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.
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)
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:
11.15.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
The Wolfpack women’s basketball team struggled against Vermont’s zone defense and lost 52-47 Saturday night in the finals of the Sheraton Raleigh Wolfpack Invitational at Reynolds Coliseum. Junior point guard Amber White talks about the loss in the video above. The result gives Coach Kellie Harper her first career loss at NC State.
“Well, I’m quite disappointed. I don’t take losing very well,” said Harper, who picked up her first career victory, in her first game, at NC State Friday night when her team beat Florida International 87-71. “Vermont is a very, very good basketball team. . . . It [was] a tough matchup for us right now.”
11.14.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
The Wolfpack women’s basketball team opened its season Friday night with an 87-71 victory over Florida International (FIU), giving Coach Kellie Harper her first victory at NC State. “I think I just had my first great Reynolds atmosphere experience at NC State,” Harper said after the game. “That was an exciting basketball game. It was a lot of fun.”
What made it exciting? After the jump we’ve got quotes and notes from the game, from the pre-game to the post-game, to help answer that question. At the bottom of the entry, we’ve also got a narrative of the locker room scene before the game and observations from the Wolfpack Women’s Basketball radio crew. In the video above is one of the members of the crew, Patrick Kinas, interviewing Coach Harper immediately after the game. If you want the traditional game recap and box score, go to GoPack.com. For photos, check out The N&O’s photo gallery. We hope to add our own photos soon. It’s all part of NC State magazine’s latest installment of “A Coach’s First Season.”
Tomorrow’s football game against Clemson will be the 400th consecutive game that Dewey Corn ’49, ’53 MS has attended. “I never really had a goal of reaching a certain number of games until I got to about 380,” he says. Tim Peeler ’87 of GoPack has the story:
The last time High Point’s Dewey Corn missed an NC State football game, his young neighbor, Johnny Evans, kicked an 81-yard punt that helped the Wolfpack beat Penn State, 15-14, in Beaver Stadium.
That was on Nov. 8, 1975, and he hasn’t missed a play since.
The 86-year-old Corn has witnessed 209 victories, 185 defeats and five ties during the 35-year streak. He’s been to 18 bowl games, including six trips to Atlanta for the Peach Bowl and a lone trip to Tucson, Ariz., for the long-defunct Copper Bowl, where he met Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.
11.13.2009 | by Cherry Crayton | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
The Wolfpack women’s basketball team opens its season tonight at 8 p.m. against Florida International in the Sheraton Raleigh Wolfpack Invitational at Reynolds Coliseum. It’ll also mark the first official game of Kellie Harper’s tenure as head coach of the team. Is she nervous? She told Wolfpack Sports Radio yesterday pretty much the same thing she told us after the Nov. 2 exhibition game against North Greenville (which NC State won 87-44):
I rarely get nervous before games. I might have [some butterflies] at first, but once we tip off, it’ll be gone because I’m very task-oriented and focused on what’s happening on the court.
And here’s what she said last week about the first game during a press conference:
There will be that “Whoa!” feeling before I walk out on the court. I had a little bit of it at the exhibition, standing in the tunnel waiting to walk out. I cracked myself up a few times thinking about what I was doing and where I was. “This is pretty cool.” And I’m sure I’ll have that moment again several times this year.
We’ll have interviews, notes and a photo gallery after the opening game, so be sure to check that out. We’ll also have notes and interviews following the Wolfpack’s second game of the season, which will be Saturday either 4 p.m. (if they’re in the invitational’s consolation game) or 6 p.m. (if they’re in the invitational’s championship game). Go to GoPack.com for a full game preview and for a story on freshman guard Marissa Kastanek. (Update at 9:34 a.m.: The Wolfpack will play Saturday at 6 p.m. regardless of what they do tonight. So if you’re heading to the football game against Clemson, stop by Reynolds afterward.)
Before the game tonight, though, we’ve got a short Q&A with senior forward Lucy Ellison and a highlight from yesterday’s two-hour practice. It’s our latest installment in “A Coach’s First Season,” in which we’re following Coach Harper and her team for the season for a feature that will appear in the spring issue of NC State magazine.
The notes on the back of this photograph from 1965 include: "Airborne - Both North Carolina State quarterback Charlie Noggle (19) and the ball are airborne in the State-Clemson game." (Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, NCSU Libraries)
11.11.2009 | by Chris Richter | Filed under Sports | Comments: No responses |
Coach Rollie Geiger is perhaps the most successful coach of any sport in ACC history. Last week, his men’s cross country team won its 11th ACC Championship in the last 15 years, and today he was named ACC Coach of the Year. It’s the 33rd time he has won an ACC Coach of the Year award and the 40th time one his teams has won an ACC Championship.
The funny thing is that Geiger, who also coaches the men’s and women’s track teams, almost went into real estate. He told us in a 2006 story that he studied for the test to get his license but landed a high school teaching and coaching job before he could take it:
“I look back on it and shake my head a bit,” he says. “Real estate in Florida is something that has been pretty good since then.”
Then again, the plaques outside Geiger’s office might be worth more to him than all the beachfront property in the Sunshine State.
Subscribe