Showing posts with label women's soccer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women's soccer. Show all posts

Monday, May 4, 2009

Swimming through some thoughts

If you woke up like me this morning, opened your front door, and walked barefoot across cold, wet (recently sprinklered) cement to get to your newspaper -- which for some reason is always left as far as humanly possible from my front door -- then you may have noticed this story.

Work is set to start later this year on Fresno State's new, $7.5 million aquatics center. We've known for a while this was in the campus master plan, but the fact that it's happening this soon, one year after women's swimming & diving was reinstated at Fresno State, is somewhat of a surprise...albeit a pleasant one. The North Gym pool is greatly outdated, and not wow-factor enough or large enough for a university like Fresno State.

Problem is, this announcement is coming just one year after women's lacrosse was born at the university, and ground also broke on a new women's soccer/lacrosse stadium smack dab in the middle of the greatest tailgate spot in the West -- the Red Lot on Cedar & Barstow. When announcement came that lacrosse was the school's newest sport, many were scratching heads as to why. Some even argued the school should have started a women's water polo program instead with hordes of local talent available and absolutely zero local talent in lacrosse.

The biggest argument against that was that Fresno State would then have to build a new aquatics center. Well, here it is. So is Fresno State planning to add another women's sport to maximize use of what will be a sparkling new facility? Or maybe even (do I dare think it?) a men's team?

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Bad news for the soccer 'Dogs

Apparently Fresno State women's soccer coach Steve Springthorpe is headed off to coach at NC State, a team that finished 11th in the ACC last season.

Springthorpe led Fresno State to each of the past four WAC tournament championship games, as well as two NCAA tournaments (2005, 2008). Considering the short time Fresno State has had a women's soccer program, they've experienced a solid amount of success.

It's a tough pill to swallow for Springthorpe to leave now, when the school has already started construction on a new women's soccer and lacrosse stadium that will take up a huge chunk of the Red Lot on Cedar and Barstow avenues, one of the premier tailgating areas in all of college football (at least from my personal experience).