Women’s basketball vs. Marist over before it started

Posted on February 18, 2012 by

Terry Zeh needed an alibi Friday night, but it turned he had a good one.

It’s a good thing Terry Zeh has a crazy story to tell.

The Canisius women’s basketball coach needs an explanation – and maybe some comic relief – after the 81-52 beat down his team took from the Marist Red Foxes Friday night at the Koessler Athletic Center.

Marist opened the game with a 17-0 run and put it on cruise control the rest of the way, going up as many as 38 points in the second half before improving to 14-1 in the MAAC, one win away from clinching the top seed in the conference tournament.

It’s not uncommon for a women’s basketball coach to search for answers after a game with Marist. The Red Foxes are working on their seventh MAAC Championship in a row, and embarrassing an opponent along the way is nothing new.

But of all the reasons coaches have used for why their team lost, the one Zeh gave may be one of the more legitimate explanations.

After Canisius’ overtime win at Rider last weekend, Courtney VandeBovenkamp and Amani Mostiller contracted the norovirus that is sweeping through Princeton and Rider universities. The two had to stay at the hotel while the rest of the team went to play Saint Peter’s in the second game of the trip.

Most of the other players on the team contracted the virus on the ride home, Zeh said. Even the bus driver got sick and lost his lunch at the wheel. The team eventually had to rent a second bus – one for healthy people and one for sick people.

“It was horrific,” Zeh said. “The comment they said to me was ‘Coach, we would have rather been dead.’ It’s that violent.”

The virus, reported as being highly contagious and causing diarrhea, vomiting, nausea and stomach cramps, kept many players from eating or drinking fluids most of the week. The only team activity they had during prior to the game was a very brief meeting on Thursday.

“I don’t know if you’d even call it practice, really,” Zeh said. “[More of] a walk through.”

Zeh pointed to the crazy week as the reason his team came out so flat, missing its first nine shots and committing five turnovers before Courtney VandeBovenkamp hit a layup to get the Griffs on the board, 7:35 into the game.

“It was very clear from the beginning that our bout with the norovirus last weekend [affected us],” Zeh said. “You could see it when the game started. I could see it. We could not get up and down the floor.”

Jen Morabito hit the Griffs’ second field goal with 8:37 to go in the first half before the Red Foxes pushed their lead to as many as 24 prior to the break. It only got worse in the second half, where Canisius would never get closer than 16 points and got down more than twice that many.

Although the Griffs entered the game leading the conference in three-point percentage and three-point percentage defense, they made only 7 of 22 from behind the arc (31.8 percent) while giving up 14 of 29 treys (48.3).

Marist’s Kelsey Beynnon hit 4 of 5 three-pointers and 10 of 12 field goals for a career-high 26 points in only 27 minutes of action.

“I felt pretty normal,” Beynnon said. “I guess I was just hitting shots today. I got lucky.”

The loss drops the Griffs to 6-9 in the conference and puts them in seventh place, an unfavorable position to be in because seeds 7-10 go to the play-in round at the conference tournament. The Red Foxes have now beaten Canisius eight in straight meetings.

“If we’re 100 percent healthy, do we beat Marist? I don’t know,” Zeh said, “but I think if we were healthier we certainly might have been able to compete a little bit better.”

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Niagara shows Canisius who’s boss

Posted on February 17, 2012 by

I spent my week watching Canisius and Niagara square off, as the Western New York rivals met each of the last three nights. There was hockey on Tuesday, men’s basketball on Wednesday and another hockey game Thursday.

Neither Canisius team is doing great, but beating Niagara is a way to make something out of a less-than-stellar season. It’s amazing how quickly the story of the year can change from “Canisius wasn’t very good” to “Hey, they beat Niagara.”

Men’s basketball and hockey needed wins this week in the worst way. The basketball team, near the bottom of country in most statistical categories, needs to beat somebody – anybody – to get some momentum going into the conference tournament. For the hockey team, it’s all about trying to stay in the upper tier of the Atlantic Hockey standings, which Canisius has been slipping out of in recent weeks.

But three nights in a row, players in purple were the ones celebrating victories, giving Niagara a decisive advantage in conference standings and the Battle of the Bridge, which is the year-long, all-sport competition between the schools.

“Opportunistic” would hardly be a word to describe either Canisius team. The hockey team’s power play success rate of 9.2 percent is making an irony of the term “man advantage” and the basketball team hasn’t had a season that bad since 1976-77 – but even that 3-22 squad found a way to beat Niagara come February.

