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A big year for Women’s College Basketball in New York

Jeffrey Bailey — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 09:19:38 +0000

Good morning. It is Friday. We’ll look at why this season was a first for women’s college basketball in New York City. We’ll also find out how LaGuardia Community College will spend a $116.2 million grant from a foundation run by Alexandra Cohen, whose billionaire husband bought the New York Mets in 2020.

This was the first season that the Columbia University women’s basketball team made the NCAA Division I tournament.

The New York University women’s team, undefeated in 31 games, also made the postseason, making this the first year the two colleges have done so simultaneously: Columbia in Division I, with an overall berth in the Big Dance. , and NYU in Division III. NYU won the Division III national title by ending Smith College’s 16-game winning streak, 51-41.

“We finally pulled away and one of the officials congratulated me on my win,” said Meg Barber, the coach of the NYU team. “This was probably with about 45 seconds left. I said, ‘Not yet.’ I was like, ‘It’s not over yet,’ and he said, ‘Yes, it is.’

And next season?

“I’ve barely processed that we won the national championship,” Barber said Thursday, “so I haven’t really thought about next year.”

Columbia’s season ended Wednesday with a 72-68 loss to Vanderbilt in a play-in game prior to the first round of the NCAA Division I tournament.

When I asked Sabreena Merchant, who covers women’s basketball, for an assessment, she said Columbia was outplayed. The game was one of the few times this season that Abbey Hsu, Columbia’s top senior guard, wasn’t the best player on the court.

“The first thing you think about at Abbey is shooting,” Merchant said. “She uncharacteristically missed a couple of free throws. For her to go 2-of-11 on 3s and miss three free throws is surprising.” Hsu is the Ivy League’s leading scorer in three-pointers, with 375.

Columbia has had less experience playing teams like Vanderbilt, which have a long history — after all, this was Columbia’s first appearance in the tournament. “You could see the athletic advantage that Vanderbilt had over Columbia,” Merchant told me. “As Abbey Hsu has done in Ivy League games, there was a different level of defense she faced against Vanderbilt – and her play didn’t step up as hoped, or as Princeton does when they get into these situations. ” Princeton, which defeated Columbia last week to win the Ivy League title, will play West Virginia in the first round of the tournament on Saturday.

Even if Hsu had an off night against Vanderbilt, she has had a remarkable career at Columbia. She holds the Columbia record in basketball, men’s or women’s, with 2,126 points.

She also has a remarkable personal story. She tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee when she was a junior in high school.

A few weeks later, when she heard banging noises from an adjacent building of the school and the teacher ordered her class to leave, she was on crutches. She made her way down the stairs and out of the school – Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, site of the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in American history.

Her first season at Columbia was interrupted by the pandemic and her father, a physician, died of complications related to Covid-19.

Still, Hsu has been Columbia’s defining player in women’s basketball under coach Megan Griffith, who arrived in 2016. Before Hsu joined the team, Columbia had won 31 percent of its games and 26 percent of its Ivy League games. Since then, the team has won 80 percent of its games.

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Enjoy a sunny day in the mid 40s. Prepare for a chance of rain in the evening with temperatures in the low 30s.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In effect until Sunday (Purim).

The latest New York news

A $116 million grant to LaGuardia Community College

Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire who bought the Mets three and a half years ago, is pouring more money into Queens: a $116.2 million grant to LaGuardia Community College for a workforce training center.

But his wife, Alexandra Cohen, gets credit for the vision behind the grant, for a 160,000-square-foot vocational training facility, said Kenneth Adams, LaGuardia’s president.

“This is 100 percent Alex,” Adams said. “Not only does it increase our educational space by 25 percent, which it does, but it is also aligned with Alex’s vision for career and technical education.”

LaGuardia officials said the grant, from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, was the largest ever awarded to a community college. Adams said it would pay for the construction of 67 classrooms, enough to add 6,000 students to LaGuardia’s enrollment. LaGuardia will use the space to train students seeking associate degrees, industry certification and other qualifications.

“I wanted to create a place where students can access high-quality programs and facilities and learn the skills they need to succeed in a rapidly changing world,” Alexandra Cohen said in a statement. LaGuardia said the center, to be called the Cohen Career Collective, would be the largest career and technical facility of its kind in the New York region.

Adams said the foundation had given the college a much smaller grant during the pandemic for a training program called Jobs Direct. It was intended to provide short-term job training to people from Queens who had lost their jobs due to the pandemic. Then, he said, “Alexandra Cohen made it clear that she wanted to do something different.”

“Alex was born in Harlem, she grew up in Washington Heights, and she really identifies with our students” — many of whom are foreign-born, working-class students and the first in their families to attend college, Adams said.

Félix Matos-Rodríguez, the chancellor of the City University of New York, said the grant would enhance LaGuardia’s position “as an engine of upward mobility.”

The center will offer language classes to foreign-born students who need to improve their English before pursuing vocational training. It will also offer high school equivalency classes for students seeking a GED

Adams said the new center would occupy two floors in a former bakery overlooking the Sunnyside Yards railway depot.

“We are receiving more and more requests to train students for green jobs, especially solar panel installation and maintenance,” Adams said. “We don’t have classrooms today that are equipped to teach that. We will.” He also said the center would let LaGuardia teach courses on energy retrofits — entry-level electrical jobs with contractors. Some labs could be used to teach courses in cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

He said the “1980s-level classrooms” used for LaGuardia’s nursing programs would also be upgraded. The center could also host classes to train students for jobs in the hospitality industry.

“All of these programs are driven by workforce dynamics and employer needs,” he said.

The Cohens’ foundation has provided more than $1.2 billion to nonprofits since 2001, including more than $185 million in Queens. In addition, Cohen and Hard Rock are bidding on a casino next to Citi Field, where the Mets play.

METROPOLITAN diary

(Queens, 3 hours)

Dear Diary:

I woke up then
the city
stopped
to talk

Stepped
from my bed

Other un-
dressed men
near windows
listened

to enjoy
nothing
something

Light I
illuminated
a cigarette

and listened

— Rolli Anderson

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send your entries here And read more Metropolitan Diary here.

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The Joker Effect: Playmaking centers have revolutionized college basketball offenses

Jeffrey Bailey — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 16:01:01 +0000

When Fred Hoiberg left a front-office job with the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2010 to coach Iowa State, he was ahead of his time chasing transfers to build a roster. Hoiberg was also ahead of the curve when he landed his biggest transfer prize: Royce White.

White was built like an NFL tight end — 6-foot-8, 250 pounds — but he thought the game like a point guard. Back then, transfers had to sit out a season, and during that sit-out year Iowa State’s coaches met regularly to try to figure out the best way to utilize someone so big with incredible ball skills.

Hoiberg settled on an untraditional role: His center would play point guard.

“We just put the ball in his hands and got our shooters in split actions — and all those guys could shoot — and that’s what Royce did best was his passing,” Hoiberg says. “So that was kind of the first really exclusive five-out (offense) in college.”

Hoiberg, now coaching Nebraska, is back in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2015. The common thread between all five of his tournament appearances is playing through a big man like White, who called himself a hybrid. Nebraska’s current big man Rienk Mast is in the mold of Georges Niang, Hoiberg’s second star point-center at Iowa State, in that both can dribble, pass and shoot.

And just like with the transfer portal, Hoiberg is no longer an outlier in playing through what’s become known as a playmaking center. That prototype is populating college rosters at a rate higher than ever before in the game’s history and has been steadily increasing in recent years. In this year’s NCAA Tournament, playmaking fives are all over the bracket. From true point centers like Marquette’s Oso Ighodaro to stretch fives who can also facilitate like Duke’s Kyle Filipowski to slo-mo pass-first bigs like BYU’s Aly Khalifa, you can find some version of a playmaking five on nearly half the tourney rosters.

