As we come to the end of another glorious season of Brown Athletics, it’s important to take a second to sit back and think about all the wonderful moments we’ve spent watching Brown teams succeed on and off the field this year. Let’s dash through season recaps for every one of our 37 varsity sports:

Baseball: A 7-33 finish, including 3-17 in Ivy League play, marks a successful and unprecedented effort by the baseball team to win even fewer games than last year’s nine. They did push #2 LSU to the wire in a narrow 4-3 walk-off loss, though, so that’s something.

Basketball (Men’s): A 7-7 Ivy League record was a big improvement on last year and good for a tie for third. Memorable wins included a comeback over rival Providence and eliminating Princeton from league title contention with a beatdown in the season finale. Sean McGonagill ’14 was named first-team All-Ivy; Cedric Kuakumensah ’16 was name Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year. Show the fuck up to their games next year, please.

Basketball (Women’s): 3-11 Ivy and 9-19 overall records were nothing to write home about, but women’s basketball alum Lindsey Gottlieb ’99 coached Cal to the Women’s Final Four, which is pretty damn cool.

Crew (Men’s): Hard to figure out, since apparently men’s rowing isn’t an NCAA sport but is still varsity (?). I don’t know. Anyway, Brown has had another great season, losing only to No. 1 Washington and Ivy rival Harvard. (I think. Crew results are really hard to understand.) The year will conclude with Ivy and National championships in late May/early June.

Crew (Women’s): The NCAA sponsors women’s rowing, so this one is easier to figure out. Brown is ranked 12th and fresh off an Eastern Sprints victory heading into Ivy and National championships in late May/early June. Sounds promising.

Cross Country (Men’s): A bunch of Brown students ran distances that would kill you or me, but didn’t qualify for nationals after finishing 11th at Northeast Regionals.

Cross Country (Women’s): A bunch of Brown students ran distances that would kill you or me, and finished 8th at Northeast Regionals. Standout Margaret Connelly ’14 placed 7th to qualify for Nationals, where she finished 130th out of 253 runners.

Equestrian: The team placed third at Ivies and sent three riders to Nationals. Honestly, the results of this shit are totally indecipherable, but I can report with some certainty that no one from Brown won the national championship. Still, it sounds like they did pretty well.

[Read more →]

Just because Providence doesn’t have any professional sports teams, per se (sorry, Bryant University Field Hockey), doesn’t mean you can’t get the top-level experience with limited investment. For a $20 round-trip train ticket, a $10-ish bleacher seat, and whatever the opportunity cost is of taking five hours of your time (thousands of dollars, I’m sure), you can attend just about any weekday Red Sox game. That’s what I did yesterday, since you asked. It was great.

If you’re going to Boston, the Amtrak Acela is a bit on the pricier side ($15-$35, depending on the train and the time), but if you have work to get done, it’s the way to go. They have almost-21st-century amenities, like outlets at every seat and semi-functional Wi-Fi, and they can get you from Providence to Back Bay Station in 55 minutes. Fenway is about a 20-minute walk from Back Bay, but if you’re a real badass like we were, you’ll take the PediCab and save a little time. The PediCab, for those unfamiliar, is the bike-cab. It is a little bit awkward, and they don’t tell you how much to pay, just a “tip range.” But they are not so happy if you lowball them.

We actually got free tickets for Wednesday’s game, because we bought tickets to Tuesday’s game, and Tuesday’s game was such a disaster (13-0 Red Sox loss, rained out after seven innings) that the Red Sox re-issued those tickets. Pretty cool. I should note that I’m actually an Oakland A’s fan, and I was going because they were in town. The only notable things that happened during the game were 1) my friend and I unsuccessfully trying to do homework during the first inning and 2) some guy behind us picking a fight with me for supporting the A’s and “having my parents pay for college.” I told him I was sorry I was smart, and then he made me tell him my SAT score. It was not my proudest moment. [Read more →]

Matthew Colantonio ’11 of the visiting Columbus Clippers

If you’ve been looking for the perfect time to hit up some minor league baseball, you just found it. For a 20-dollar price tag, the event sponsors will hit you up with a ticket to this Sunday’s PawSox game, round-trip bus transportation, a meal (hot dog, chips, Gatorade), and a chance to run the bases after the game, if that’s something you’re into. The PawSox, of course, are the Red Sox triple-A affiliate (that is, their best minor league team) and the only professional baseball team in Rhode Island. Yeah, that’s right – somehow, there’s only one professional baseball team in Rhode Island. Go figure.

