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After 36 years as the skipper of the Wichita State Shockers, Gene Stephenson was fired as head baseball coach on Tuesday. In 36 seasons at the helm, Stephenson won 20 regular season MVC title, 18 MVC tournament titles, appeared in 7 College World Series and won the Valley’s only college baseball national championship in 1988.

Link to Wichita Eagle report: Sexton says Gene Stephenson’s 36-year Wichita State tenure could’ve ended differently

You can discuss this and more on the MVCfans.com baseball message board

Missouri Valley Conference tournament champion Wichita State saw their season end with a 3-1 loss to Arkansas in the NCAA baseball tournament on Saturday afternoon.

Full report from Wichita Eagle.

Kansas State scored 9 runs in the bottom of the first inning and cruised to a 20-11 victory over Wichita State on Friday afternoon in Manhattan, KS. It was the most runs ever surrendered by a Wichita State team in NCAA play.

The 4th seeded Shockers will play the loser of the Arkansas vs Bryant game at 3pm on Saturday in an elimination game.

]]> http://www.mvcfans.com/wp/2013/05/31/ncaa-baseball-regional-kansas-state-20-wichita-state-11/feed/ 0 http://www.mvcfans.com/wp/2013/05/26/wichita-state-wins-18th-mvc-baseball-tournament-title/ http://www.mvcfans.com/wp/2013/05/26/wichita-state-wins-18th-mvc-baseball-tournament-title/#comments Sun, 26 May 2013 13:22:49 +0000 admin http://www.mvcfans.com/wp/?p=3594

 

NORMAL, Ill. – Wichita State won its 18th Missouri Valley Conference Tournament title with a 5-2 win over Illinois State.

Cale Elam pitched seven innings and allowed two runs on eight hits with no walks and seven strikeouts to earn the win, while Aaron LaBrie pitched two shutout innings with three strikeouts to earn the save.

link: Shockers wins MVC tournament title

The pairings for the 2013 NCAA Division I Baseball Championship bracket will be announced on May 27 at Noon ET on ESPNU.

From: MVC-Sports.com

Illinois State earned its first-ever outright MVC regular-season title after finishing 16-5 in league play – and the Redbirds have earned the tournament’s top seed. The Redbirds were also regular-season co-champions in 2010, sharing with Wichita State.

Illinois State enters the tournament on the heels of a five-game winning streak after taking all three matchups this weekend against Southern Illinois and the final two against Evansville the previous weekend.

The Redbirds will host the MVC baseball tournament beginning on May 21. Click here to see the full tournament bracket: 2013 MVC baseball tournament bracket

As I sat and ate lunch today I started to punch out my admittedly way too early initial effort in ranking the MVC mens basketball teams for 2014.  There’s only so much that can be entered in 140 characters, but here is the quickie version.

MVC Power Rankings:

1) Wichita St – will be near unanimous first place pick. How much will the Shockers miss Armstead and more importantly, Carl Hall?
2) Indiana St - return everyone from last season.
3) UNI - I predicted them too high last season at #2. Hope I don’t make same mistake.
4) Bradley – might be too high, but Lemon Jr is a stud.
5) Missouri St – will last year’s star frosh develop or slump? High ceiling here.
6) SIU – Salukis showed progress last season and could jump up here.
7) Evansville – replacing Colt Ryan is tough assignment for Marty
8 ) Loyola - I put Ramblers here acknowledging I have a lot of homework to do.
9) Illinois St – massive holes to fill in Normal
10) Drake – New coach could make for a rough season.

 
You can discuss this and more on the MVCfans.com message board

With a simple tweet, Creighton fans breathed a sigh of relief when two time All-American Doug McDermott announced that he would return to Creighton for his senior season.

Doug McDermott @dougmcd3

I will be returning to Creighton for my senior year and can’t wait to put on that uniform for one more season!

 

At a press conference on Thursday afternoon, McDermott said, “I was in my dad’s office and we were going over some things. That’s when it hit me. I told him I think I’m ready to come back.

I went with my gut on this one. My heart has been telling me all along to stay, but my mind tried to take over a couple of times. I just ended up trusting myself that I was making the right decision.”

So, the Missouri Valley Conference is accepting Loyola as its replacement for Creighton on the way out the door. No, they don’t average 15,000 fans per game. No, they haven’t been to the tournament since before every Division I basketball player today was born. No, they haven’t been relevant in the Horizon League for seven years, and only briefly then.

You should be ecstatic with the move made by your conference leadership. Let me tell you why, from the perspective of someone who has been a rival to Loyola for a long time.

First off, Loyola is a first class university. This is a bona fide Jesuit institution – the largest in the country at 15,000 – with a medical school and law school of decent size. Like most urban universities, they have a central campus and then spread themselves around town. Loyola’s main campus is where the undergrads live and take most of their classes. It’s also the home of the Gentile Arena, their home for basketball.

