By CHRIS WALTERSKIRCHEN
The Second round selection of Eastern Washington’s Tyler Harvey by the Orlando Magic marks the second time in 9 years that the Eagles have had a player taken in the NBA draft. In 2007 Rodney Stocky was taken 15th by the Detroit Pistons, Stucky would prove to be one of the few bright spots in the Pistons recent history. Griz fans do you remember that Larry Kryskowiak spent a season with the Orlando Magic? In the 1993-94 season Krysko was part of a very young Magic team that featured “Penny” Hardaway and Shaquille O’Neal.
After three years of legal wrangling the University of North Dakota has begun the process of selecting as nickname to replace “Fighting Sioux.” The controversy over college using Native American legos mascots has gone on for over 40 years. Interestingly one of the first Colleges to abandon a Native American nickname was Eastern Washington (then known as Eastern Washington state college) in 1972. Eastern had been known as the Savages.
The Montana State Bobcats have a non-conference game in October against East Tennessee State. The Buccaneers of ETSU have played in Montana before. In 1996 the Buccaneers met the Grizzliez in Missoula in the FCS quarterfinals where the Griz routed them 44-7. A few years later; East Tennessee State dropped football–a status that remained for over a decade. Now the Johnson City Tennessee School is in its third season of rebuilding their once powerful program.
As we enter July the Major League baseball play-off picture looks very similar to that of 2014 in the National League but much different from a year ago in the American League. At this writing the five teams in play-off positions in the NL are the very same teams that were in last season’s play-offs with St Louis Washington and Los Angles as Division leaders and Pittsburgh and San Francisco in the Wild card spots. In the American League the only team in position to repeat in the post-season this year are the reigning AL Champs, the Kansas City Royals who would be joined by Tampa Bay and Houston as divisional leaders with New York and Minnesota as the wild card entries.
Once again the Chicago Bulls have turned to Ames Iowa to find a new head coach. Fred Hoyberg left Iowa State to become the next Bulls coach. In 1998 the Bulls turned to Tim Floyd to help rebuilt the Bulls. Floyd has had mixed results since leaving ISU including two less then awesome stints in the NBA. The Floyd move in 98′ brought Larry Eustachy to Iowa and opened the way for former Griz coach Stew Morrill to take the reins at Utah State.
********************
Chris Walterskirchen has been an observer of Montana sports for nearly half a century. A Kalispell native, Chris has worked in various capacities for professional and college sports organization of at various times: ranging from announcing and statistical work to the concessions and even a stint as a costumed mascot.
Chris has academic degrees in communications and elementary education. His style of sports trivia involves more than just who won and who lost, but also focuses on the obscure or human side of sports. In this blog you will learn things like the Grizzly football team has won 210 games over the 19 seasons since they have had Monte as their mascot or that UNLV is the only school that both the Griz and Lady Griz have both faced in the NCAA basketball tournament
When not following sports Chris enjoys taking care of animals of all kinds (a peacock rescue?) and reading to pre-schoolers.