Staffers reflect on years of Spartans sports memories
Four SN seniors describe their two favorite sports memories while at MSU.
Four SN seniors describe their two favorite sports memories while at MSU.
When the Lansing Lugnuts and the MSU baseball team peer across the field at each other in their respective dugouts, they’ll see players of a different level and a different age.
With the Big Ten title from last year and three tournament wins this season, the No. 16 MSU women’s golf team heads to Penn State this weekend for the Big Ten Championships with high hopes.
The first three innings of the MSU baseball team’s game against Toledo on Wednesday at Kobs Field looked like the makings of an offensive slugfest.
Despite sweeping Oakland in Wednesday’s doubleheader that lasted four hours, it was a rough victory for the MSU softball team.
There’s no denying it: Chris Roberts was slumping. Through the MSU baseball team’s first 10 games of the season, the sophomore left fielder was hitting .167 and he wasn’t feeling like himself.
Before this season, Chris Cullen bounced around the MSU baseball team’s pitching staff without any firm role. But with a little help from pitching coach Tom Lipari and some offseason work, the senior right-hander has developed into arguably the team’s most dependable starting pitcher, a place head coach David Grewe plans to keep him.
MSU men’s head basketball coach Tom Izzo has landed another recruit for the 2009-2010 season. Six-foot-9, 275-pound center Derrick Nix verbally committed to MSU, according to the scouting Web site Rivals.com.
A senior-year, season-ending knee injury followed by microfracture surgery is a situation most typical 18-year-old basketball players would have no idea how to bounce back from.
The MSU softball team doesn’t seem to follow any predictable pattern. The Spartans split a two-game series against Purdue and ended the weekend by splitting a doubleheader Sunday against Indiana.
MSU football fans turned out in droves for the intrasquad game Saturday, but some fans had the chance to watch from a place few would normally expect.
MSU baseball coach David Grewe went into this weekend’s series with Michigan saying the matchup wasn’t a rivalry because one team — the Wolverines — always comes out on top.
It wasn’t one wide receiver who stepped up in Saturday’s spring game — it was four. And that depth is important for a football team that lost eight touchdowns and 1,260 receiving yards when Devin Thomas declared for the NFL draft after last season. With Thomas watching from the sideline, the young receiving corps of sophomore Mark Dell, redshirt freshmen B.J. Cunningham and Chris D. Rucker and junior Blair White stole the show at MSU’s annual spring game.
The MSU men’s tennis team was as hot as the temperature on Saturday against Northwestern, but it went cold against Wisconsin on Sunday.
It wasn’t trash-talking — senior defensive tackle Justin Kershaw wanted to make that clear — but there’s an air of confidence surrounding the White team as the MSU football team heads into its annual spring game.
MSU women’s basketball head coach Suzy Merchant announced the signing of a third recruit for the 2008-09 season on Thursday. Joining Porsche Poole and Courtney Schiffauer in signing a National Letter of Intent is Taylor Johnson.
Walking by a Ping-Pong table, gaming consoles and shelves of shining trophies filled with Spartans history, Sam Puryear’s office sits with the door wide open. Upon accepting the head coaching job at MSU in August, Puryear left Stanford, a Pac-10 team that just won the national championship.
When the MSU baseball team and Michigan meet for four games this weekend, they’ll travel a short distance to each other’s home fields, but MSU coach David Grewe won’t refer to the cross-state showdown as a “rivalry.”
The MSU softball team will try to bounce back from a lackluster weekend to battle Purdue in a two-game weekend series. But it won’t be easy, especially for a team that’s slumped as of late, MSU head coach Jacquie Joseph said.
If one team heavily beats up on the other during Saturday’s intrasquad spring game, MSU football head coach Mark Dantonio won’t be pleased.