The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
9 — Monday, March 16, 2020
Sports
ALEXANDRIA POMPEI/Daily
Michigan coach Kim Barnes Arico expected her team to get an NCAA Tournament bid this year.
MILES MACKLIN/Daily
The Michigan baseball team showed promise in the 15 games it played before the season’s cancellation.
Adjacent Stadium Boulevard, outside of
Crisler Center, there’s a billboard.
During the day it’s merely a roadside
distraction. Its rotating images about
Michigan are only given attention when
drivers sit still, stuck at the red light
between Stadium and Main.
At night, its hundreds of LED panels
stand alone as a source of light for the
meager commuters driving past to look to,
one of the only roadside attractions they’ll
pass.
Most of the frames it shows are harmless:
a plea for a passerby to buy football tickets,
a lab photo with a declaration of being the
best public school in the nation. There’s
nothing someone looking at it would think
twice about, until it reaches the photo of
Jon Teske and Naz Hillmon framing the
words “This week in Michigan basketball.”
This week in Michigan basketball is
depressing. COVID-19 has forced the
NCAA and Michigan to stop all athletic
events for the rest of the year. There’s not
much else to it, other than depressing.
Seniors won’t see their season off the way
they want to. Neither will coaches or fans
or other players.
It brings a finality to the season that
no one wanted, forcing us to reflect on an
almost-done women’s basketball team far
before anyone ever wanted.
Who knew that when a reporter asked
Michigan coach Kim Barnes Arico about
reflecting on the season, “Now that it was
over,” after its semifinal loss to Ohio State
in the Big Ten Tournament, the season
actually was over? And Barnes Arico’s
gentle nudge at the end of her answer that
the season was not over — there was the
NCAA Tournament after all — proved to
be wrong.
“This was a special group,” Barnes Arico
said last Saturday. “It’s a special year. It’s
kind of a bummer to end on a loss, but I
think we put ourselves in a position with
this tournament and with our schedule all
season long to be an NCAA Tournament
team.”
This
year
in
Michigan
women’s
basketball was a rollercoaster, and it’s
easy to look at the bad parts. The loss of
superfan Chuck Raab on the day of the
season opener, a fourth-quarter collapse
against a weak Notre Dame team, Kayla
Robbins’s ACL tear, blowout losses at
home to Maryland and Indiana — a myriad
of times to look back on and ponder, “If
only.”
This season was long and grueling,
with few payoffs for the Wolverines. An
overtime victory over a Syracuse team on
the program’s first-ever appearance on
ESPN, sweeping Michigan State for the
first time in years, a 15-point win over
then-No. 18 Iowa on Pink Day — yet the
biggest payoffs have, perhaps, a lot more
to do with the future than with this year.
Freshman guard Maddie Nolan, after
riding the bench for the first three months
of the season, became a starter due to
Danielle Rauch’s injury and literally stole
the show in Indianapolis. Freshman center
Izabel Varejão developed throughout the
season to where, at the end, her potential
was obvious: With Naz Hillmon, she will
be unstoppable.
And then there are the two that you
forget are sophomores, Hillmon and point
guard Amy Dilk. Hillmon last week, amid
the bombardment of depressing sporting
news, was named one of five finalists for
the best power forwards in the country.
Her dominance became commonplace, to
the point where no one blinked when she
had a double-double by the third quarter.
Dilk,
meanwhile,
struggled
with
turnovers to start the year, but as the
season progressed, the ball grew closer
and closer to her hip until the pair were
inseparable. She also became a scorer and
distributor and figured out how to balance
those two things.
While those futures are known, senior
guard Akienreh Johnson’s is not. The
team has applied for her to gain another
year of eligibility, retroactively, after her
freshman year was cut short with an ACL
injury.
And now, with practices cancelled and a
dead campus, she has to wait, not knowing
if she’ll get that extra year — or when.
She’ll have to wait while that billboard
outside Crisler Center will keep changing,
rotating through its eight pictures as fewer
and fewer people drive past it, blinking
along as the country shuts down.
That
billboard
will
be
normal,
promising normal, promising a next year
for Michigan. One that will be more stable,
with an ending.
For Wolverines, a long wild
year holds promise for 2021
KENT SCHWARTZ
Daily Sports Writer
Last Wednesday night, I sat in front
of a microphone and predicted that the
Michigan baseball team would end its
season at the College
World Series.