College coaches have figured out that the easiest way to run efficient offense is five-out attacks. Ideally with centers who can shoot. And if they cannot shoot, they can at least be the trigger man and pull the opposing big away from the paint by facilitating from the perimeter.

In much the same way that Steph Curry influenced a generation of guards by shooting a higher frequency of 3-pointers and from further out, Denver Nuggets star Nikola Jokic is now the most dominant and entertaining player on the planet, and he’s made passing cool for big men.

“You look into the grassroots programs, a lot of these younger kids now, they’re really working on their multi-skill set to be able to play all five positions,” Hoiberg says. “Because that’s where our game is going is positionless basketball, especially in the NBA.”

“Every NBA team plays some form of five-out,” says Alabama first-year assistant coach Ryan Pannone, who was a G League coach for three seasons and then a New Orleans Pelicans assistant in 2022-23. “Some teams are playing a higher percentage of five-out offense, but every team is in some way shape or form.”

College basketball still has its variations, and you can still win with a post-up heavy style — see Purdue and Zach Edey — but even Edey sometimes is sent to the perimeter to initiate dribble-handoff actions. And he plays on the team that’s the second-most accurate from 3-point range, surrounding him at most times with four shooters to give him room to operate.

“Nearly every team these days has like four guys on the floor that can shoot it, and a lot have five,” says Ken Pomeroy, college basketball’s foremost authority on analytics. “Ten years ago, that was pretty rare, and 20 years ago that was almost unheard of.”

A few years ago Pomeroy dug into why teams are shooting a higher percentage of their shots from 3, and he found the main culprit was fours and fives shooting more 3s.

“Offense is spacing,” says Indiana State coach Josh Schertz, whose high-powered offense is centered around big man Robbie Avila. “Spacing is shooting. If you have great spacing, but you don’t have great shooting, you don’t have great spacing.”

And the optimal way to create that space is a playmaking center.

Robbie Avila has been an elite playmaker at center for Indiana State. (Jeff Curry / USA Today)

Schertz keeps a FaceTime from Avila saved in his call log.

Oct. 22, 2021.

That’s the day the goggled Goliath committed to the Sycamores, before Schertz ever coached a game at the Division I level.

“That’s when we changed the program’s trajectory,” Schertz says. “You build an entire program around that kind of kid. You can build your whole offense around that kind of player.”

This is not hyperbole. In Schertz’s third season in Terre Haute, Indiana State went 28-6 and had its best season since the Larry Bird-led Sycamores made the national title game in 1979. The Sycamores were the victim of last week’s bid thieves, one of the first four out of the NCAA field, but they won the Missouri Valley regular-season title and have the most efficient halfcourt offense in college basketball. It is built around the slightly pudgy 6-foot-10 center who looks better suited to be crushing in Mathletics than on a basketball court. Avila is the college version of Jokic. Avila can shoot (40.5 percent from 3), dribble, pass (a team-high 3.8 assists per game), slash and punish switches in the post.

Last spring when Schertz recruited two point guards out of the portal (Ryan Conwell and Isaiah Swope) to join another point guard already on his roster in Julian Larry, he was asked: How are you going to play all three together?

Easy. Play none of them in the actual point guard spot. That’s Avila’s job. Although Schertz doesn’t call him the point guard; he calls him “the hub.”

“When you utilize the big as the hub,” Schertz says, “I think it creates organically an egalitarian-type offense, where everybody is more of a part of it, because the other four spots become completely interchangeable.”

The reality is that there are fewer traditional point guards than ever before. The mindset of the guard has changed. Florida Atlantic coach Dusty May brings up Tyrese Haliburton to show how unusual it is to find a pass-first point guard and the allure of playing with one.

May poses the question: Why did Pascal Siakam agree to go to the Pacers instead of opting to wait for free agency?

“Because they have a point guard that’s a superstar that likes to pass,” May says.

We might get to a point where it’s easier to find a big man who loves to pass than a guard. Two of the top five assist leaders in the NBA right now are centers — Jokic and Sacramento’s Domantas Sabonis — and we’re seeing higher assist numbers from centers in college than ever before. There are 207 playmaking big men in college basketball this season, per Synergy’s analysis, and assists per-40 minutes of all players 6-9 or taller has risen from 1.3 during the 2011-12 season (when White played for Hoiberg) to 1.8 this season.

If you have one of those bigs, a point guard no longer feels necessary. Hoiberg says he doesn’t have one, in part, because of Mast. At Illinois, Brad Underwood is starting five players who are all 6-foot-6 or taller and have all played power forward at some point in their careers. Underwood said one of his motivations was playing positionless style defensively, where the Illini can switch everything. But it’s worked beautifully offensively too; the Illini rank third in adjusted offensive efficiency. No point guard for the Illini? No problem. They have 6-11 playmaking center Coleman Hawkins.

“When you can stretch the floor with five men who can shoot it and pass it,” Underwood says, “spacing becomes ‘advantage, offense’ on all accounts.”

So much of the game has become pick-and-roll and many coverages use the center to contain the guard, so a popping big man is almost always open. And when you have to stunt at that big man, this happens:

Underwood also allows Hawkins to rebound and go. That’s another reason players like him are so valuable.

“It distorts almost every form of transition D you have,” Underwood says. “Because people send their point guard back and somebody protects the rim, so now you’re getting cross-matched immediately, especially if you play with any pace.”

Jokic is not only the prototype; he’s giving coaches ideas to implement. Two years ago, Marquette coach Shaka Smart approached Nuggets assistant David Adelman to get ideas on five-out offense, because Ighodaro had flashed enough playmaking skills that Smart believed he’d thrive in that setup. Adelman said they let their players experiment in offseason pickup games, throwing out ideas for an action to start the play and seeing where they take it.

Smart is right there with Schertz in the number of different actions in which the Golden Eagles involve their center. Not only do both Avila and Ighodaro sometimes bring the ball up the floor, they’re both featured in pick-and-rolls as both the roller and the handler. In fact, among players with at least 50 possessions as the handler, Avila is the fifth-most efficient when the handler and Ighodaro is 77th, per Synergy.

“I think inverted ball screens are some of the hardest things to guard, because what are you going to do with them?” Schertz says. “Centers are not used to guarding ball screens with a handler. And guards are not used to guarding bigs coming off a ball screen. So it’s really unique coverage.”

Case in point:

Ighodaro is in the White mold. “He’s the five-man that doesn’t shoot it, but impacts the game in every other capacity, just because of his athleticism, his speed and his passing,” Underwood says. “Oso’s unique because he’s a freak athlete. His passing and his athleticism create gaps in space, like he’s very hard to stay connected to.”

The Golden Eagles use Ighodaro in a lot of two-man games on the side of the floor, then space with three shooters on the other side. It forces teams to play two-on-two, and Ighodaro and his guards will play hot potato until an opening presents itself. One concept that has become a go-to for centers is “gets,” where the guard will throw it to the big and then immediately go get it back on a handoff. Marquette has the luxury of Ighodaro also bringing the ball up the floor and starting the dribble handoff himself.

Dayton’s offense is almost a replica of Marquette’s, only DaRon Holmes II plays the Ighodaro role and adds the shooting element.

According to Synergy, there are a higher number of dribble handoffs this season than any other season the site has logged; if you’re wondering where the game is headed, that’s a good indicator. It’s a more efficient action than the pick-and-roll.

“Dribble handoffs are much harder to guard than ball screens,” Schertz says. “Because what’s your coverage on dribble pitches? Ball screens, you can have seven coverages. You can’t ice a dribble pitch. (Icing is keeping the ball on the sideline and forcing the handler toward the baseline.) You can’t really show on a dribble pitch, otherwise, the center’s gonna just keep the ball and go get a layup. It’s hard to lateral that. There’s way fewer coverages you can give to a dribble pitch. The more dribble pitches obviously you can produce, the higher the efficiency.”