And that’s what you care about at the end of the day, right? Basketball. So why get excited about a team that is second only to Youngstown State as the worst basketball program in the Horizon League since 2000? The answer is investment.

Over the past six years, Loyola’s aging fan base has grown restless. The program had a large following in the 1950’s that started to decline in the 1960’s through the 1980’s, and their diehards are getting up there in years. You’ll find that even on their message board, many fans are 70+. I can’t tell you how many cultural references you’re not going to get.

They are passionate, but they are restless. These are doctors, lawyers and businessmen with big pockets who watched the program decline as the last few Presidents at the school did not believe that Loyola basketball could be a major asset to the university.

That all changed when the restless, aging fan base decided to put major pressure on President Michael J. Garanzini to invest heavily in men’s basketball. What you see today are the foundations of a great program built on the last few years of big money and big commitment to growing the program.

Hiring Porter Moser may not seem like a big step for an MVC school (he wasn’t so hot at Illinois State), but this is the school that has routinely dipped into D-II and D-III for coaches. Jim Whitesell spent his entire career in the lower levels before coming up to Loyola. Moser had been a head coach, and he was a highly successful assistant for Rick Majerus afterward at SLU. If he were still there, that might be his team instead of Jim Crews’.

Moser got significantly more money than any coaching hire previously at Loyola, which was a big part of them getting off on the right foot. They were far from over.
If hiring Moser was about getting off on the right foot, the Gentile Arena project was taking a ten-food broad jump. The university tore down old Alumni Gym, making way for a renovation of the Gentile Center, addition of a student union and construction of the Norville Center, a practice, training and office center exclusively for intercollegiate athletics.

There’s no understating the level of commitment Loyola has put together in the last couple years. That fan base is getting old, and they are trying their hardest to return Loyola to the national prominence of their youth – one told me following our 2011-12 game in Chicago, “We want a national championship within ten years.”

That should give you an idea of what’s going on here. First off, these old grippers can be insane. But they’re also rich and can make things happen that wouldn’t be possible at any other Horizon League school. For instance, it’s been reported that Loyola has promised to raise their athletics budget to $15 million when joining the MVC. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if 90% of that was new donations.

They’re hungry, and they’re running out of time – at least the generation that is opening its pocketbooks now. They’re more open with the money they have, because they want to turn the program into a big-time winner before, you know, they won’t see it.

I think what you have is Loyola going all-in, shoving its chips toward the center of the table and trying to recapture the glory that was Loyola basketball. And it was glorious – it can’t be understated how much the program has been sustained, even in lean years, by the generation that is now in its 70’s and 80’s. Those were the people who grew up knowing Loyola as a national power, and they’re willing to do everything they can to get back there.

They feel like moving to the MVC is another step. I think so too. And I think the MVC should be more than happy. There are a lot of advantages to having Loyola, and some of the disadvantages at the school aren’t really a big deal.

What I’m speaking to specifically is the Gentile Arena renovation. The first time MVC fans will go there, they’ll think “wow this is small.” It’s about 4,000 seats, smaller than the Horizon League’s minimum capacity rule. They could have built it bigger. It’s hard to explain why this is okay to MVC fans, but I’m going to give it a shot.

I’ve often read people looking down their nose at Horizon League schools for small attendance. After all, Horizon cities are typically much bigger and attendance should reflect that. But you can’t overstate the impact of having to be the second or third option in town, even in just basketball. Here in Milwaukee, the Panthers are overshadowed by the Brewers, the Bucks, and Marquette. Add in the fact that many people would prefer to watch Badgers and Packers on television than come to a Panther game, and you’ll see why we struggle to pack even the small gym we moved into for this season (hopefully only this season).

At Loyola, they’ve got five million people, sure, but they also have the Bears, Bulls, White Sox, Cubs, Northwestern and DePaul to compete with – not to mention all of the minor-league and mid-major schools like the Chicago Wolves, Sky, UIC, Chicago State and more. Or that Chicago has practically a million things to do on any given night, and the best musical acts always come through the city.

So please, give Loyola the benefit of the doubt when it comes to attendance. That doesn’t mean they’re less committed or their fans less rabid. It means that there’s other stuff going on.

They’re committing a lot of money to athletics, and specifically men’s basketball. They’ve hired a coach who they think is going to take them to the next level, and if he doesn’t they’ve got more than enough money to can him and find someone who does. Loyola’s got an aging fan base, but they’re rabid and extremely hungry for a national title. The difference between today and six years ago isn’t that, but rather that their President finally understood his legacy is judged partly by the basketball program and he is now willing to put it front and center.

Loyola is going to experience a boom in the next few years. My only regret is that they didn’t do this ten years ago.