After being swept this week, hockey and basketball have combined to lose more than 40 games this winter. Maybe expecting more was too much to ask.

Niagara had the better teams, the better players and the better fans. Purple Eagle Giancarlo Iuorio was the best player on the ice for either team this week, not to mention the one with the best hockey name, with all due respect to Mitch McCrank. Antoine Mason and Juan’ya Green were the best players in the Gallagher Center Wednesday night, elevating their games while Harold Washington and Gaby Belardo went missing.

Not only were the losses humbling for Canisius on the scoreboard, but Niagara also won in stands. One week after RIT’s fans came to Buffalo and silenced Canisius supporters with their organized lunacy and decibel levels, Niagara’s N-Zone returned the favor, outnumbering fans in gold at Buff State at least 10:1.

The attendance at Thursday’s hockey game at Niagara’s own, on-campus arena was 1,249, nearly double the 643 people who hiked over to Buff State Tuesday. Granted, it was Valentine’s Day, but let’s be honest: Niagara always has good support and there is no reason to believe its fans would have let a holiday interfere with something they’ve loved longer than their partner.

Niagara would have made the game a holiday-themed event and fans would have made it a Valentine’s destination. Instead, the holiday was the perfect scapegoat for a Canisius fanbase that looks for any reason not to go to a game. (Can they even be called fans? “Fan” is short for “fanatic,” which Canisius students clearly are not.)

Niagara’s athletic director Ed McLaughlin was the happiest guy in WNY this week. He was out and about at all three games, shaking hands and celebrating with his teams while tweeting out one #victoryalert after another. He was the first person to congratulate his basketball coach Joe Mihalich after the press conference Wednesday and went right down to the bench after the final horn of Thursday’s hockey game. Life is good when you’re on top.

With four points this week, Niagara took a share of first place in Atlantic Hockey and has the offense and goaltending to make a serious playoff run. Green and Mason, Niagara’s prized basketball recruits, are just freshman but are already causing Canisius fits. Mihalich has a knack for getting his teams to peak at the right time every year, and if these freshmen continue to develop, Canisius may be looking up at Niagara in the standings for quite some time to come.

Niagara now has a commanding 14.5-6.5 lead in the Battle of the Bridge. While athletes on the smaller teams sometimes feel left out on campus, they’re the ones keeping Canisius afloat in the competition.

Men’s basketball, hockey, men’s soccer, women’s soccer and volleyball went a combined 0-9-1 against the Purple Eagles this year, with hockey earning half a point for the tie. A layup from Ashley Durham in the final second of the game gave the women’s basketball team a win over Niagara earlier this month, and the Griffs’ only other points are courtesy of men’s and women’s cross country.

If men’s and women’s swimming and diving can finish ahead of Niagara at the MAAC Championships this weekend, it would pull in four huge Battle points for Canisius.

Wouldn’t it be something if the big teams chipped in and bought the swimmers a little gift to say “thanks for saving our butts”? Don’t ask Niagara – the Purple Eagles haven’t needed any help.

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Niagara sneaks past Canisius in OT; Griffs drop 10th straight

Posted on February 16, 2012 by

LEWISTON — For as disappointing as this season has been for the Canisius Golden Griffins, they were in a position Wednesday night to make it all go away.

Junior Alshwan Hymes was the Griff who deserved to take the final shot Wednesday night at the Gallagher Center.

A win over rival Niagara on its home court wouldn’t erase Canisius’ 4-21 record, wouldn’t make the team’s injuries heal any faster and wouldn’t make the blowout losses any less embarrassing, but for one night, everything would have been okay.

Alshwan Hymes stepped to the free-throw line with 6.7 seconds left in regulation and calmly hit both shots to tie the game at 55 and send his Griffs to overtime. Down by three points with the clock running out in the overtime period, Hymes again had the ball, and the game, in his hands.

After Gaby Belardo made a nice pass to find Hymes wide open, he set his feet, jumped, and released a clean look that would have sent the game to a second overtime. This time, Hymes’ shot hit the rim and fell back toward the floor. Belardo collected the rebound and ran behind the arc for a desperation attempt, but it was off the mark and Niagara claimed a 60-57 win.