The most efficient action is cutting, and no one is better at delivering those passes than centers who can pass. Not only are they usually always open on ball reversals, they have the best lines of vision — think of taller quarterbacks.

“Being able to see over defenders, especially on backdoors or when teams are switching, I can throw it over the top rather than throwing a bounce pass, and it comes from a better angle because it’s coming from up higher,” UConn center Donovan Clingan says. “It’s definitely an advantage being able to be 7-2 and pass the ball like that.”

Clingan is not what you’d picture in a playmaking center. But instead of just planting him in the post, which is where he would have played in past eras, Dan Hurley has made him the hub for UConn’s halfcourt offense. Clingan can’t really dribble or shoot, so defenders usually sag off him, but that’s a luxury for the Huskies. He’s always open for ball reversals, and he can execute handoffs and deliver the ball as UConn’s shooters are endlessly screening and cutting around him.

“I love passing,” Clingan says. “Just getting a great pass off and setting up a teammate for an easy basket, I love that.”

Hurley uses him this way because it works, but he also sees it as his responsibility to develop Clingan so he will eventually fit in the NBA.

“If they can’t play in five-out, if they can’t play away from the basket, they’re going to have a hard time getting to the NBA,” Hurley says. “So I think it’s a weapon for you, creates new opportunities offensively, but also the responsibility to the player in terms of their career and your player development and being able to recruit the next center that you can win with.”

Go back to one of the legendary upsets in NCAA Tournament history — 13th-seeded Princeton over No. 4 seed and defending national champion UCLA in 1996 — and the box score reads like the perfect analytically-driven approach (outside of the shooting accuracy). The Tigers attempted eight more 3-pointers than 2s, and they had 15 assists on 17 made field goals. Layups and 3s are the goal today, and that’s what Pete Carril’s Princeton offense has been generating for years.

“He was doing this in the 1960s and ’70s,” says Richmond coach Chris Mooney, who was a four-year starter for Carril in the early 1990s and still runs the Princeton offense. The Spiders won the Atlantic-10 regular-season title this year with a pass-first center. “That’s not like 10 years ahead of his time; it’s 50-60 years ahead of his time.”

In 1996, the Sacramento Kings forever changed the NBA by hiring Carril and implementing elements of his offense. Some of the best college offenses have borrowed from him too, especially in the way he used his center away from the basket. It was a part of Johnny Orr’s pinch-post offense, and John Beilein had elements of the Princeton in his two-guard offense — two offenses that get copied a lot in today’s game.

Beilein reminded us years ago the value of a big man who can shoot when he had Kevin Pittsnogle at West Virginia and rode his hot shooting and the gravity it created to the 2005 Elite Eight. (Those of us who were college basketball fans in that era will forever hear the name Pittsnogle and immediately scream “PITTSNOGLLLLLLE!”)

Pittsnogle also taught us that you didn’t need an athletic, above-the-rim center to win. On the offensive end, skill in that position is much more valuable. And Jokic is taking it to another level.

Jokic is the role model for this generation’s big men. Ask just about any big guy in college basketball right now who they watch the most, and Jokic is the answer. Clingan idolizes and studies Jokic. Avila does too, getting clips sent to him of the Joker every Friday. But the part that rarely gets said out loud that Jokic has done for centers: He’s changed the way we see body types in basketball, and changed the way some guys see themselves.

Is Jokic an elite athlete? Not in the run-fast, jump-high sense, but … “In reality, they’re fantastic athletes,” Pannone says of Jokic and Luka Doncic. “What they have is the ability to process information and react quicker, which makes them more athletic and then they play at fantastic angles.”

Avila, who lives below the rim and has just one dunk this season, still finds a way to get to the basket often, averaging more than four baskets per game at the rim. Both he and Jokic also make up for a lack of foot speed with elite hand-eye coordination and body control, which can get you where you need to go on the floor sometimes just as effectively as quickness.

And it’s these below-the-rim, quick thinkers who have become college basketball’s best passers. They thrive in the actions Carril made popular. You’re not going to find more beautiful backdoor dimes than those delivered by Avila, Khalifa, Rice’s Max Fiedler and Richmond’s Neal Quinn, the latter three who all rank in the top 100 in assist rate nationally.

Peruse the top of the efficiency charts this season, and you’ll find either a center who can shoot and/or one who is a triggerman on many of those teams.

Schertz, who has the most Jokic-like player in the country, says he’ll never coach another game without a center who can be his hub.

“It’s always good to be able to coach players that are smarter than you, see the game slower,” he says. “Robbie’s been proof positive that mental acuity, when you have it at a high level, can compensate for a lack of physical quickness.”

GO DEEPER

Dandy dozen: The 12 teams that can win the men’s NCAA Tournament

GO DEEPER

Daily NCAA bracket picks: Our expert predictions for every game on Thursday in tournament

(Illustration by Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos of Oso Ighodaro, Donovan Clingan and Coleman Hawkins: David Allio, G Fiume and Michael Hickey / Getty Images)

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My family were upset when I dropped out of college, but now I earn £5,000 a DAY

Jeffrey Bailey — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 20:39:33 +0000

In addition to mastering your chosen subject, university can also be a time when you learn a lot about yourself.

A young woman struggling with student life made the brave decision to quit and earns as much as $10,000 a day from her new career.

Chloe dropped out of college at the age of 19 and was terrified to tell her familyCredit: instagram/@glowiebyher/

Now 21-year-old Chloe earns AUS$10,000 (£5,000) a day from her nail businessCredit: instagram/@cloiey/

Like many students during the pandemic, Chloe Zhu missed the classic college experience.

After starting her bachelor’s degree in 2021, the then-teenager felt “extremely lost.”

Even changing her studies didn’t help as she switched courses twice to study both finance and computing science.

Instead of just staying the course like most students, she made the courageous decision to try to change her life for the better – by quietly quitting.

Around this time, the young entrepreneur focused on her dream of starting her own beauty brand, with inspiration coming from the most unlikely source: COVID.

When she saw how many salons had closed due to the lockdown, she was in need of a manicure and decided to start nail press-on business Glowie from her one-bedroom apartment.

After coming across the idea in December 2021, it didn’t take long for her business to start blossoming.

Yet she still couldn’t tell her family about her success.

Knowing her parents would be disappointed, the academically gifted student hid the truth for eight months and feared her loved ones’ reactions.

Eventually the truth came out during the family dinner, where her brother dropped the huge bombshell in front of her parents.

She remembered the awkward moment and gave in 7Life, adding, “I felt bad that I couldn’t give my parents the life they dreamed of for me. But I knew I could make them proud.

I’m a stay-at-home mom who took four extra tries to see which one made the most money. I had a clear winner, but there’s a catch

“They were initially not happy at all and tried to convince me of the decision, even suggesting that I take a break from my life. company finish my studies first.

“But I knew I could make them proud and stay true to myself in my own way, and eventually they came around.”

Her meteoric rise was made even more difficult as the entrepreneur struggled with burnout and missed the company of friends.

At one point, she became so exhausted that she felt like she didn’t want to wake up in the morning after working non-stop for months.

Luckily, her gamble more than paid off, with the now 21-year-old making AUS$10,000 (£5,000) a day from her beauty brand.

In fact, the young woman finds it hard to believe how different her life looks just a few years later.

She said: “My life looks completely different and I’m still shocked at how you can change your career path in such a short space of time.

“Now I have a job that uses so many different skills that are analytical, creative and technical at the same time – from building the website, optimizing our SEO and of course designing our product launches – and I couldn’t ask for a job which is more satisfying.”

