according to Rivals.com, had been offered by several major colleges including Texas A&M and BYU.
“He’s a very good player,” USD coach Joe Glenn said Thursday. “He just finished his AA degree, which he had to complete before he got a...
More on track
I wasn’t able to include as many comments from the winning coach in Tuesday’s story about the Summit League indoor track meet as I would have wished, but I will relay along a little more of my conversation with USD coach Dave Gottsleben today….
In my time covering the men’s and women’s programs I’ve always been impressed with the quiet way he’s gone...
Football awards
The sports info department at USD released the football team award winners today:
Will Powell was the MVP with 55 catches for 625 yards. Marcus Sims was the Dave Triplett offensive MVP and Tyler Starr was the Joe Salem defensive MVP.
Punter Cole Zwiefelhofer the special teams MVP and linebacker Keyen Lague was the freshman MVP. Jordan Eaton was the defensive lineman of the year and linebacker...
Last Dome game
The USD men’s basketball team played its last home game on Saturday with the contest ending up being another in a series with frustrating outcomes. The Coyotes were 4-4 in the Summit League after winning on the road at Oakland on Jan. 19. Included among the four conference losses were a last-second 73-71 defeat against Western Illinois at the DakotaDome, a 90-86 loss to Kansas City and a...
At practice...
The University of South Dakota men’s basketball team was beginning its preparations for tonight’s game at the Dome against Oakland on Tuesday night. I was down there getting interviews in the afternoon and decided to hang out for a while along press row and watch the team practice.
This is the sort of thing that keeps sportswriters sharp for game days—we try to recreate game...
BracketBuster....
The Coyote men will play Montana State (7-5, 10-10) in Bozeman on Sunday, Feb. 24 at 1 p.m. It’s the first meeting of the schools since 1946.
USD (4-7, 8-15) will face an MSU team that is tied for second in the Big Sky with Southern Utah. Former NCC and Great West rival North Dakota is 6-6 and defeated Montana State 86-73 in Grand Forks this year.
Of note, the Bobcats have an eight-day...
Recruits
Here’s what I got on football recruits…a few more I expect will be revealed Wednesday:
Quarterback/TE…Aaron Ramsey, 6-3, 215, BlueValley Southwest High School, Overland Park, Kans.
http://espn.go.com/college-sports/football/recruiting/player/news/_/id/151896/aaron-ramsey
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=8023444
Khorey Kilgore, 5-10, 195, RB, Blue Springs South High School, Blue...
January 2013
4 posts
Summit League road win....
The USD men were overwhelmed a year ago in their first trip to Oakland, losing 101-83. It was the first Summit League weekend in program history and a hint of what was to come during a 5-13 conference effort. A season later, it was a different story.
Two nights after losing yet another tight league game at Fort Wayne (62-60), the Coyotes trailed Oakland 30-16 with 9:40 to play in the first half...
After last night
It was obvious that USD women’s coach Amy Williams was feeling good about what she’d witnessed on Thursday night in an 82-51 beating of IPFW.
Against a five-guard team that had the potential to present match-up issues, they were able to assert their own advantages rather than the other way around.
“It was a long bus ride home from Kansas City, it was a long Sunday, it’s...
The audio of the UMKC — aka Kansas City ...
After last night...
Most heartening for the Coyote women’s team, in a 72-60 loss to SDSU, was hanging in there on the rebounds. I know that statistically this was to be expected given the Coyotes’ numbers this year, but it’s been a Jackrabbit advantage in these matchups going back to the end of the NCC days.
I was very interested in Aaron Johnston’s take on this new Amy Williams version of...
December 2012
6 posts
And now...
The Coyote men essentially closed up the non-conference portion of the schedule — Wait! There’s that Brisket Buster game yet! — with a 70-50 loss to Kansas State on Monday afternoon in Manhattan, Kan.
The Coyotes are now 6-9 with NDSU and SDSU coming to town next week on Thursday (NDSU) and Saturday (SDSU, 4 p.m.).
Two years ago the Coyotes faced Kansas State and lost 91-69....
After last night...
The Coyote men went small for the most part to post an 85-75 win over Morehead State at the DakotaDome on Wednesday night. They had the luxury of sticking with their plan because everyone stayed out of foul trouble.
A lot of nights — and I’m speaking of just about every college basketball team here — foul trouble can scuttle a game plan a team has been working on for two or...
David, we hardly knew ye....