“The ball was in our hands, on our terms, on the very last possession,” Canisius coach Tom Parrotta said. “We had a couple of shots at it. Gaby missed a layup, which he knows he needs to make the next time he’s in that position, but he turned around and made a great pass to ‘Shwan — who else do you want standing there with his feet set taking a three to send it to double overtime?”

“We needed three points, wide open three-pointer, that’s a shot I got to make,” Hymes said.

Canisius’ hopes had to come down to Hymes, who was the only Griff who could have been remotely happy with his offensive performance. He kept Canisius in the game with five three-pointers and finished with 19 points, more than twice as many as any teammate. Belardo and Harold Washington combined went 3-for-23 and scored 14 points, most of which coming from the free-throw line.

Neither team managed a field goal in overtime, with Niagara going 0-for-4 and Canisius going 0-for-8. The game was decided by five Niagara free throws in the extra session, all hit by Antoine Mason, who finished with a game-high 21 points. MAAC Rookie of the Year candidate Juan’ya Green had 16 points and five assists while knocking down 4 of 9 three-point attempts.

Shooting issues weren’t limited to overtime. Only 15 of the 59 three-point attempts in the game went in, just over 25 percent (Canisius 8 for 30, Niagara 7 for 29).

“It certainly wasn’t a beautiful thing,” Niagara coach Joe Mihalich said. “It wasn’t beautiful, it wasn’t pretty, but at the end of the day, we won. Winners find a way to win.”

The key point of the game in regulation came when Josiah Heath converted the old-school three-point play – a basket and a foul shot – to tie the score at 41 with 12:23 to go. Neither team could score over the next three minutes as tension grew with possession of the game in the balance.

Franklin Milian hit a free throw with 9:11 left to give Canisius its first lead of the night and Hymes scored from distance later to make it a 7-0 run that put the visitors ahead 45-41. But Niagara answered with a 10-0 run of its own to retake a lead Canisius wouldn’t match until Hymes’ free throw and the end of regulation.

Heath, a freshman, was dominant on the glass with 14 rebounds and came up with a block and a steal on consecutive critical possessions in overtime.

It’s been over a decade since Canisius last beat Niagara at the Gallagher Center, though the last two games have come down to the final play. In last year’s meeting, Niagara won on a goaltending call at the buzzer, and Wednesday night took overtime before the Purple Eagles walked off victorious. Through 167 all-time meetings between the two schools, 18 games have gone to overtime, with each side winning nine apiece.

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Quick-strike Niagara beats Canisius in home-and-home opener

Posted on February 15, 2012 by

Chris Lochner and Ryan Murphy scored goals 18 seconds apart early in the second period Tuesday night at Buffalo State Ice Arena to put the Niagara Purple Eagles up 3-0 and sink Canisius into a hole it would never recover from.

Dan Morrison is now just 11 saves away from Canisius' all-time record of 2,771, set by Bryan Worosz in 2005. However, sophomore Tony Capobianco will likely get a start in net Thursday.

The Griffs controlled the tempo of the game early on but lost momentum with four first-period penalties and untidy play in their defensive zone. They struggled to put offensive chances together in the second and third periods, but any Griff who was able to elude defenders on the way to goal was met by a purple brick wall — Niagara’s senior goaltender Chris Noonan, who ranks second nationally in goals against average and save percentage.

“Going into the game, we talked about how it’s not an X’s and O’s type game, it’s who can play with passion and intensity,” Canisius coach Dave Smith said. “I thought from a Canisius perspective, they had a couple of sloppy goals … it’s tough to win against anybody with that many sloppy goals.”

Noonan stymied Mitch McCrank’s one-timer from point-blank range early in the first period and was sharp all night, finishing with 30 saves to improve to 10-5-4 on the year.

Niagara went up 4-0 later in the second period before Doug Beck’s fourth goal of the season got Canisius on the board shortly after. Senior goaltender Dan Morrison got the start in his final home game against Niagara and made 32 saves in the 4-1 loss. He is now just 11 saves shy of Canisius’ all-time record.

Morrison was beaten in the first period on a point shot from Dan Weiss that found its way through traffic and went in to the lower portion of the net. The second was a power-play goal from just outside the crease and the third came on a 2-on-1 break.

Niagara scored its fourth goal after Duncan McKellar tried to knock a puck out of the air in the neutral zone but instead sent it toward his own net. Morrison came out in desperation and tried to swipe the puck away, but it went right to Giancarlo Iuorio, who shot into an empty net.