The young woman is now the proud owner of press-on nail brand GlowieCredit: instagram/@glowiebyher/

Chloe initially started the business from her one-bedroom apartmentCredit: instagram/@cloiey/

The post My family were upset when I dropped out of college, but now I earn £5,000 a DAY appeared first on USMAIL24.COM.

Doug Blevins, Kicking Guru for College and NFL Players, Dies at 60

Jeffrey Bailey — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 20:03:50 +0000

Doug Blevins, who successfully coached college and NFL kickers like Adam Vinatieri and Justin Tucker despite never playing football because he had cerebral palsy, died Sunday in Johnson City, eastern Tennessee. He was 60.

His son, Roman, said the cause of death in a hospital was complications of esophageal cancer.

Doug was fascinated by football from an early age, and increasingly by the nuances of kicking. He watched games and instructional videos, read books and began corresponding with former Dallas Cowboys kicking coach Ben Agajanian in high school. Doug analyzed the video Agajanian sent him and then used the information to improve the kicking of his high school team, where he coached.

“Being handicapped, I knew I would never play a down,” Blevins told The Los Angeles Times in 2000. “But I was focused on this goal: making it to the National Football League.”

Blevins, who instructed kickers from his motorized wheelchair, taught himself the mechanics of place-kicking, punting and kickoffs. He analyzed hip rotations, leg swings and toe angles; he talked to kickers about where they could ideally plant their foot before kicking a field goal and how to get their body into the end zone.

His most famous students included Vinatieri, who became one the NFL’s career scoring leader with the New England Patriots and Indianapolis Colts, and kicked two Super Bowl-winning field goals; Tucker of the Baltimore Ravens, who holds the league record for highest percentage of field goals made; and Olindo Mare, the Miami Dolphins all-time goal scorer and field goal leader.

In the mid-1990s, news of Blevins’ reputation as a guru began to spread. Through an administrator at a community college where he had coached, he came to the attention of Dick Steinberg, the general manager of the New York Jets.

Blevins provided Steinberg with scouting reports on the Jets’ kickers in 1993, and the following season he worked as the team’s kicking consultant, a major shift in his career.

“This is an uphill battle,” Blevins told Sports Illustrated for a profile of him in 2004, noting that it was especially difficult because he was not a former player and even more challenging because of his disability. “I needed walking, talking resumes. If I found guys who became successful kickers in the NFL, I would always have a place in this league.

In 1995, he began a five-year consulting stint with the World League of American Football (later known as NFL Europe), where his duties included teaching football players how to be NFL-style kickers and selecting the kickers for the teams.

Between 1995 and 1996, he also spent several months in Abingdon, Virginia, living with Vinatieri, an undrafted kicker from South Dakota State University, where he refined his place-kicking skills.

As a result of their collaboration, Vinatieri had become a more consistent kicker, shooting footballs from his powerful right foot. Blevins signed him to the Amsterdam Admirals of the World League in 1996, and the Patriots signed him later that year. His career included kicking two Super Bowl-winning field goals for the Patriots.

“Doug has the perfect kick in mind,” Vinatieri told Sports Illustrated. “He watches you and thinks about what to do.”

“Without him I wouldn’t be here,” Vinatieri added.

William Douglas Blevins was born on August 3, 1963 in Abingdon. His father, Willis, was an engineer. His mother, Linda (LaFon) Blevins, was a nurse who encouraged Doug to pursue whatever he wanted.

In the early 1980s, Blevins was a student assistant coach under Johnny Majors while attending the University of Tennessee. After transferring to East Tennessee State University, in Johnson City, he held the same position, working for head coach Mike Ayers, and earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice sciences in 1988.

He soon began organizing instructional camps in the southeastern states – which he did for years – and teaching kickers. From 1992 to 1995, he was the special teams coordinator and kicking coach at Abingdon High School.

In 1997, while still working for the World League, \Mr. Blevins was hired by Jimmy Johnson, the head coach of the Miami Dolphins, as a kicking coach. He helped Mare win the No. 1 job by slowing down his kick.

Johnson said Blevins’ single-minded focus helped the kickers.

“A lot of kickers just come off and get out of rhythm; A lot can happen to them if someone doesn’t coach them every kick,” Johnson said in a phone interview. “Doug knew this was his role and mapped out all his kicks, and Mare became one of the best Dolphins kickers ever.”

After six years with the Dolphins, Blevins became an advisor to the Minnesota Vikings in 2004. He helped improve Aaron Elling’s yardage and hangtime on kickoffs.

During the team’s training camp that year, Elling told The Minneapolis Star Tribune that Blevins “can see every mechanical thing you do on a kick at once.”

The Vikings job was Blevins’ last for an NFL team. But he continued to work with kickers individually, coaching at Emory & Henry College, in Emory, Va., and at East Tennessee State. He had agreed to join the staff at Tusculum University in Greeneville, Tennessee, before he was diagnosed with cancer.

Billy Taylor, Tusculum’s new head coach, was a player at East Tennessee State when Blevins was a student assistant coach.

“Doug drove into Coach Ayers’ office and said, ‘Coach, I’ve had cerebral palsy my whole life, but I’m a linebacker at heart,’” Taylor said by phone, recalling the conversation. “‘I love football and I want to be part of this.'”

In addition to his son, Roman, from his first marriage to Nenita Colon, which ended in divorce, Blevins is also survived by his parents; his daughter, Sarah Blevins, from his marriage to Nancy Duque, which also ended in divorce; his brother, Greg LaFon; his grandmother, Kathleen Hensley; and his stepmother, Carmen Blevins.

Blevins said his disability did not diminish his passion for coaching players in a specialty he knew so well.

‘Professional football is a results-oriented business’ he told Abilities.com, a website for the disabled. “Once people saw that I could create the results they wanted and achieve the right level of success, I was welcomed into the arena.”

The post Doug Blevins, Kicking Guru for College and NFL Players, Dies at 60 appeared first on USMAIL24.COM.

A look at the blunders that threw the college admissions season into disarray

Sabir Ansary — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 20:47:14 +0000

There were only days left to process a batch of applications for federal financial aid when Department of Education officials made a fateful discovery: 70,000 emails from students across the country, containing large amounts of vital data.

They sat untouched in an inbox.

That discovery last week set off a panicked, three-day scramble by more than 200 department employees, including Richard Cordray, the nation’s top student aid official, to read through each of the emails one by one and to extract crucial identifying information needed for the investigation. financial help. The future of the students depended on it.

“It needs to unravel,” Mr. Cordray told his staffers on Thursday, according to recordings of two consecutive meetings obtained by The New York Times. “So, you know, I’m getting pretty impatient.”

An exasperated employee replied, “We worked all night – literally – all night.”

It was another setback in the botched rollout of a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA, that millions of families and thousands of schools rely on to determine how students will pay for college. Three years ago, Congress directed the Department of Education to revamp the new form to make it simpler and more accessible. It has been anything but.

For nearly six months, students and schools had to navigate a bureaucratic mess caused by serious delays in launching the website and processing crucial information. A series of department blunders — from a haphazard rollout to technical glitches — have left students and schools in limbo and thrown into disarray the most critical phase of the college admissions season.

‘Hanging on by their fingernails’

In a normal year, students would be sorting through their financial aid offers by now, giving them plenty of time to prepare for the traditional May 1 decision day, when many schools expect commitments.

But this is not a normal year.

Due to the delays in the FAFSA rollout, schools do not have the information they need from the government to put together financial aid offers. Students have had to postpone decisions about where to go to college because they have no idea how much help they will receive.

Many schools are shifting their enrollment deadlines to give students more time to get their finances in order, throwing college budgets and waiting lists into chaos.

