11.21.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
Sophomore forward Bonae Holston had a double-double with 21 points and 10 rebounds and three other NC State players scored in double figures as the Wolfpack women’s basketball team beat Davidson 79-54 Friday night at Reynolds, giving Coach Kellie Harper her 100th career win as a head coach.
“One-hundred wins is a milestone,” said Harper, who compiled a 97-65 record in five seasons at Western Carolina and is 3-1 at NC State. “I’m not sitting in my office calculating my wins; I’m worried about these girls getting wins for the season. But I’m proud of that. You can really put things in perspective very quickly, though, when you can look around at other coaches [across] the country and realize that it took me, . . . in my sixth year, to get a hundreds wins.
“So to get a thousand,” she added, referring to her former coach, Tennessee’s Pat Summitt, who is the all-time winningest coach with 1,005 career wins, “I’ve got to coach 60 more years. That put things in perspective very quickly.”
(Summitt, incidentally, picked up her 100th career victory on Jan. 13, 1979, in a 79-66 win over NC State in Reynolds.)
Coach Harper and junior forward Tia Bell, who had 15 points and 9 rebounds, talk about the win in the video below. Junior forward Brittany Strachan added 10 points and 8 rebounds, and freshman guard Marissa Kastanek scored 11.
For a full recap of the game and box score, visit GoPack.com.
11.20.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: One response |
Nikitta Gartrell, left, and Coach Kellie Harper, during a prayer before the Wolfpack women's basketball team's first game of the season on Nov. 13. (Photo by Peyton Williams)
Kellie Harper will go for her 100th career win as a coach Friday at 7 p.m. when the Wolfpack women’s basketball team faces Davidson in Reynolds. (Tonight’s promo: Bring two canned goods and get $3 off the ticket price.) As part of our continuing coverage of the team, we’ve got two features heading into tonight’s game: an interview with senior guard Nikitta Gartrell and the first entry from our guest blogger, Patrick Kinas. Patrick has been the play-by-play voice of the Wolfpack women’s basketball radio network for nearly a decade and has been around sports his entire life. He has a perspective and knowledge that very few people share. In his debut entry, he writes about what he’s learned about Coach Harper over the past several months:
Kellie Harper hates to lose. I’m convinced that her loathing-for-losing quotient is significantly higher than her affinity for winning. . . . Kellie doesn’t seem driven to win with the thought of growing her victory column. To me, Kellie seems driven to win simply to siphon the air out of the L column. But make no mistake. The wins will come. They’ll just come as a by-product of Kellie’s obsession to not to lose.
Read his entire, insightful debut entry after the jump, and look for weekly entries in the future.
First is our Q&A with Nikitta. The 5-foot-9 three-year starter averaged 10.9 points last year and is averaging 8.7 points during the first three games of this season. She talks with us about the season so far, her teammates, and her goals.
Q&A With Senior Guard Nikitta Gartrell
You’ve got three games under your belt, going 2-1. What’s your assessment of the season so far?
It seems like the season has jumped off fairly quick. I feel that things are going good. We’re still in the learning process, and we still have got a lot to learn, plays and stuff, that Coach Kellie has designed for us to use this season.
Color commentator Wally Ausley, left, and play-by-play announcer Bill Jackson huddle with the Wolfpack football team in 1970. (Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, NCSU Libraries)
We’re redesigning www.alumni.ncsu.edu to give you a better way of keeping up with NC State and the people in your alumni community. But first we want to hear from you. What do you want from your NC State alumni site? What features or tools are you interested in? What do you think we should be working on? Share your thoughts here or e-mail them to alumniblog@gw.ncsu.edu.
We have added a new tab to the NC State Alumni Association’s Facebook page. “NC State on Facebook” has links that will help you connect to the Facebook pages of NC State colleges, alumni groups, organizations and other university entities. We have dozens of pages listed, but we know there are more out there. If you have suggestions for pages to add, leave them in the comments or send them in an e-mail to alumniblog@gw.ncsu.edu.
11.18.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
Redshirt junior point guard Amber White had a career-high 25 points and freshman guard Marissa Kastanek added 20 points to lead the Wolfpack women’s basketball team past Florida Atlantic, 84-70, last night at Reynolds Coliseum. Get a full game recap and box score at GoPack. An after-the-game interview with Coach Kellie Harper is below. In it, Coach Harper, who is one game shy of 100 career victories, talks about how and why she can’t remember the first game she ever won as a head coach but why she remembers the first one she lost (it came against Clemson).
Update: Coach Harper will go for win No. 100 Friday night when the Wolfpack takes on Davidson at 7 p.m. in Reynolds. An interesting sidenote is that Coach Harper’s former coach at Tennessee, the legendary Pat Head Summitt, picked up her 100th career victory against . . . NC State. The Lady Vols beat the Wolfpack 79-66 in Reynolds on Jan. 13, 1979. It took Summitt about four years to hit the century mark.
WUNC, North Carolina’s public radio station, also aired a story this morning that gave a good overview of the team and looked into what it’s like for Coach Harper to work with her husband, assistant coach Jon Harper. Listen to the 5-minute broadcast here: Wolfpack WBB Team on WUNC
About working under his wife, Jon Harper told WUNC:
You probably know the name Doc Hendley ’04 by now, but just in case: He’s the founder of Wine to Water, a faith-based nonprofit that installs running water and sanitation systems in the neediest parts of the world, and he’s one of the 10 finalists you can vote for to be named CNN’s 2009 Hero of the Year. Voting for that ends Wednesday, and the winner will be announced Thanksgiving Day at 9 p.m. during a live telecast on CNN. So, vote! And, keep voting.
We first reported on the work that Doc is doing on our blog in May. We spoke with him by phone for a few minutes Monday; and after the jump is a Q&A with him about how his life and his organization have changed since he was named a finalist for CNN’s Hero of the Year.
How did you find out you were a finalist for CNN’s 2009 Hero of the Year?
I found out a couple of days before they announced it on Oct. 1. They called and told me. I ran off the road when I found out. I didn’t expect it at all.
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