“The difference in tonight’s game was they capitalized on our sloppy plays,” Smith said. “That’s why we keep score — credit goes to Niagara for capitalizing.”

Morrison had a similar take, noting how his team’s play has changed over the course of the season.

“We have to find our team defense again and build off that,” Morrison said. “Earlier in the year we had good team defense. We might not have had as many scoring chances, but at least we’d be in every game. Right now it’s just getting away from us.”

Canisius had five power-play opportunities on the night but couldn’t convert. The unit had trouble getting situated in the Niagara zone and, when it finally set up, couldn’t get shots through. Both of those are recurring problems this season: After going 0-for-5 with four shots on the night, the power play unit now runs at just 9.6 percent on the season and averages only 1.02 shots per power play.

In contrast, Canisius’ opponents score on 22.2 percent of power plays and record 1.63 shots per man advantage.

The teams will meet again Thursday night, this time at Niagara’s home rink.

“Man,” Morrison said, shaking his head, “we can’t lose Thursday.”

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Short bench no problem for Siena as Canisius drops ninth straight

Posted on February 11, 2012 by

Canisius has pointed to its lack of depth all season as the reason it can’t stay in games. A short bench didn’t seem to slow down the Siena Saints Saturday afternoon, who brought only eight players to Buffalo and still worked over Canisius, winning its first road conference game of the year, 60-50.

Fatigue never seemed to set in to the same six-man rotation Siena coach Mitch Buonaguro also used Thursday night against Niagara and has employed much of the season. Senior guard Kyle Downey played the entire game and scored 15 points while MAAC Rookie of the Year candidate Evan Hymes didn’t check out until the final minute and finished with 12 points. Siena big man OD Anosike logged 36 minutes and picked up his 19th double-double of the season with 15 points and 11 rebounds.

Everyone's role changes depending on the availability of Gaby Belardo, who herniated two discs in his back.

Canisius had Gaby Belardo back and Reggie Groves saw his first action since coming off suspension, but none of the 12 Griffs who got into the game could keep pace with the Siena Six.

“I looked across at the national anthem and I’m like, ‘where’s the rest of their team?’ ” Canisius coach Tom Parrotta said. “They are very, very in-tune, those six guys, what they do as individuals and what they do as a team. Because everyone is in their role. That’s where it’s different from where we stand. We have depth issues, absolutely … but [everyone’s] role is shifted now.

“Their roles are unbelievably defined and they know exactly what to do and they play the right way for what they got. But if you take one of those guys out of there and someone else has to do some different things (like Canisius has to do when Belardo can’t go), it becomes a much different team.”

Siena, faced with both injuries and eligibility issues, has had limited depth all season. That benefited some players, like freshman Evan Hymes, who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten off the bench. Those who would have started either way say the team’s issues are forcing them to become better players.

“It’s kind of the ultimate teacher. If you play bad defense you’re going to go sit on the bench and the scoreboards going to run up pretty quickly because we don’t have that many guys,” Downey said. “We could run for days right now.”

Belardo started on the bench but gave his team a spark midway through the first half. Siena led by as many as five early on before Belardo hit four shots in a row – three 3-pointers and a layup – to put Canisius up 23-22 with 8:14 left in the first half.

But that would be the Griffs’ last lead of the game. They hit only one field goal the rest of the half while the Saints closed the period on a 15-3 run to take a 37-26 lead into the locker room.

The run reached 30-10 midway through the second half as Canisius struggled to put a comeback attempt together. Siena pushed its lead to 19 at several points and only a 9-0 run to close the game brought the score within 10 points.

Harold Washington had difficulty getting through Siena’s zone much of the first half but found his way in the later stages, finishing with 16 points on 7-of-14 shooting. Alshwan Hymes took advantage of the zone with back-to-back 3-pointers early but struggled overall, going 3 of 11 from the floor for eight points.

With the loss, Canisius falls to 4-21 on the year and has lost to ever team in the conference by double-digits.

“It’s not fun,” Parrotta said, “it really isn’t. But we have to stick to our guns. That’s all we can do … It stinks, and it’s not okay – it’s not okay – but this is what it is.

“We have to continue to build and get better every day … I want this team to be as good as they possibly can be when we get to Springfield (site of the MAAC Tournament) … But if we let frustration come into what we’re doing here, we might as well not even show up for practice. But that has not been the case with these guys. They’re in there chomping at the bit and will continue to do so. We just don’t have the wins to show for it.”