Need some more reasons to go? Fine. 1) The PawSox are a good team–league champs last year and 12-7 so far this year. 2) Brown alum Matthew Colantonio ’11 will be playing for the visiting Columbus Clippers. 3) I really only thought of two reasons, but you should go. According to the Facebook event, those who want a ticket should email Joshua_Weiner@brown.edu or Connor_Sakwa@brown.edu. The PawSox are waiting.

Image via.

A college-aged Tiger Woods playing in the Brown Rec Golf Tournament. He finished twelfth, behind champion Josiah Carberry Jr. ’99.

If you’re anything like me (and I hope you are), you’re sitting around in your post-Spring Weekend hangover/doldrums wondering when the next bit of campus-wide fun might be occurring. “Oh no,” you may be thinking to yourself, “nothing good is happening until Senior Week, and I’m not even staying for that.” What you’re forgetting, of course, is that the 13th annual Brown Recreational Golf Tournament will be played at Agawam Hunt Course on Friday, May 3 (during reading period). For $40, you get 18 holes, a golf cart, free food, and prizes. It’s a pretty sweet deal. Enter with three friends as a four-person scramble team, show up Friday morning, and the rest is taken care of. So what are you waiting for? All the cool kids are doing it. Just sign up here and put your fun-seeking mind at ease. You’re welcome.

Image via.

I want to preface this post by saying: I am on board with Brown softball. Seriously, I am. Okay. Now that that’s been said, what in hell are we doing with our softball program? Here is some evidence that whoever makes decisions about how to prioritize sports funding does not even realize we field a softball team:

• They play on some field behind the field behind the baseball field, which is behind the field hockey field which is behind the IM frisbee field which is behind the OMAC.
• The scoreboard was built some time in the B.C. era.
• There is a hill on the left-field foul line. Like they couldn’t find a flat surface to build the field on, and were like, “Eh, fuck it–we’ll just put the field on this hill anyway.”
• The online schedule was titled “Brown Softball Schedule [Tentative]” until this week. Because opponents won’t commit 100% to playing us, or what? Maybe we’re worried they’ll see the hill in left field and bail.
• The first page of Google Images hits for “Brown softball” includes as many pictures of Harvard softball as of Brown.

Alright, but like I said, I am on board with Brown softball. Here is some evidence that softball is fun: [Read more →]

Still Brown football…but now at night!

The recently announced 2013 Brown football schedule includes home night games against both URI and Princeton. The last time Bruno played at night on its own turf twice in one season was, well, never. Though the belief that attendance is inherently higher at night games (see: 2012 Homecoming vs. Harvard) may be a case of mistaking correlation for causation, the move is nonetheless noteworthy. In other scheduling news, the Bears will also play at Harvard in a night game, and will play Bryant University for the first time in school history. So, uh, only five months until the season kicks off. We know you’ll be counting down with us.

Since the publication of Moneyball (now a major motion picture!), there has been no shortage of armchair baseball statisticians ready to proclaim their candidacy for Yankees Director of Baseball Operations because they understand what an On-Base Percentage is. But the ranks of baseball statistics gurus operating on the same level as Billy Beane (that’s the guy Brad Pitt plays in the movie) have remained thin. Leading the pack of future Brad Pitts, though, is none other than Lewie Pollis ’14, an economics concentrator and Cleveland Indians fan.

