Sports

One way to look at the Cal Poly women’s basketball team’s loss Saturday to UC Santa Barbara is that it was its sixth loss in the past eight games. A more optimistic view, though, would be that the Mustangs took the Big West Conference-leading Gauchos to overtime, and gave the unbeaten squad one of its toughest conference tests this season.

The Cal Poly men’s volleyball club team is quickly becoming the team to watch out for in its league.

Broken up into two teams, the A team plays in Division I and the B team is part of Division II in the Northern California Collegiate Volleyball League.

Cal Poly’s A squad is currently ranked ninth in the nation and is 5-0 in league play.

Basketball is in mid-season. Baseball and softball are just starting. Football? Football never stops.

The Cal Poly football team opened its spring practice drills Wednesday morning on the I field in the first of sessions that will run through March 8 leading up to its spring game.

I’ve been toiling away in an office in Mott Gym for the past six months and had to come out of retirement. The new crop of Mustang Daily columnists has produced plenty of professional sport analysis, but how about some attention to the Cal Poly campus?

With a historic event on the horizon, I had to come out of retirement and give Cal Poly athletics a voice since no other columnist has.

The Cal Poly men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams, which have broken seven of their prior records since the beginning of the season in September, compete today through Saturday in the 2008 Big West Championships today at the Belmont Plaza Olympic Pool in Long Beach.

Just when it seemed as if the Cal Poly men’s basketball team couldn’t have any worse luck, it was struck with another blow – or more specifically, another injury.

Mustangs sophomore guard Lorenzo Keeler is out indefinitely with a possible stress fracture, Cal Poly head coach Kevin Bromley said Monday.

Bouncing back from Saturday’s tough loss at San Diego, the Cal Poly men’s tennis team picked up a 5-2 win over Santa Clara on Monday, improving its record to 4-3.

The Mustangs dominated, sweeping all three doubles matches and dropping only two of six singles matches.

“Too often the intelligence of black athletes is negated,” Spike Lee once told an interviewer. “(It’s presented as if) we come out of the womb dunking and running. There’s hard work involved. That stuff is never talked about.”

‘Oh, but that’s just Spike Lee – a dogmatic zealot with an axe to grind,’ right?

Wrong.

At 6-foot-2, Lisa McBride uses her height to benefit her on the basketball court, but when she started playing, she wasn’t nearly that tall.

She began when she was 4 years old on a YMCA team that was coached by her mom and continued to play as she grew through elementary school, junior high and high school, as well as on club teams.

The Cal Poly softball team lost twice Sunday in Las Vegas at the UNLV-hosted Louisville Slugger Desert Classic, in which it fell in all five of its games. In the first, the Mustangs (2-8) lost 7-5 in eight innings to Wisconsin. Junior shortstop Melissa Pura was 2 for 2 for Cal Poly, while senior Sarah Iwata went 2 for 5 with two runs and an RBI.

A little more than a year ago, the Cal Poly men’s basketball team did something it had done just once since 1959: win at UC Santa Barbara. Because the Big West Conference rivals each returned many of their key contributors, coaches and media picked both the Central Coast squads to finish atop the conference, with UCSB in first.