We don’t hear much from UC Santa Cruz, which hasn’t had much to talk about in basketball. (Perhaps if we covered soccer or tennis we might hear from the home of the Banana Slugs.) But another reason we don’t hear from them is that the department is extremely poorly funded, and is at the mercy of the student body. The students narrowly voted down a proposal to increase their own fees to better fund the department.
The local paper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, has written a couple of stories on the endangered species, first a news story, then a column. They’re worth reading, even if the columnist’s math is a little fuzzy, claiming the men’s basketball team pushed close to a .500 record (they finished 9-18).
I think what the writer probably meant is what they’ve won about .500 as many games as they lost… 😉
No wonder Nicholas Vita transferred from UC-Santa Cruz to Fordham, a D-I Atlantic 10 school, after the 2003-04 academic year. Here’s a link to his bio.
http://www.fordhamsports.com/playerprofile.asp?PlayerID=1015&TeamID=120&SN=Men's%20Basketball
Looks like he was serious about wanting to play basketball. He tried out for Fordham’s basketball team as a walk-on in the 2004-’05 season and won a spot on the roster. His stats as a junior weren’t much, but he contributed this past season with the followng stats:
32 Nicholas Vita…… 32-9 376 11.8 29-76 .382 0-4 .000 10-17 .588 43 50 93 2.9 45 0 24 27 2 9 68 2.1
If you can’t read that, he started 9 out of 32 games, averged 11.8 minutes, 2.9 rebounds and 2.1 popints per game. Not bad for a kid who chose to drop down from D-III to D-I
Good pieces, and the column was especially impassioned and well-reasoned, even though the columnist blew it when it came to assessing the Banana Slugs’ record last season. But it bothers me — and probably nobody else 🙂 — that the [i]Santa Cruz Sentinel[/i] doesn’t know the difference between “tact” and “tack”.
Their Men’s Volleyball program is ranked in the top 10 nationally