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Canisius basketball throws away passes, victory

Posted on February 10, 2012 by

All Gaby Belardo could do was sit and watch as his team let an upset of the Rider Broncs slip through its fingers last night at the Koessler Athletic Center.

Harold Washington scored 15 points and even pulled down 10 rebounds last night for his first career double-double.

The junior guard has battled through a back injury all season to try to give some quality minutes to a team struggling to remain competitive. But after receiving an injection Wednesday that hadn’t taken full effect, coaches decided Thursday morning to hold him out and get him ready for Saturday’s matchup with Siena.

Belardo watched his team control the first half and walked to the locker room with them at halftime leading 34-29. He watched his team continue to outscore Rider deep into the second half, going up as many as 10 points with 7:19 to play.

But when the Broncs went to a full-court press, Belardo wished he could have been out there, giving his team a veteran presence it desperately needed. Instead, he could only watch as the Griffs turned the ball over on five straight possessions while Rider ripped off a 13-0 run, taking its first lead of the night with 1:38 left and securing 71-66 the win, sinking the Griffs to 4-20 overall and 1-13 in MAAC play.

“It was hard at the end because we needed a ball handler and I wasn’t there,” Belardo said. “Those last two minutes I think the team needed me and I feel bad I wasn’t with my teammates.

“I hate sitting down, even when my back is feeling bad I still want to play. Coach [Tom Parrotta] told me to take the day off and be ready for Siena but it hurts a lot just watching my teammates giving 110 percent and not winning. I feel bad. I kind of feel like I let my team down but we’re definitely going to get this win on Saturday.”

On a night when it looked like the Griffs would pick up their second win of the calendar year, the end result was instead a collapse that extended the team’s losing streak to eight games. The Broncs’ Novar Gadson led all players with 19 points.

“We kind of went into a lull,” said junior Harold Washington, who had a double-double of 15 points and 10 rebounds but also was charged with the first two turnovers during the Griffs’ collapse. “Nobody could find their scoring touch. We were kind of desperate for a basket so sometimes we find ourselves forcing the issue a little bit. Once they began to full-court press us, I think we kind of broke down a little mentally and started playing to their hands and started to panic, and that’s what led to the back-to-back turnovers.”

The Griffs were two guards down last night without Belardo and Reggie Groves, who had his suspension lifted by Parrotta earlier this week but did not get into the game. Lack of depth has been an issue for Canisius all season, bust last night, the opponent was shorthanded as well.

The mysterious gastrointestinal virus afflicting students at Princeton and Rider universities hit the Rider basketball team, Broncs coach Tommy Dempsey said, as bench players Eddie Mitchell and Junior Fortunat were “struck ill” on the bus ride to Buffalo. The players combine to score over eight points per game but will remain secluded from the team until cleared to play by doctors. Dempsey hopes they will able to play in the second game of the trip against Niagara.

The low point of the game came with 18 seconds left after Rider’s Novar Gadson hit a free throw to put his team up two possessions, 67-63. Parrotta took his last timeout to draw up a play and sent freshman Tyler Funk to inbound the ball. When Funk couldn’t find a man, he tried to call a timeout, but was assessed a technical foul because Canisius didn’t have any left to take.

Parrotta took responsibility for the play after the game, saying he shouldn’t have put a player in that situation who wasn’t ready for it, but when Jeff Jones hit both ensuing free throws the game was essentially out of reach.

Belardo gets back to action Saturday afternoon when the Siena Saints come to the KAC. He may be hoping for a repeat of the last time Siena visited Canisius – Belardo hit the game-winning shot with 11 seconds left to knock off the three-time defending champs.

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Vent against athletes shows power of social media

Posted on February 3, 2012 by

A cheerleader wrote a blog post earlier this week comparing club sports with Division I sports that caused a firestorm of responses from athletes and non-athletes alike. Things like this are a big deal at a school like Canisius where everybody pretty much knows everybody.

If you aren’t familiar with the post, the author vented her frustrations with the way athletes carry themselves, writing, “Sometimes I look at these D1 athletes and I wonder if they even love their sport or they’re just doing it for the free ride.”

You can check out the full posts (and subsequent comments) at cheerdummy.wordpress.com if you want to find out more. Hold your jokes about the redundancy of that title while we consider the facts.