Less than 24 hours
later,
the
take
was
rendered freezing cold;
the NCAA and Big Ten
canceled all competition
for the remainder of the
spring sports season in
response to the COVID-
19 pandemic. Now, not
even
the
best
team
would be Omaha bound, let alone the 8-7
Wolverines.
“(We haven’t) played a cupcake schedule
like a lot of teams have done,” Michigan
coach Erik Bakich said. “... We’ve played
all (NCAA) Regional-caliber teams.”
True. Pepperdine, the Wolverines’ final
foe of the campaign and to whom they lost
two of three, slashed a gaudy .301/.390/.441
as a team. Connecticut starting pitcher
Nick Krauth tossed 10 2/3 innings against
the Wolverines, earning two wins and
allowing just one earned run.
But other high-performing teams and
players didn’t stop the Wolverines from
taking three of four in their opening
weekend of play in Arizona, winning an
away series against Cal Poly or avoiding
sweeps against the Huskies and Waves. At
the end of the day, the greatest roadblock
to Michigan’s success was Michigan itself.
Offensively,
the
Wolverines
were
great at piggybacking off the success of
teammates, but often unable to get the ball
rolling.
“I think the problem is that we didn’t
use (my leadoff homer) to gain momentum,
and we struggled the rest of the game to
string quality at bats together,” Nwogu
said after losing the last of three games
to the Huskies, 9-2. “I think sporadically
we put together some good at-bats but
not enough to plate runs and that was the
problem.”
That was painfully evident in power
outage defeats, and sometimes held true
even in victory. In a 5-0 win at California,
Michigan was stymied from posting
crooked numbers despite working against
the Golden Bears’ bullpen for eight
innings.
But
when
the
floodgates
opened,
they gaped, and that was a cause for
optimism. Against Cal Poly in Arizona, the
Wolverines used two three-run innings
— sending the entire order to bat in the
first — to put up an eight-spot that lasted
despite a catastrophe in the bullpen.
A near-constant shuffle of the lineup
and relievers didn’t help maintain this
success.
“We haven’t had the same lineup twice
which always leads to inconsistencies,”
Bakich
said
after
last
weekend’s
Pepperdine series. “But in the early part
of the year you just have to experiment to
find your best nine and we still don’t know.
We are still trying to figure that out.”
Bakich had just begun to figure that out.
A step in the right direction was moving
junior shortstop Jack Blomgren from
second to third in the order; Blomgren
responded by reaching base 16 times in the
ensuing eight-game span.
“I think it was just to split up the right
handers,” Bakich said. “We want Jack up
in the first inning, but I don’t think there
was any strategy behind it other than
sandwiching a left-hander between him
and Nwogu.”
By playing 31 of his 36 guys in the
season’s first and only month, rather than
sticking with nearly exclusively veterans,
Bakich had a lot of similar decisions to
make. And at season’s end, a core group of
starters was starting to emerge.
Freshman outfielder Clark Elliott was
becoming a fixture in right field, freshman
Ted Burton and sophomore Cam Hart
formed a yin and yang at third base and
freshman Jimmy Obertop began to take
over the first-base job. Redshirt freshman
left-hander Steven Hajjar and junior right-
hander Blake Beers were the rotation’s
rookies, but each pitched to lower ERAs
than ace junior right-hander Jeff Criswell.
With junior outfielder Jesse Franklin
and projected closer, sophomore right-
hander Willie Weiss, winding down
rehab on their injuries — along with a
more solidified group of starters — the
Wolverines could have reached a perfect
storm
against
significantly
weaker
competition.
The bright spot is that everyone on the
roster who would like to return will be
able to do so for the 2021 season, thanks
to eligibility relief for spring athletes.
With all the pieces able to return, Bakich
can continue to assemble the puzzle of
the starters on which he was nearing
completion this year.
“The number one goal every year is to
add as much value as we possibly can to
an already storied program,” Bakich said
at the team media day. “So last year going
into it we wanted page 153 in the Michigan
history book to be bookmarked for all
time, and it’s the same goal this year.”
That goal, of course, is no longer
attainable.
The value from team 154, though, may
not come with a trophy, but with a group
that showed the capability to power
Michigan to Omaha come summer 2021.
JACK
WHITTEN
In 15 games, ‘M’ showed what
next year could hold