It was a definitely a shocker around here Thursday afternoon when USD athletic director David Sayler, suddenly, was announced as the new AD at Miami of Ohio. In hindsight, though, it probably shouldn’t have been.
In my opinion there was something near a 90 percent chance he was going to move on to another school in the next two years. Nothing in Sayler’s resume up to this point would...
Colin Mertlik
The Coyote football recruiting season got good news this weekend with a verbal commitment from Colin Mertlik, a 6-2, 205-pound athlete from Blair, Neb.
Mertlik was drawing some interest from bowl-eligible programs but got an early offer from USD and ultimately decided on the Coyotes. He was recently named to the All-Omaha Area team at linebacker.
I’d guess that’s where he’ll...
Ball State....
The Coyotes will get a load of Ball State in the coming days with a game on Saturday in Indiana and another next week at the DakotaDome. The Cardinals (3-4) lost three starters from last year’s 15-15 (6-10 in the MAC) squad. They got a taste of No. 1 Indiana earlier this season, losing 101-53. They also lost to Butler, Indiana State and Cleveland State.
Leading scorer is Majok Majok, a 6-9,...
After last night....
On press row on Saturday night we learned that Rick Majerus had died. I knew from talking to Coach Dave Boots over the years that he’d had a long and steady rapport with the fallen coach, who’d been seriously ill for sometime. In hindsight, I felt a little guilty shoving a recorder in Boots’ face about it minutes after the IUPUI win — he wasn’t aware, prior to me...
November 2012
8 posts
After last night...
I can’t remember any stretch of covering Coyote sports where I’ve dealt with such a long string of games in all sports that end so much of the time with USD participants having to deal with painful circumstances.
You can add last night’s 73-71 men’s basketball loss to the list. I would say, however stupid this might sound, that the details involved in the loss to Western Illinois were much more...
Summit start
The Coyote men’s basketball team begins Summit League play Thursday night against the Western Illinois Leathernecks. The Coyotes (3-3) are coming off a pair of wins over lower-level teams at the DakotaDome and will enter the contest with three wins in their last four games.
It’s a very quick start to the conference season, especially for a team that has four new starters, three of...
USD football...
As would often be the case when you lose your last nine games of the season, the failures of the University of South Dakota football team were not concentrated in one particular area. I’ve been asked a few times recently about where the team will be looking to shore up the squad via recruiting this offseason and the answer is always going to be: 1. They need a little of everything, and 2. There’s...
First game
The Coyotes hung in there against Southern University on Wednesday in their opening game after falling behind by double-digits. Southern lost by 10 to Nebraska earlier in the week. The Cornhuskers were picked to finish 10th in the Big 10, but the fact that Southern had a few games in prior to playing USD probably worked in their favor against the Coyotes.
USD got a big game for Trevor Gruis with...
VB signees
We didn’t get it into the newspaper on Wednesday but the USD volleyball team announced the signing of two players on Wednesday….Haley Walker is a 5-10 middle blocker at Lakeville North High School, the same place Tyler Flack from the basketball team went to school. It’s a volleyball power in Minnesota, with two state titles in the last three years.
“Haley has a great vertical and will add a lot of...
Women's basketball
Looking at the box score, Amy Williams’ first win at USD involved some of the same grit that marked the effort of last year’s team, though it was executed without a lot of last year’s players. That’s a good sign for a team that appears like it may be struggling at the offensive end occasionally.
Early in the season, I’m always curious about how the minutes are...
Volleyball has a shot
The Coyotes will attempt to continue their radical volleyball turnaround today in Omaha with a shot at finishing 8-8 in the conference after being 3-8 at one point this season.
There is also an outside chance of getting into the Summit League postseason tournament.
With help of an interpretation from USD SID Jarrod Tell, if the Coyotes defeat Omaha today and Western Illinois defeats Oakland, USD...
Youngstown State
The football losing streak reached seven games on Saturday with the Coyotes returning to the “close loss” scenario after departing from the script against NDSU and Indiana State. USD has now lost four of its six Missouri Valley Conference games by a touchdown or less.
When I think of how the Coyotes have attempted to weather the challenges of a new conference I think back to the old NCC basketball...
October 2012
10 posts
Game day
Looking like a pretty nice windy fall day here in Terre Haute, Ind., where USD will play Indiana State at 1 p.m. central time. The game is on ESPN3.