One phenomenon of social media is that it gives people an outlet to share their inner-most selves, unfiltered and more honest than they could ever be in person. It’s interesting how something about the fact that the person your tweet, status or blog post is directed at won’t know it’s about them, won’t see it, probably won’t see it, or at least won’t be able to say something back to your face about it gives people the confidence to publish thoughts they would normally keep to themselves.

That’s not to say the author of the post published it there to hide behind a computer screen. That’s not the case at all. As she later noted, she’s run the blog for months and never had more than 70 hits in a day. It was just a place to get a few feelings out and maybe hit a few requirements for a class along the way.

You can’t fault somebody for publishing an opinion – this is America, after all – and the underlying frustrations with Division I athletes on campus aren’t limited to club sport participants. A lot of people resent athletes for their scholarships, their wardrobe of Griff logo clothes and any of the other perks associated with playing a D-I sport.

But forget for a second that player apparel packs cost money and there are players who don’t get a dime from athletics toward tuition. Even if every single student-athlete were here all-expenses-paid, what would be wrong with that? They are good at what they do and they got a coach to offer them a free ride. That’s a great opportunity that they’d be foolish not to take. Don’t direct your anger at the athletes when you’re really mad at the system.

I get both sides of the argument. I play club hockey here and I know firsthand what it’s like to be treated differently by people when they realize you’re not on the “real” team. I was choking down vending machine PopTarts on a road trip when I saw pictures of the buffet the basketball team had in Las Vegas. And I definitely wish a medical staff and training facilities had been available to me right on campus after I broke my leg representing the Blue and Gold during a game in December. You give it everything you have whether it’s intramurals, club sports or the MAAC Championship, but the school only cares about you if you’re competing for the latter. That’s a hard pill to swallow when you first come to college.

But being the sports editor of the paper, I’ve gotten to know the faces behind the stat sheets and I now know most of athletes on campus (if we haven’t met, feel free to introduce yourself). I spend far more time watching their games and researching their stats than I do on my schoolwork, but I’m also the only kid on campus who gets paid to care about their teams and understand their problems. (Granted, it works out to like $1 an hour, but it’s something.)

If you’re still not convinced, look at the top of this page. It says SPORTS in big letters. There’s no NARP section of the paper. Just sports. (NARP, of course, is an acronym for “non-athlete regular person” athletes use to describe the mortals on campus.) One quarter of this publication is devoted to coverage of our athletes and their endeavors and I spend hours a day making sure we do it well.

So where to go from here? If you wanted to attack the “regular people” out there, you’d tell them to get over themselves and just accept the fact that there are people in the world who are going to be better than them at things and they get perks that everyone else doesn’t. College athletics are a billion-dollar industry nationally, and even at a low mid-major school like Canisius where athletes are closer to Joe Average, college student than Joe Moneybags, professional athlete or even Joe Randle, Big 12 running back, they get treated differently and no amount of complaining will ever change that.

If you wanted to attack the athletes, you could just go around with a big sign that says “WE GET IT,” because everyone knows who the athletes are long before they walk into class dressed head-to-toe in Griff gear. That’s not to clump every athlete into one group, but for the most part, it aggravates classmates (and faculty – they talk too) that athletes wear sweats/warm-up suits/hoodies every day and that they never go anywhere without their posse and that a sense of entitlement seems to be something they put on every day after deodorant.

Disgruntled athletes might say that maybe if NARPs spent as much time lifting weights or practicing as they did complaining about everything, maybe they’d be the ones with the scholarships. Annoyed non-athletes might say maybe if athletes spent more time worrying about athletics instead of commenting on blogs, maybe they’d actually win something once in a while. Maybe that’s where they went after they bailed on the men’s basketball game last Friday, to surf the blogosphere, because Lord knows they might miss something important if they stayed to cheer on a Canisius team any longer than the Athletes-for-Athletes event required.

So here’s what it comes down to: Regular people, suck it up and deal with it. Life’s not fair. Athletes are athletes and a lot of the resentment you have comes from wishing you were a little bit more like them. You’re here for the education; worry about yourself. If you really need something to get you through the day, think back to your high school graduation and remember the speech your valedictorian probably gave about being the boss someday.

And athletes, chill out. Cory Conacher was way better at sports than anybody still here and he never acted for a second like he was better than anyone; even though we all knew that he was. For a collective group of people who are supposed to be above it all, you sure care an awful lot about what one person said about you. Leave the girl alone and focus on your upcoming season. There’s plenty there to keep you busy.

 

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