The Ministry of Education has pledged to meet Friday’s self-imposed deadline to send students’ financial information to schools. A Biden administration official, who requested anonymity to discuss details of the process, said the department had begun sending out “small batches” of data this weekend.

But the task ahead is monumental. The department is working with 5.7 million applications to date, but it is expected that more than 10 million additional applications will be received as students work their way through the process. still not functioning without delays.

“Financial aid offices across the country are hanging on by their fingernails right now,” said Justin Draeger, the CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

A broken system

The goal of the updated FAFSA system was to simplify the notoriously baffling form by reducing it from more than 100 questions under 40 years of age and more accessible to lower-income students.

But it wasn’t ready to roll out in October, when the FAFSA form usually becomes available for students to provide their family’s financial information to the government.

At the end of December, when the system was finally launched, the problems were immediately apparent.

Due to technical glitches, many students were unable to access the form on the website. Students reported being repeatedly kicked out or locked out, or hanging up after waiting 30 minutes to three hours for someone to answer the department’s helpline.

The botched rollout has upended a crucial function of the federal student aid process.

The government needs the FAFSA information to calculate how much federal aid students should receive. The schools, in turn, need that number to make their own calculations about how much a student should expect to pay at that specific college or university, after adding up tuition and any additional scholarships.

For many students, the FAFSA estimate, sometimes received before they even hear from one of the schools they applied to, is the first sign of hope that college is within reach.

Students in limbo

Andrea, a senior at KIPP Denver Collegiate High School in Colorado, will be the first person in her family to attend college. She has her sights set on Duke University.

But first she has to navigate the FAFSA.

“It’s painful,” said Andrea, 17, who asked to be identified by her first name to protect her parents, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico and are undocumented. “It goes deeper than a form. It is our future.”

Her case encountered perhaps the most pernicious flaw in the rollout: The new form froze applicants who couldn’t provide a Social Security number for themselves or their parent or guardian, something that wasn’t a problem with the old form.

To get students with missing social security information approved, the Ministry of Education asked applicants like Andrea to submit photos of a driver’s license, ID card or other documents that would verify their identity by email. As the department prepared to announce last week that the Social Security number issue had been resolved, officials realized the inbox and its 70,000 emails had gone untouched.

That prompted Mr. Cordray to put together emergency teams of volunteers who had to work overtime to clear the backlog.

The students, he said, trusted it.

“These are a lot of Dreamers, new immigrants and the kind of people who, if they can just lend a hand in the higher education process, can find their way to this country,” Mr. Cordray said. “We want them to be able to do that.”

Although the previous FAFSA form was long and complex, seniors at Andrea’s school were able to complete their forms without many incidents in recent years. KIPP Colorado, part of a network of public charter schools with some of the highest acceptance rates for low-income students in the country, hosts an annual FAFSA night, where families gather to fill out the form together.

This year, only about 20 percent of students at FAFSA night were able to complete the form — a huge change from previous years, school officials said.

Karen Chavez, assistant director of college and careers at KIPP Colorado, said she usually tried to reassure students that college was within reach.

But she is having difficulty with that message this year.

“It’s hard for us as counselors to have to pay attention to what I say or how I say things,” she said, “because I want to guard their hearts and manage their expectations.”

Who is to blame?

The Government Accountability Office has started one research in the rollout of the FAFSA at the request of Republicans, who say it took a back seat to other priorities, such as President Biden’s student debt forgiveness programs.

Several senior White House and Department of Education officials have cited unreasonably short timelines, contractors who missed deadlines and insufficient funding. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the issues openly, acknowledged that other key orders, such as restarting federal loan repayments and reopening schools after the coronavirus pandemic, were draining vital resources.

“It’s not like anyone here didn’t realize how important this project is or how big this project is,” said James Kvaal, deputy secretary of the Department of Education. “And it has been a top priority for us at the very highest levels of the department for a year and a half.”

There were obvious misses, such as a lack of robust user testing needed to catch dozens of major technical issues. And the Department of Education only realized in November that it had failed to adjust the critical income formula, which would have denied more than $1 billion in aid to students.

Even as the department tried to express optimism about progress, officials privately harbored doubts.

On February 13, Miguel A. Cardona, the education secretary, told reporters that once the technical issues were resolved, FAFSA would be a “15-minute process” and a “net win” for students and schools.

A week later, at a staff meeting, Mr. Cordray had a different assessment: “It’s really bad,” he said, according to people who heard the comments. “It could get worse.”

In response to a request for comment on this article, Mr. Cordray said the Department of Education’s focus was on providing an updated and streamlined FAFSA.

“Our team is not focused on pointing fingers,” he said, “but on getting more federal student aid to deserving students and families.”

Commitment

There is growing concern that FAFSA issues will disproportionately impact traditionally underserved communities, particularly Black, Latino, first-generation, and low-income students.

For many of them, the most important factor in choosing a university is how to pay for it.

Student advocates fear that many of them will simply give up, skip college or rely on expensive loans to pay for college.

“The equity stakes are enormous,” said Kim Cook, CEO of the National College Attainment Network. “The later those letters come, the more the conversation shifts from where to go or where to go.”

This month, the Ministry of Education began deploying personnel across the country to conduct a so-called… concierge service, supported with $50 million from the department’s budget to provide technical support to colleges struggling with the delays.

But as of last week, officials had met in person with only 20 of the 180 schools that had requested additional support, a senior department official said.

Lodriguez Murray, the senior vice president for public policy and government affairs at the United Negro College Fund, said the impact of the FAFSA delays could be similar to the devastation historically black colleges and universities experienced in 2011, when the government made it more difficult. for parents to obtain loans to help pay for their children’s education. Enrollment at HBCUs dropped by 40,000 in one year when aid flow was cut off.

“It is a crisis that seems unnecessary,” Mr. Murray said of the fallout from the FAFSA, “and one that we hope can still be averted.”

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A look at the blunders that threw the college admissions season into disarray

Sabir Ansary — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 17:04:32 +0000

They sat untouched in an inbox.

An exasperated employee replied, “We worked all night – literally – all night.”

‘Hanging on by their fingernails’

But this is not a normal year.

Many schools are shifting their enrollment deadlines to give students more time to get their finances in order, throwing college budgets and waiting lists into chaos.

The Ministry of Education has pledged to meet Friday’s self-imposed deadline to send students’ financial information to schools.

But the task ahead is monumental. The department is working with 5 million applications to date, but it is expected that more than 10 million additional applications will be received as students work their way through the process. still not functioning without delays.

“Financial aid offices across the country are hanging on by their fingernails right now,” said Justin Draeger, the CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

A broken system

The goal of the updated FAFSA system was to simplify the notoriously baffling form by reducing it from more than 100 questions under 40 years of age and more accessible to lower-income students.

But it wasn’t ready to roll out in October, when the FAFSA form usually becomes available for students to provide their family’s financial information to the government.

At the end of December, when the system was finally launched, the problems were immediately apparent.

The botched rollout has upended a crucial function of the federal student aid process.

For many students, the FAFSA estimate, sometimes received before they even hear from one of the schools they applied to, is the first sign of hope that college is within reach.

Students in limbo

Andrea, a senior at KIPP Denver Collegiate High School in Colorado, will be the first person in her family to attend college. She has her sights set on Duke University.

But first she has to navigate the FAFSA.

That prompted Mr. Cordray to put together emergency teams of volunteers who had to work overtime to clear the backlog.

The students, he said, trusted it.

This year, only about 20 percent of students at FAFSA night were able to complete the form — a huge change from previous years, school officials said.

Karen Chavez, assistant director of college and careers at KIPP Colorado, said she usually tried to reassure students that college was within reach.

But she is having difficulty with that message this year.

“It’s hard for us as counselors to have to pay attention to what I say or how I say things,” she said, “because I want to guard their hearts and manage their expectations.”

