Major League Soccer’s opening weekend is just two days away and along with celebrating the league’s 25th anniversary the league will also be welcoming its two newest franchises in Nashville and Miami this season.
With the rise of social media, it’s easy for chatter to take over when it comes to the days leading up to sport trade deadlines or drafts. Insiders across the industry will rush to tweet out and scoop trades or rumors first in an effort to gain notoriety among fans.
The Seton Hall women’s golf team finished with another strong performance over the weekend, placing fourth in the Rio Verde Invitational out of a field of 18 teams. The Pirates continue to place within the top-five and have never placed farther than fourth throughout the whole 2019-2020 season.
Over the weekend, the Seton Hall softball team travelled to Conway, South Carolina to compete in the Chanticleer Classic. The team went 1-3.
The Seton Hall Pirates baseball team lost two out of three games this weekend against Liberty. The weekend began with promise after a 5-4 victory over the Flames on Friday afternoon but quickly turned south with back to back close losses on Saturday and Sunday. The stumbles against the Flames put the Pirates at 3-3 with ample time to go in the season, including the entirety of Big East play.
There are few things more wholesome than the excite- ment of parents watching and cheering on their kids from the sidelines. The atmosphere of youth sports games is dictated by father-coaches yelling and stereotypical soccer moms devoting their time to be the team mascot. Unfortunately, as the kids grow older and they begin to filter out by who has the potential to play in college and who does not, these age- old tropes retire from their unwritten roles in the team.
In a college basketball landscape that features prolific one-and-done freshman stars year in and year out, the Big East continues to thrive on player development and veteran success. The last one- and-done to attend a Big East School was Henry Ellenson of Marquette in 2015-16. Ellen- son was drafted 18th overall in the 2016 NBA Draft to the Detroit Pistons. He is the only player to truly be one- and-done in the Big East since the conference’s realignment in the 2014-15 season.
Excitement, upsets, and under appreciation are all things that seem to happen withing the Big East conference of the NCAA men’s basketball program. How- ever, if there was one thing these teams are not used to, it is one and done basketball players.
If you ask the basketball gods how they would have ended the 74-72 nail-biting victory for Seton Hall over Butler on Wednesday night, it happened exactly like it they would have liked.
No. 10 Seton Hall, once down by as many as 25, stormed back on the road at Providence but saw time run out as the Friars defeated the Pirates 74-68 behind a career-night from Alpha Diallo.
Myles Cale was relegated to riding the pine to start the game on Feb. 5 against Georgetown. For the 6-foot-6 junior, it was the first time that he was not on the floor for the opening tip for Seton Hall since his freshman year – the Round of 32 loss to Kansas that ended the Pirates’ hopeful March run.
When it comes to college hoops, regional rivalries have consistently dominated the minds of local fans and created. In New Jersey, Rutgers and Seton Hall sit just 30 miles from each other and have left New Jersey split. The schools grew a disdain for each other during their 23 years together in the Big East, but conference realignment has stripped the rivalry of the in-conference stakes that the matchups once included. While the Big East provided a framework for Rutgers and Seton Hall to face once, twice, or even three times each season, the split has put each school into a position to make an effort to face the other each year creating a novelty to a once frequent rivalry.
The women’s golf team and coach Natalie Desjardins enter the spring with high expectations. The team is seasoned and experienced, due in large part to the production of its four seniors, Lizzie Win, Maddie Sager, Sammie Staudt and Carolina Ronchel-Salas. Desjardins came to Seton Hall in 2017 from LIU Brooklyn, arriving in South Orange a year after three of her seniors did. Desjardins’ defection from LIU spurred Ronchel- Salas to join the Pirates.
For the four upperclassmen on the men’s golf team, the desire to win more has been brewing for four years.
On a baseball team full of experience, David Festa adds to that despite being only a sophomore. The University’s reigning Freshman Athlete of the Year is one of the pivotal starting pitchers on a team with hopes of capturing the conference crown. Already holding the role of a weekend starter, it is known Festa is one of the most important cogs of the Pirate program after an impressive first season.
As Myles Powell launched up a three with 1.4 seconds left and saw it fall, the usually exuberant superstar looked defeated instead in a clear indication of the effort his team put forth against a steady Creighton team on Wednesday night. Powell finished at an abysmal 3-for-16 overall from the field and 1-for-11 from beyond the arc as Seton Hall fell, 87-82, for the second straight time at the Prudential Center.
Sunday marked National Girls and Women in Sports Day in South Orange, and Walsh Gymnasium was jam-packed with celebratory honors and momentous odes to the sporting world’s best female superstars for a critically important Big East matchup with nationally ranked DePaul.
Solutions by The State News
