Lehigh's Big Weekend On The Road

Saturday and Sunday are packed with Lehigh sports to follow. Although the men's basketball team have been eliminated, the wrestling team is heading to Franklin & Marshall in nearby Lancaster, PA to wrestle in the EIWA championships. The games will be available with live audio from Lehighsports and live internet video from F&M, starting at 10:30AM Saturday with championship and consolation rounds starting 10:30AM Sunday morning.

Historically, Lehigh has been a national power in wrestling and has won a whopping 34 team championships. Lehigh's team, loaded with underclassmen, could be a dark horse for the championship this year, but with daunting Penn and Navy teams in their way it will be a tough go.

As important as the championships will be the opportunity to have Lehigh wrestlers qualify individually for the NCAA Championships in St. Louis, MO later in March. Last year Lehigh qualified seven wrestlers and hope to do so again. This year, Lehigh is hoping to get (most likely) a maximum of six: 133 lb Seth Ciasulli, 149 lb Trevor Chinn, 157 lb Dave Nakasone, 165 lb Mike Galante, 174 lb Alex Caruso, and heavyweight Justin Allen. The only senior here is Nakasone, which bodes well for the future.

The #3 seeded Lady Hawks (17-12, 9-5) hope to emerge from West Point, NY with a chance at the automatic bid to the NCAA Women's Basketball tournament. To do so, they'll have to beat the same Lafayette (14-15, 6-8) team that beat us twice earlier in the season, even though they're the #6 seed. A 7:30PM Saturday start for this Lehigh revenge match will be available on audio from LehighSports and on video through Patriot League all-Access.

With only one senior starter, the key of this game appears to be senior G Kaela Pearce and how she keeps the young team together in this tournament game. She has the experience to settle things down and beat these pesky Leopards. On Sue Troyan's blog she said that the Lady Hawks were uncharacteristic in making mistakes with a whopping 26 turnovers and 35% free throw shooting in their last game against the Leopards, a 59-43 loss. You've got to believe that they'll do a better job tomorrow night.

The key to this game will be defense: the last time out, Lehigh allowed G Cristin Zavocki to run wild on the outside and F Vanessa Van Der Venter to kill them underneath, on the way to having three Leopards scoring in double figures. Keeping the score down (and the turnovers down) will be the key to this game, I think, for the Lady Hawks.

The winner won't have much time to celebrate: should they win, they'll face the winner of the Holy Cross/Navy game at 3:30 Sunday. If Lehigh and Holy Cross both win, it would set up a very interesting second "revenge" matchup for the Lady Hawks who fell twice to the Crusaders during the regular season.

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago . Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled. Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season. The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League. W

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though? Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me? Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything. Everything. The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who

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