Who is to blame?

Even as the department tried to express optimism about progress, officials privately harbored doubts.

A week later, at a staff meeting, Mr. Cordray had a different assessment: “It’s really bad,” he said, according to people who heard the comments. “It could get worse.”

In response to a request for comment on this article, Mr. Cordray said the Department of Education’s focus was on providing an updated and streamlined FAFSA.

“Our team is not focused on pointing fingers,” he said, “but on getting more federal student aid to deserving students and families.”

Commitment

There is growing concern that FAFSA issues will disproportionately impact traditionally underserved communities, particularly Black, Latino, first-generation, and low-income students.

For many of them, the most important factor in choosing a university is how to pay for it.

Student advocates fear that many of them will simply give up, skip college or rely on expensive loans to pay for college.

But as of last week, officials had met in person with only 20 of the 180 schools that had requested additional support, a senior department official said.

“It is a crisis that seems unnecessary,” Mr. Murray said of the fallout from the FAFSA, “and one that we hope can still be averted.”

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NAACP asks college athletes to ‘reconsider’ attending Florida public schools

Jeffrey Bailey — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 16:58:46 +0000

In an open letter Published Monday, the NAACP urged black college athletes to “reconsider any possible decision” to attend a public university in Florida, after last week’s news that the University of Florida is eliminating its Diversity and Inclusion office.

The University of Gainesville decision came in response to a law signed last year by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that bans the state’s public universities from using state or federal dollars for diversity programs or activities. In a March 1 memo, the university announced it would eliminate 13 positions, including the Chief Diversity Officer, and reallocate $5 million it spent on DEI initiatives.

Monday’s letter, signed by NAACP Board Chairman Leon W. Russell and President and CEO Derrick Johnson, is addressed to NCAA President Charlie Baker and current and future college athletes. It predicts that “while the University of Florida may be the first, it won’t be the last.”

Six public universities in Florida – Florida, Florida State, Central Florida, South Florida, Florida Atlantic and Florida International – compete at the FBS level.

“Florida’s rampant anti-Black policies pose a direct threat to the progress of our young people and their ability to compete in a global economy,” Johnson said in a statement. “Diversity, equity and inclusion are paramount to ensuring fair and effective educational outcomes. The value that Black and other college athletes bring to major universities is unparalleled. If these institutions cannot fully invest in those athletes, it is time for them to take their talents elsewhere.”

The NAACP letter echoes the sentiment of former Gators executive Emmitt Smith, who wrote on March 3 that he was “completely disgusted by UF’s decision and the precedent it sets.”

In his statement, he said, “to the MANY minority athletes at UF: please be aware of this decision by the university, which is now closing its doors to other minorities without any oversight.”

pic.twitter.com/NkMvqkkHYes

— Emmitt Smith (@EmmittSmith22) March 3, 2024

In the school memo announcing the elimination of the DEI office, officials wrote: “The University of Florida is — and always will be — steadfast in our commitment to universal human dignity.”

The NCAA and the Florida governor’s office had not returned messages seeking comment by time of publication. On the day the University of Florida announced it would close its DEI office, DeSantis tweeted: “DEI is toxic and has no place on our public universities.”

(Photo: Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

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Thirty years ago, Chris Farley and college basketball collided in an unforgettable way

Jeffrey Bailey — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 14:42:19 +0000

Thirty years later, Christian Laettner isn’t sure he knew it was coming. He played in the NBA in 1994, his second season with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Maybe someone had informed his agent, but he doesn’t think so.

The former Duke star remembers seeing the commercial on ESPN one day. Chris Farley, then at the height of his “Saturday Night Live” glory, wearing Laettner’s No. 32 jersey, recreated his buzzer-beating shot against Kentucky, a signature moment in NCAA Tournament history.

“All I know is that it suddenly came out and it was hilarious and amazing,” Laettner said The Athletics.

Farley did three spots that aired on ESPN, all promoting college basketball, all remembered for the physical comedy and shenanigans that made Farley so beloved and famous.

In one spot was Michigan’s Farley Rumeal Robinson, who stood on the foul line and had to sink two free throws to win the 1989 national championship. “And he makes it look…” Farley says, before he shoots and misses, not once, not twice, but six times, and screams in famous Farley frustration (“GO IN!”) after each stone.

In another, he’s North Carolina’s Michael Jordan in the 1982 title game, but instead of sinking the winning jumper from the wing, Farley decides to take a step back (he was ahead of his time in this), rightly noting in the It came to an end that college basketball at the time did not have a three-point line.

But it’s the Laettner ad that is so fantastic, so funny, so Farley.

“Okay, I’m Christian Laettner,” the comedian begins, dressed in a sharp Duke uniform. “1992. Duke Kentucky. Kentucky is up by one, Christian has the ball. Two more seconds.”

Farley turns and faces five Kentucky defenders, life-size cutouts made of plywood. He dribbles and shoots a turnaround jumper, just like Laettner did that memorable afternoon in Philadelphia in the East Regional final.

No.

“From the glass!”

“Gets its own rebound!”

To miss.

“Loose ball!”

Farley ducks and knocks over a Kentucky cutaway. Finally, he makes a layup and raises his arms in celebration.

“The Duke wins! Game of the century,” Farley shouts. “And that is the way it happened! … Well almost.”

Actually, this is how it happened.

In 1993, Glenn Cole worked at Wieden+Kennedy, an ambitious advertising agency based in Portland, Oregon. Although today a global agency, Wieden+Kennedy at the time devoted much of its resources to one client, Nike. It was known from ‘Bo Knows’ and from Mars Blackmon who told Jordan: ‘Money, it has to be the shoes.’

A copywriter, Cole, 24, was the youngest at the company. A former sprinter at the University of Oregon, he loved the creativity and storytelling advertising offered, especially at Wieden+Kennedy. He described himself in that environment as an “idiot who was an intern half a minute ago.” But his superiors had enough of him to assign him an ESPN campaign that entailed a simple task.

Promote college basketball.

“I have the keys to this kind of cool car. No one is looking at it,” Cole said, referring to all the attention the company paid to Nike. “I have an ESPN basketball campaign. I watch ‘Saturday Night Live’ a lot. And I was obsessed with Chris Farley.

Cole had an idea. A common basketball moment: playing solo on a playground. Draw. Clock is running out. 3…2…1.

Yet the shot rarely falls. The countdown is reset. No game-winning heroics, just a tarmac victory.

“And so I thought it would be funny to mess with that trope,” Cole said. “And then I thought, ‘Oh my God, Chris would be the perfect person to do that.’”

Farley was approaching thirty and was a rising star. The New York Daily News had called him the breakout performer of SNL’s final season, someone who had brought the same kind of “volcanic, magnetic energy” as Eddie Murphy and John Belushi before him. His talent and comedy began to transfer to the big screen. “Tommy Boy,” starring Farley and David Spade, was set to premiere in 1995.

Even better in this case: Farley was a sports fanatic. He grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and played hockey and football. He had played club rugby at Marquette. On SNL, he played pickup hoops with castmates on 76th Street Basketball Court in Riverside Park.

“Chris was a gifted physical comedian,” said Doug Robinson, Farley’s agent. “And a lot of people don’t know that Chris was a really great athlete. He moved very well. He loved sports. So if Chris was going to do physical comedy, he would be committed to whatever he did.

Cole flew to Los Angeles to pitch the concept to Farley. ESPN asked if he had a backup plan in case Farley declined. “Of course,” Cole said.

Actually, he didn’t.

“I remember thinking, ‘This is a gamble,’” says Beth Barrett, producer of the campaign. “It was a time when it wasn’t as common as it is today for celebrities, famous athletes, comedians and musicians to sell out in commercials. It was almost a bad thing to be in a commercial.”