For the Coyotes to have a shot today against the Shakir Bell-led Sycamores they’re going to have play a cleaner game than the team they’re playing. Sounds like pretty basic stuff, but not really.
Somehow the 2012 season has became an...
Anonymous asked: Have you heard if there is a chance that the Bison might get snowed in at the border!! we need all the help we can get! Seriously, the yotes might surprise a few folks this weekend. Any predictions?
Anonymous asked: Mick Garry, Did you work in Crookston at one time...I believe so. Just checkingin from Crookston. MaryAnnSimmons
Men's practice begins
Basketball practice began this week at USD. The Coyotes got a jump start on that this year with the 10 practices permitted in preparation for their trip to Winnipeg. Rule changes also gave coaches a chance to work with the team once a week this fall.
That’s good because the Coyotes have six new players and will be trying to replace 40 percent of their points this year with the...
Practice visit
There was a noted attempt by coaches to be positive on Tuesday afternoon outside at the University of South Dakota football practice field. I had a few questions for Coach Joe Glenn about the upcoming game, but what I was really curious about was how a football coach goes about deciding how to approach a week like this, where the team is coming off a difficult loss — which followed two...
Missouri State Game Day
A view of Plaster Field from press row. It’s cloudy here but it’s hinting at being a pretty nice afternoon. Temps in the mid-70s and a little breezy. You’ll note the big building beyond the corner of the end zone. It is where Harry S. Truman was both conceived and born.
The game here represents a pivotal juncture in the Coyote season. It’s a tough spot for this reason:...
Missouri State
This is a first-time meeting between Missouri State and USD. The Coyotes will get a break from the big backs who have given them trouble against the Bears, who hand it off to Ryan Heaston, a 174-pound freshman who doesn’t start but leads the team with 81 carries for 415 yards. He had 148 yards against SDSU so he must be pretty decent.
Missouri State has lost to Kansas State and Louisville,...
Murtha, recruiting...
Starting offensive tackle Marc Murtha will go in for surgery on a meniscus issue a week from Thursday and they’ll also look at his ACL at that time. If it’s torn – they’re not completely sure on that yet – he’s in for an extended recovery period. At any rate, he’s not going to be back in the lineup any time soon. As he told me on Tuesday “I’m hoping between now and next week somebody invents a way...
Leatherneck Week
I asked Joe Glenn on Tuesday morning to compare the team he has to the team he thought he had a month ago. Essentially I just wanted to know if his impressions of his squad had changed since the season started.
This is what he said:
“There are some things that I’ve taken for granted — maybe we should never take anything for granted — but we’ve had some penalties...
Aspiring sportswriter Josh Bern
Last Saturday I had a helper in covering the USD-Illinois State game named Josh Bern. Josh, who is 9, is an intense sports card collector, a fan of every Minnesota team you can think of, and a really nice, smart kid. He’s also a brain tumor survivor who has endured several lifetimes’ worth of medical attention.
I knew we were going to hit it off when he told me he went up and down the line with...
September 2012
8 posts
Illinois State
We’ll know by the end of the season, of course, but the Coyotes may be playing an elite FCS team this week. Certainly the rankings say so, with Illinois State at No. 12.
The one thing the Redbirds have not done, unlike some of the other MVC-level heavyweights, is play a BCS kind of a program where you might get a more accurate reading as to how good they really are. Eastern Michigan is a...
A conversation at Northwestern
During a TV timeout late in the USD-Northwestern game on Saturday, I looked up from my computer and saw Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald in a fairly involved conversation with Coyote cornerback Chris Frierson.
It was obviously not a contentious exchange taking place, but it was conspicuous because it was during the game and it was taking place on the field, a few yards away from the Wildcat...
Game Day
It is crisp out here by the lake today, though it is dry, unlike yesterday. I asked Tim Marlette this morning about the last time he played on real grass on a wet day. He couldn’t remember a time as a Coyote, so if we get some rain today, playing in the mud — probably not mud, but wet grass — will be something new for at least a few of the players.
There are pockets of Coyote...
Why it might be a game -- or might not
OK, the Northwestern Wildcats, who finished 6-7 last season with a ho-hum bowl game loss that shoved them under .500, are definitely pumped about the possibilities this season in Evanston, Ill.
You’re not going to get anyone to yack it up about how the ease of the schedule might contribute to this optimism but the rest of us are free to speculate. If the Wildcats move to 4-0 on Saturday...
