Thursday, August 21, 2008
Virginia football, men's basketball don't make the top 10
Virginia's men's lacrosse and men's tennis teams top the list
Doug Doughty
Doug Doughty's UVa Insider is exclusive to roanoke.com and is posted by 5 p.m. Thursdays in season.
See Doug and Randy talk sports every week with the Sports edition of the TimesCast
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We usually try to coordinate these “Insider” columns, particularly now that we’re contemplating a change to a blog format, but there’s been one problem this week.
Randy King, who covers Virginia Tech for The Roanoke Times, remains hospitalized at Roanoke Memorial and probably won’t return to speed until next week.
In any event, the UVa Insider begins each year with a ranking of Virginia’s athletic programs based on where the program stands at this particular point.
With last year’s “Doughty ratings” in parentheses, following are this year’s ratings:
1. MEN’S LACROSSE (2) – The Cavaliers looked overmatched at times in both of their meetings with ACC rival Duke last season, but if Virginia had been able to hold onto a five-goal lead against Syracuse in the national semifinals, coach Dom Starsia might have won a fourth national title. (Ranking last year: No. 2).
2. MEN’S TENNIS (1) – Who knows when the Cavaliers will have a better opportunity to win a national championship than they did with two-time NCAA singles champion Somdev Devvarman, but coach Brian Boland knows how to recruit and has taken UVa to back-to-back final fours. (Ranking last year: No. 1)
3. WOMEN’S LACROSSE (4) – The Cavaliers were 11-7 losers to North Carolina in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, a particularly ignominious outcome given Virginia’s 16-5 victory over the Tar Heels less than two months earlier, but few other UVa teams have the capacity to compete for NCAA championships on a regular basis.
4. WOMEN’S ROWING (6) – Only one coach in school history has won more ACC titles than UVa rowing coach Kevin Sauer and that coach, swimming’s Mark Bernardino, has had the opportunity to win them two at a time. The rowing team finished fifth in the NCAAs this year, their eighth top-five finish in 11 years, but somebody will have to explain to me how Brown and Yale, who don’t give athletic scholarships, could go 1-4.
5. SWIMMING (8) – How could you put swimming behind rowing when the Cavaliers won men’s and women’s titles last year? Rowing did better at the NCAAs, where the UVa men swimmers were 15th and the women were 20th. The return of Pat Mellors and Ryan Hurley from a year of Olympic preparation make the men a threat for the top 10 this year. Upgrade the diving facilities and maybe the top five is a possibility.
6. WOMEN’S GOLF (14) – The Cavaliers lost head coach Jan Mann and best player Leah Wigger from a team that finished ninth in the regionals and failed to make the NCAA championships in 2007. All they did under new coach Kim Lewellen in 2008 was take Duke to the wire in the ACC tournament and finish 12th at NCAAs. Last year’s top eight players return.
7. WOMEN’S SOCCER (9) – The most impressive thing about this Cavalier team in 2007 was the manner in which the Cavaliers lost. They were beaten by perennial power North Carolina in overtime in the regular season and by penalty kicks in the ACC Tournament. Then, they were eliminated by No. 1-ranked UCLA in overtime in the NCAA Tournament. Jess Rostedt, the team’s leading scorer in 2005 and 2006, returns for a redshirt junior season after a knee injury ended her 2007 season after three games.
8. BASEBALL (3) – How can you argue with five straight NCAA appearances from a perennially downtrodden program? UVa went to the ACC championship game and its 39 victories fell just short of a fifth-straight 40-win season, but seven potential 2009 standouts were lost to the major-league baseball draft. That’s not Brian O’Connor’s fault, but it’s hard to see the Cavaliers not skipping a beat. This looks like a rebuilding year.
9. MEN’S SOCCER (5) – The feeling was that George Gelnovatch’s program was ranked too low at No. 12 in 2006 and it may have been too high at No. 5 last year. A season-ending injury to offensive star Yannick Reyering helped short-circuit the 2007 season and we’re taking Gelnovatch’s word that his current squad is his youngest and most inexperienced since the late 1990s.
10. WOMEN’S BASKETBALL (Bottom five) – It was hard to knock the Cavaliers after they jumped from 19 wins in 2006-2007 to 24 wins in 2007-2008. Coach Debbie Ryan still struggles to land the top players from Virginia but recruiting has come to life in the last year. Cavs look to be a NCAA regional contender this year.
11. FOOTBALL (12) – It’s not a good sign when neither of your top two programs are in your top 10. I’m impressed by what the Cavaliers did in finishing 9-4 last year. I’m impressed by what they’ve done in recruiting for 2009. I’m not impressed by forecasts for 2008.
12. CROSS COUNTRY (10) – This is still the program that Jason Dunn built and you have to like the pedigree of his successor, Jason Vigilante, but it remains to be seen how much of Vigilante’s time can be devoted to cross country. He was the head cross-country coach at Texas but will be director of men’s and women’s track and field and cross country at UVa. The Cavaliers won ACC men’s cross country titles in two of Dunn’s last three seasons before he left for Stanford.
13. MEN’S BASKETBALL (7) – Some dropoff was to be expected with the departure of J. R. Reynolds and Jason Cain from a 21-win team in 2006-2007, but many expected a return NCAA trip when Sean Singletary elected to return for his senior year. It didn’t happen and now the Cavaliers have to try and improve on a 17-16 season without him.
14. FIELD HOCKEY (14) – After the Cavaliers got to the second round of the NCAA Tournament in coach Michele Madison’s first season, 2006, a first-round ouster in 2007 was less than impressive. It looks like they have one of the top players in the country this year in Inge Kaars Sijpesteijn, who has moved to an offensive position for a team that was shut out in five of its last 13 games.
15. WRESTLING (15) – A serious of goofy events prevented the Cavaliers from winning an ACC championship last year and there should be one in coach Steve Garland’s future, particularly since only four ACC teams sponsor the sport. Last year’s NCAA showing could have been better.
BOTTOM FIVE (in order)
VOLLEYBALL (15) – Back-to-back 23-8 and 18-13 seasons are no embarrassment, but they didn’t get Virginia to the NCAA Tournament and couldn’t save Melissa Aldrich Shelton’s job, although she technically resigned to become the head coach at William and Mary. Successor Lee Maes has tremendous credentials.
MEN’s GOLF (Bottom five) – This was the turnaround program at Virginia this past year. There’s still a lot of room for improvement in the ACC, where the Cavaliers were ninth, but they made the most of an NCAA Regional bid, moving from 16th to 10th on the final day to claim an NCAA Championships spot.
TRACK AND FIELD (Bottom five) – Clearly the Cavaliers were improved this year under Randy Bungard, who resigned in July. Bungard had been on the chopping block one year earlier, but the UVa men and women were fourth and fifth in the ACC and Bungard could have returned.
WOMEN’S TENNIS (13) – Great things were expected when Mark Guilbeau took over this Virginia program after his selection as Southeastern Conference coach of the year, but the nation’s No. 1-ranked recruiting class failed to pan out and the jury is out. In three years, this program has gone from sixth to 13th to bottom five in the Doughty rankings.
SOFTBALL (Bottom five) – The Cavaliers improved on their 1-20 conference record in 2007 to 6-15 under new coach Eileen Schmidt. Virginia is always going to be remembered as the program that didn’t recruit Angela Tincher and this year it didn’t recruit Abbie Rexrode, who broke Tincher’s records at James River High School.