Cole met Farley in Farley’s hotel suite. Farley wore a tweed suit that was shoddy in design. Cole presented his vision and Farley understood immediately. The comedian got off the couch and started reenacting the Laettner spot. He knocked over a vase, which immediately made Cole realize, “Oh, I need to get something for you to knock over.”

“Yeah, this sounds like a lot of fun,” Cole remembers Farley saying. “Let’s do it.”

The spots were recorded days later in a Los Angeles studio. Nowadays, a celebrity would probably show up with some sort of entourage. But Larry Frey, the campaign’s creative director, recalls at the time that Farley’s manager arrived early and Farley later quit on his own. Spade came over around lunchtime.

“He literally looked like a 10-year-old kid, and they just called recess,” Frey said. “Full of energy. Like,”Hey guys! I’m probably going to screw it up today.‘Super self-mockery. Super excited. And just get started with it.”

They shot the spots in Michigan and North Carolina first, mainly because Cole knew what Farley had planned for Laettner and didn’t want to risk his star getting hurt.

(In addition to the ads, Farley also shot a series of promos that never aired. In the film below, Farley holds two stuffed animals and pantomimes a conversation about an upcoming rivalry game. Of course, the mascots soon attack each other, and then Farley, and the promo ends with a signature Farley outburst.)

For the Laettner spot, Cole gave simple instructions.

“Look, I’m going to put you on the three-point line,” he remembered telling Farley. “We’re going to start this piece the way everyone remembers it in our collective memory. And then look, man, try to make the shot, but if you don’t, just hurry up and try to finish the play and surprise me.

Farley, released.

Farley at his best.

He charged through cutouts of former Kentucky standouts Deron Feldhaus, John Pelphrey and Travis Ford, knocking them to the ground.

“A whirlwind,” Barrett said.

Good ideas don’t always translate. Cole knew immediately that this was the case.

“With each one of them, right after the first shot of each spot (all three), I was like, ‘Ah, f…, this is going to be incredible,’” he said.

In “The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts,” authors describe Tom Farley Jr. and Tanner Colby this period as the highlight of Farley’s life.

The comedian struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, but after visiting rehab in Alabama he tried to stay clean. Farley was confident and confident, the authors wrote, but it was ultimately a losing battle. In 1997, Farley died of an overdose at the age of 33.

When Cole and Barrett look back on that day in Los Angeles, the experience is as striking as the final product. Farley had performed on camera as usual. (After each take, he asked, “Was that funny?”) But he was also personable and engaging for the eight hours he was there.

“We would hang out in the green room between setups and he would ask questions and be interested in other people,” Barrett said. “And just being a bit of a dork. It was just one of those experiences that were quite rare in advertising, where you really got to know someone at the end of the day. It was pretty amazing.”

Farley and Cole had worked so well together, bantering back and forth and exchanging ideas, that Farley had asked him if he would be interested in writing for him at SNL. Cole panicked and thought, ‘What if I can’t put out great stuff every week?” It was an incredible offer, but Cole loved what he did. He refused.

“As far as I can remember, that was my third advertising project, but it was the first where I felt like I was working with someone to make something better than I or he could make on their own,” says Cole, who is now co- founder and chairman at 72andSunny, a global advertising agency.

A year or two after the commercials aired, Laettner was walking on a plane, about to board a plane. He doesn’t remember which airport or where he was going, but as soon as he boarded he saw a familiar face sitting in first class. It was Farley.

Like most celebrities, Farley looked down and tried not to be noticed, but he made eye contact with Laettner. Farley stood up and the basketball star and comedian hugged and laughed.

“Great commercial,” Laettner told him.

Chris Farley and Glenn Cole, backstage at the college basketball commercial shoot. (Courtesy of Glenn Cole)

(Top illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletics; photos and videos courtesy of Glenn Cole)

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Mexican agents shoot dead a student at the Rural Teachers College

Jeffrey Bailey — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 00:12:23 +0000

Mexican police officers shot dead a student at a rural teacher training college in the country’s western party on Thursday evening. The episode comes at a time of increasing tension between the government and the university’s students, linked to one of the worst atrocities in Mexico’s recent history.

The shooting occurred Thursday in Guerrero state after state police officers tried to stop a white pickup truck that had been reported stolen and was met with gunfire, according to state authorities.

Authorities said that in the ensuing shootout, one person in the vehicle, Yanqui Kothan Gómez Peralta, 23, was shot in the head by police and later died at a hospital. A second person in the truck was arrested and a firearm and drugs were found in the vehicle, police said.

Guerrero State Secretary General Ludwig Reynoso told reporters after the shooting that Mr Gómez Peralta was a student at the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos – a teacher training college in a rural area of Guerrero with a history of activism and social protest.

In 2014, a group of 43 students from the school were attacked by armed men, including local police officers whose commanders had taken direct orders from local drug traffickers – as evidenced by a trove of text messages, witness statements and investigative files.

The students were kidnapped and never seen again. Ten years later, the remains of only three bodies have been officially identified.

The teachers’ council on Friday condemned the actions of police in the pickup truck encounter, suggesting it was an unprovoked attack.

“One of our colleagues was brutally shot,” the school said in a statement. “We hold the state government directly responsible for the armed attack.”

State officials said they regretted the killing but explained that officers were responding to a crime.

“There is no attack on a student, because we did not know he was a student, but on a person who drove a vehicle with a theft report and did not stop at the request of the authorities,” said René Posselt. a spokesperson for the state government of Guerrero.

The killing of Mr. Gómez Peralta came days after a group of protesters rammed the wooden doors of the National Palacewhere the country’s president lives, demanding answers about the investigation into the case of the 43 missing students – which protesters said the government had halted.

The president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, downplayed the protest, calling it a provocation.

After the death of Mr. Gómez Peralta, some teacher training students staged a protest in Chilpancingo, the state capital, setting fire to a police vehicle.

José Filiberto Velázquez, a local minister and director of the human rights group Minerva Bello in Guerrero, said a third student who got out of the pickup to go to a nearby store alerted the college to what had happened.

Other students then called Mr. Velázquez, who disputed the official story that the students had attacked the police first.

“For us, this was an extrajudicial killing,” Mr. Velázquez said. “It is the result of a tendency to abuse power, of police violence that is already a habit.”

Santiago Aguirre, the lead lawyer representing the families of the 43 missing students, said there has been a pattern of disproportionate use of lethal force by state authorities in Guerrero, adding that human rights groups have documented cases of police officers destroying evidence at crime scenes posted.

“The prudent call is for a thorough investigation that is not conducted with bias and that exhausts all necessary lines of inquiry,” Mr. Aguirre said.

On Friday morning, Mr. López Obrador expressed his dismay over the killing of Mr. Gómez Peralta and said prosecutors would thoroughly investigate Thursday’s incident. He also reiterated his intention to get answers about what happened to the 43 missing students.

“We will not respond with violence in any way. We are not oppressors,” said Mr. López Obrador, whose government is leading the investigation into the missing students. “Knowing what happened, punishing those responsible and finding the young people – that is my commitment, and I am working on it.”

The teacher training college and the families of the missing students have criticized the government’s handling of the investigation.

Last year, a panel of international experts investigating the students’ kidnapping announced it was ending its investigation and leaving the country after members of the panel said they had been repeatedly lied to and misled by the Mexican armed forces about the military activities of the army. role in the crime.

A spokesman for the Mexican military said the Defense Ministry was no longer authorized to speak on the case of missing students.

“It is the president who is talking about this,” he said.

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How Connor Swindells became Sex Education’s sleeper success: College dropout who lost his mother aged 7 says he’ll go back to ‘building fences with his brother’ if acting work dries up – as he’s cast in Lockerbie drama

Sabir Ansary — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 04:44:28 +0000

He rose to renown by playing a troubled bully who struggled with his sexuality on Netflix’s Sex Education.

