Pullman campus
has rainy day commencement backup plan
April 24, 2018 WSU Insider
By Linda
Weiford, WSU News
To ensure a sunny sendoff for WSU Pullman graduates, a
rain plan is in place for the May 5 commencement.
Just in case.
Even though the ceremony is held inside the Beasley
Coliseum, students and faculty line up outside before filing into the building
for the processional, when thousands of audience eyes are upon them.
Last year, students and others found themselves lining up
in a chilly downpour with wind gusts of up to 20 mph prior to the 8 a.m.
commencement ceremony.
“I have been doing this for 20 years and last year was
the first time we had to cancel the processional of undergraduates and their
faculty members and have them come inside to get out of the rain,” recalled
commencement operations manager Teri Hansen. “It was not something we decided
on in a whim, it was miserable out there.”
To prevent rain from clouding future commencement events,
an inclement weather plan has been created. It applies to undergraduate
students and general faculty only, the largest group that assembles outdoors
for the line-up. The other commencement groups are small enough that they can
line up in the tunnel entrance to the coliseum in the event of heavy rainfall,
said Hansen.
Commencement officials will monitor weather reports early
graduation morning. If heavy rain is predicted, a text message will be sent to
all registered undergraduates and general faculty of that specific ceremony to
alert them that the outdoor lineup and processional has been cancelled due to
bad weather. Alternate instructions will be provided and ceremony participants
will be ushered inside the coliseum in an organized manner.
To ensure that the rain plan notification system is
functioning properly, all registered undergraduate students and general faculty
will receive a test text message on April 30.
Should the real thing have to be activated the day of the
ceremony, heavy rain will be to blame — not drizzle or snowfall, said Hansen.
“In that case, it’s better to have the processional as
planned with all the pomp and circumstance,” she said. “There’s something
magical about emerging from the tunnel onto the main floor — the smiles, the
music and selfies – with audience members watching all around them.”
For a look at commencement ceremonies scheduled at WSU’s
Spokane, Tri-Cities, Vancouver and Everett campuses, go to:
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Grip on Sports: The NCAA wants to grab more power over
basketball but should it have it?
Wed., April 25, 2018, 7:58 a.m.
From Vince Grippi Spokane S-R Sports
A GRIP ON SPORTS • The NCAA has made its big
announcement. The organization, under fire since the FBI decided to use its
weight investigating the money pit that is college recruiting, says it wants to
change its ways. But will it work? Read on.
• Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has dealt
with rogue nations, political conventions and the Stanford faculty lunchroom.
But one has to wonder if she’s ever had to deal with a more byzantine
institution than the NCAA. The complexity of the organization’s recruiting
rules, its lack of transparency and its general vindictiveness may be beyond
the pale of anything Rice has dealt with over the years.
We will find out over the course of the next few months
if the NCAA is really committed to implementing reform, even the
not-really-going-to-fix-much reforms proposed by Rice’s committee.
Let’s recap: About seven months ago the FBI and a federal
prosecutor in New York shook the basketball recruiting world with charges and
indictments of college assistants, shoe company employees and would-be agents.
Since then, the NCAA, the organization that oversees college athletics, has
been playing the role of Captain Renault, basically saying it was shocked to
find out such corruption was occurring. And that something had to be done about
it.
Hence Rice’s commission. And its recommendations.
Reading through the commission’s proposals, proposals
NCAA president Mark Emmert wants turned into rules by the end of summer, it’s
obvious the organization wants more control over basketball and basketball
players before those players enter college – if they do at all.
In simpler words, more power.
But should the NCAA have it?
That’s the $6 billion-dollar question. Can the NCAA be
trusted with the power to give coaches a lifetime ban, the power to milk every
dollar out of grassroots basketball, the power to approve agents?
The past tells us no. Resoundingly no.
The NCAA, like all organizations, is made up of people.
And people, no matter who they work for, can be exemplary. But they also can be
corrupt, can be petty, can be haughty. Most of all, though, they can be
vindictive.
If you don’t believe they are already, then you haven’t
been paying attention.
There is a trial going on in Los Angeles documenting all
those traits in the case of USC football, Reggie Bush and Bush’s family. The
plaintiff in the case is Todd McNair, the former USC assistant coach. He might
not be St. Francis of Assisi, but he also probably isn’t the Boris Badenov as
the NCAA portrayed him. There just isn’t enough evidence to support his
show-cause ban.
And yet here we are, years after the sanctions were
handed down – and their expiration – in a courtroom trying to figure out why
the NCAA had folks who seemed to be out to get McNair and USC.
This is the organization that had one member institution
protect Jerry Sandusky and another employ Larry Nassar, that organization that
a couple years ago made it harder for anyone to see how the millions in shoe
money was spent at its colleges and universities, the organization that did not
punish a school, North Carolina, for holding fake classes for athletes, the
organization that let Baylor basically skate after years and years of sexual
assaults.
And it wants more power?
That doesn’t seem like the right thing to do.
::::::::::::::::
April 24, 2018 / Baseball
From WSU Sports Info
COUGARS OPEN ROAD TRIP AT SEATTLE U
WASHINGTON STATE (13-20, 5-10 Pac-12) at SEATTLE U
(26-11, 8-4 WAC)
Bellevue, Wash. | Bannerwood Park
April 25, 2018 |
Wednesday, 3 p.m.