Pollis has been a fixture on the baseball statistics–aka sabermetrics–circuit since the debut of his Indians blog, “Wahoo’s On First.” But he took his game to a whole new level by winning the SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Commentary. The award specifically recognized Pollis for his post on the blog Beyond the Box Score refuting the suggestion that Hall of Fame voters should have seen a player in action in order to cast a vote on that player’s enshrinement. Receiving the honor capped a memorable weekend for Pollis at the SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix, AZ, which he describes as the first time in his life he has been able to have in-depth, in-person conversations about the complexities of baseball analysis. [Read more →]

Matt Lorito ’15

Brown men’s hockey completed a 2-1 best-of-three series victory over Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (yeah, that’s what RPI stands for) with an intense 3-2 victory Sunday night, advancing to the ECAC Final Four in Atlantic City, New Jersey next Friday. Goals from Jason Goldberg ’14, Nick Lappin ’16, and Matt Lorito ’15, along with clutch goaltending by Anthony Borelli ’13, helped the Bears hold on to upset #16 RPI. For those of us who dished out ten bucks to watch the online feed, it was well worth it (driving six hours round trip last night to see us lose 6-2 in Game 2… not as much). We humbly suggest kicking your spring break off right by heading down to Atlantic City for a weekend of partying, gambling, and Brown athletics. Seriously. Why not? If you were ever going to support a Brunonian sports team, this is a pretty awesome one to pick.

Image via.

Anthony Borelli ’13

There’s nothing quite like heading out to the ol’ rink on a Saturday night for some cold hard hockey action (note: just because nothing is “quite like” it doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of things better than it). Watching a few bros bat around the puck for a few hours is the definition of fun—just waiting for the official word from Merriam Webster on that.

Jokes aside, hockey is a great sport as long as we can shit on something/somewhere called “Clarkson University” at it. Friday and Saturday, we did just that (at Pizzitola, by the way, and I hope you feel guilty if you didn’t come), giving Bruno a series sweep over the not-so-Golden Knights in the first round of the ECAC tournament. What’s the ECAC, you say? It’s our hockey conference; there is no full Ivy League in hockey because Columbia and Penn don’t field teams. (They probably spend the money required to sustain a Division-1 hockey program on pamphlets assuring prospective students that they have at least a 50% chance of not getting killed by stray bullets if they go off campus at night.) [Read more →]

All the loyal readers of this column out there (hi, mom and dad!) might agree that last week’s post, an open letter to head basketball coach Mike Martin ’94, was a high point in professionalism and gravitas for Sixth Man. In the interest of balance, then, this week will mark a low point. I confess, dear readers, that I was too busy this weekend raging face catching up on The Wire to catch any of our many exciting sporting events. But, as an ever-dedicated journalist wanting to have a column for this week, I made up for it by spending my Sunday night completely alone in the bleachers of Pizzitola, watching the intramural basketball finals for all three divisions (High, Mid, Low). Here are summaries of the riveting action.

This is exactly how it went down.

LOW

Final Score: Scorgasms 37, Schrodinger’s Balls 24 (score approximate, forgot to write it down until a few hours later)

Recap: The Scorgasms, a group of eight seniors (including a girl, the only championship team to have one), used their superior outside game and non-receding hairlines to triumph over the physics grad students representing Schrodinger’s Balls. Schrodinger’s Balls gameplan of “give it to our one bearded big guy, Beardsie” was eventually detected and neutralized by the four Scorgasms who quadruple-teamed Beardsie, helping the Scorgasms pull away in the second half.

They Said It (Winner Edition): “I’m glad I won a[n intramural champion] shirt as a senior. Definitely on my bucket list.”–Wooyoung Moon ’13

They Said It (Loser Edition): “We don’t want to be quoted.”–Beardsie [grad year unknown]

They Said It (Ref Edition): “It was well-fought. I feel like [The Scorgasms] don’t even belong in the low division. They were pretty adept. They definitely deserved it.”–Danny Ecehvarria ’16, referee [Read more →]