And now, five years later, Connor Swindells has become the hottest rising star to watch, following a series of hit performances across intense dramas including Vigil (2021) and SAS: Rogue Heroes (2022) – both by the BBC – and Autumn de Wilde’s Emma (2020).

He has also recently kicked off working on Lockerbie – a historical thriller about the 1988 bombing.

The 27-year-old’s career is soaring as he continues to prove his acting chops in challenging roles exploring real life tragedies, high-stakes plots and emotionally demanding performances.

He has also shown his range with more lighthearted comedic moments – including a cameo in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie as a Mattel intern.

In 2019, he landed the role of Adam Groff in Sex Education – a bully who, after struggling with his sexuality, learns about opening up to the people around him. Connor Swindells, left, pictured with Asa Butterfield in the show

Connor has a series of work lined up over the coming years, including parts in Scoop – a Netflix retelling of the scenes behind Prince Andrew’s notorious 2019 interview with Emily Maitlis – historical epic William Tell, and a festive romcom titled Jingle Bell Heist.

But despite his soaring success, the actor from West Sussex wasn’t a natural-born performer.

Albeit describing himself as the ‘runt of the litter’ surrounded by the ‘big, burly, physical, hard-working men’ that are his brothers to the Guardian, Connor started out as an athlete.

As a young man, he put ‘everything’ into boxing – but after his passion for it dried up, he didn’t have ‘anything to fall back on’.

In other reports, Connor has also said he simply didn’t feel like the sport was ‘him’ anymore.

‘I did terribly in school. It’s all or nothing with me,’ Connor – who dropped out of college aged 17, told Screen Daily in 2017.

Speaking with the Guardian in 2022, the star also explained that he makes sure never to forget his humble beginnings and working class background.

‘I know that, if this was all to go away, I would always have a place working with my brother building fences,’ he explained.

And now, five years later, Connor Swindells has become the hottest rising star to watch, following a series of hit performances across intense dramas including Vigil (2021) and SAS: Rogue Heroes (2022). Pictured with Sofia Boutella in SAS: Rogue Heroes

Speaking with the Guardian in 2022, the star also explained that he makes sure never to forget his humble beginnings and working class background. Pictured in 2020

‘During that storm, the crazy one – Eunice was it? – my fence blew down and my brother came up to London, and we were just digging holes in the garden for fence posts again.

‘And I thought, “God, it’s important that I don’t forget this.” As crazy as the industry can get, with these pockets of excitement, it’s easy to get lost in that. And it’s important to remember that you came from just digging holes in the earth.’

The actor has been open about his tight-knit family – he has three brothers – and has been equally candid when discussing how his mother Phoebe, who was of Romany traveller heritage, died from bowel cancer.

He was seven when she passed away, but Connor keeps her legacy alive with Instagram posts and videos supporting fundraising initiatives for the illness.

Last month, he raised more than £20,000 for Bowel Cancer UK as he took part in the Brighton Half Marathon.

‘My mum lost her battle with bowel cancer and now in honour of her fight – I will be doing this run for her and those we all know who have also been through this war,’ he wrote in the JustGiving page.

The actor (left) has been open about his tight-knit family – he has three brothers – and has been equally candid when discussing how his mother Phoebe (right), who was of Romany traveller heritage, died from bowel cancer

Last month, he raised more than £20,000 for Bowel Cancer UK as he took part in the Brighton Half Marathon. Pictured, a reminder of his late mother

‘With the bowel cancer stuff, it was always an anxiety of mine because not only had my mum passed away from bowel cancer, but her father had as well as my grandfather,’ he told a Square Mile interview two years ago.

‘So there was always this thing of like, “Oh, maybe it runs in the family.” My way of conquering that was to try and spread awareness.

‘And I think also it was just about trying to make my mum proud.’

Connor’s first role was as the lead in a theatre production of The Trial by Franz Kafka.

Soon success came along with appearances in Jamestown (2017) and Harlots (2017) – both period dramas – and The Vanishing (2018), a psychological thriller, and VS. (2018); VS., a movie about the underground rap scene in London.

In 2019, he landed the role of Adam Groff in Sex Education – a bully who, after struggling with his sexuality, learns about opening up to the people around him.

Speaking with GQ in 2022, the star revealed he felt ‘privileged’ to bring the fan-favourite to life and that it’s been ‘almost a fairy tale’.

And in 2021, he also told Attitude magazine how it helped him unpack his own understanding of masculinity.

‘My mum’s side of the family is really working class. I was talking to a friend about this today, in that your masculinity was shown by your endurance level’, he said.

In 2021, Connor told Attitude magazine how Sex Education helped him unpack his own understanding of masculinity. Pictured with co-stars Emma Mackey and Asa Butterfield

He has also shown his range with more lighthearted comedic moments – including a cameo in Greta Gerwig ‘s Barbie as a Mattel intern

He also opened up about how being in the industry also means there is a pressure to one-up each other – which he tries to ‘catch himself’ on. Pictured in July

‘As a labourer, if you could get through a full working day drinking half a bottle of water and [eating] one sandwich, that was considered masculine, which is probably something that not many people are aware of, because that stuff comes from working-class backgrounds, where they’re not wanting to speak about masculinity and the forms that it takes.’

He also opened up about how being in the industry also means there is a pressure to one-up each other – which he tries to ‘catch himself’ on.

Successes continued with yet another hit from Connor – a role as David Stirling in SAS: Rogue Heroes – which depicts the real-life events that were revealed at great length by historian Ben Macintyre in his 2016 book of the same name.

Connor portrayed a real life officer, who was described by Britain’s most senior military officer as ‘quite mad’.

‘It was a hard shoot,’ he told The i. ‘We were in the Moroccan sun for two and a half months… it got up to 49 degrees at one point.

‘At one point we had big ice coolers full of cold wet towels that in between takes we would put on the back of our necks.

‘But then we found out that that was giving people a fever.’

And Connor is travelling back to the past once again with his most recent project – an upcoming drama about the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Pictured: A file image of a policeman walking away from the damaged cockpit of the 747 Pan Am airliner that exploded and crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland

In an Instagram Story from today, Connor has revealed that he is ‘honoured to be telling this story’

And Connor is travelling back to the past once again with his most recent project – an upcoming drama about the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

The show recounts the terrorist attack which killed 259 passengers and crew – including 35 students from the University of Syracuse, along with 11 Lockerbie residents – after a Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded over the town in Dumfries and Galloway, 40 minutes into its flight from London to New York on December 21, 1988.

The TV series in development by Netflix and the BBC also features Jonathan Lee (Who Killed Jando) as the showrunner of the series, who co-wrote the drama alongside Gillian Roger Park (Flotsam).

Directing the series is Michael Keillor who previously directed and produced the thriller Roadkill, and directed episodes of Line of Duty.

A detailed synopsis of the Netflix/BBC version reads: ”A drama based on the real events surrounding the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and the joint Scots-US investigation which sought to bring the perpetrators to justice.

‘Lockerbie will focus on the investigation into the crash on both sides of the Atlantic and the devastating effect it had on the small town and the families who lost loved ones.

‘From the initial exhaustive search for evidence on the ground in Scotland, via the US and Malta to the trial at Camp Zeist in 2000, the drama goes right up to the most recent indictment at the end of 2022.’

In an Instagram Story from today, Connor revealed that he is ‘honoured to be telling this story’.

The post How Connor Swindells became Sex Education’s sleeper success: College dropout who lost his mother aged 7 says he’ll go back to ‘building fences with his brother’ if acting work dries up – as he’s cast in Lockerbie drama appeared first on USMAIL24.COM.