PROBABLE STARTERS
Bryce Moyle | FR | LHP | 0-0, 6.91 ERA, 14 K, 14.1 IP at
Dawson Day | FR | LHP | 1-1, 5.40 ERA, 26 K, 28.1 IP
COUGARS OPEN ROAD TRIP WEDNESDAY AT SEATTLE U
Washington State opens a four-game road trip with a
nonconference matchup Wednesday at Seattle U. First pitch is set for 3 p.m. at
Bannerwood Park in Bellevue, Wash.
FOLLOW ALONG
Follow all the season's action on the Washington State
baseball official twitter page @CougBaseball, instagram page @Coug_Baseball and
wsucougars.com. Links to live stats and radio streams will be available at the
baseball schedule page on wsucougars.com. Every home game will be webstreamed
through wsucougars.com.
ON DECK
The Cougars will faced Washington for a three-game
weekend series with all three games televised on the Pac-12 Network. The Friday
and Saturday contests are set for 7 p.m. while Sunday's finale is set for 1
p.m.
…….
FOOTBALL from Spokane S-R
Washington State center Fred Mauigoa has spent spring
camp refining snapping technique
UPDATED: Tue., April 24, 2018, 10:48 p.m.
By Theo Lawson /// Spokane Spokesman-Review
PULLMAN – After completing a group interview at Martin
Stadium, Fred Mauigoa walked over to collect a few things before trotting off
the field. He picked up a gray helmet with a crimson Cougar head and the
football he’d stuffed inside of it.
After Washington State’s 15th and final spring practice,
the helmet is stowed away inside a locker. It won’t be extracted by Mauigoa for
another three months – not until the team returns to Pullman for fall workouts.
As for the Cougar-branded football? That’s not leaving
him anytime soon.
This spring, WSU’s starting center has encountered some
unexpected turbulence snapping the football. He’s been more consistent as of
late and finished spring camp on a good – and accurate – note, but Mauigoa is
still trying to improve, and he’s found there’s no better way to do that then
by building muscle memory through constant repetition.
So, where Mauigoa goes, the football goes.
“Last spring we had some problems, too,” Mauigoa said
Tuesday in Pullman. “Me and Noah (Osur-Myers), we got to take a ball home. I’ve
been snapping all over the place. Snapping in the house, snapping outside,
snapping in the hallways.”
Mauigoa’s first season as WSU’s full-time starting center
was mostly trouble-free. In 2017, the Cougars aired it out more than anybody
else in the country, attempting 713 passes – 72 more times than the second-highest
team on the list, New Mexico.
That means approximately 700 times over the course of the
season, Mauigoa was counted on to deliver an accurate snap to his quarterback,
who in Mike Leach’s Air Raid typically sets up 5 to 6 yards behind the line of scrimmage
in a shotgun formation and expects a clean ball to the chest each time.
That’s enough pressure for any center, let alone someone
who’d never started a game and faced the tall task of replacing Riley Sorenson,
a longtime fixture at the position.
But it was mostly smooth sailing for the 6-foot-3,
310-pound native of Tafuna, American Samoa. He didn’t botch many snaps, and
center suddenly became a position of strength, rather than uncertainty, for the
Cougars.
Which makes Mauigoa’s recent struggles even more
perplexing.
“I think it’s just myself, forgetting how I usually snap
and where I put my fingers on the ball,” Mauigoa said. “It’s all up to me,
because last season I didn’t have a single problem and obviously it just came
up.”
Said Leach early in spring camp: “He’s snapped 13 games
worth of snaps and now all the sudden we’re chasing snaps around. So he’s got
to get that right and just concentrate.”
Repetition has been helpful. Between WSU’s practices and
the time Mauigoa spends honing his craft on his own, the junior estimates he
fires a football between his legs 250 times a day.
“Maybe 300,” he said.
In his Pullman apartment, Mauigoa enlists help from Liam
Ryan, an offensive lineman who willingly catches his roommate’s snaps whenever
the two have downtime.
Refining his mechanics has also helped.
One fix he made was placing the ball farther away from his
body, rather than directly underneath it. First-year offensive line coach Mason
Miller detected that early on and made an immediate correction.
“The one thing that Coach Miller found out about my
snapping is the ball was right below me,” Mauigoa said. “I had to put some
distance, and it really helped me. Since he found out about that, he told me
about it and we’ve been working on it, and it’s doing pretty good.”
He’d done it the right way last season, but fell into
some bad habits at some point this spring.
“It’s the same thing. It’s just, I forgot about it,”
Mauigoa said. “I forgot, really, where to put the ball, and it was all me.”
An offensive line that has to replace three starters this
fall doesn’t need anything else to worry about. Mauigoa assures he won’t be one
of them.
“It was good today and the past three, four practices,”
he said. “That’s a good thing; we don’t need any bad snaps. Right now,
everything’s together.”
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From The Press Box with Larry Weir
April 24, 2018 - WSU broadcaster Matt Chazanow weighs in
on Cougar baseball, basketball
Larry Weir and Jim Allen break down the latest from
Eastern Washington, where a new athletic director could be hired any day and
spring football is in its final week; then Larry talks with WSU broadcaster
Matt Chazanow for the first of two interviews: Today, they look at baseball and
basketball.
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