Head coach Heather Dyche said she was looking for leadership from UNM’s offense. She got more than one leader in Friday afternoon’s 3-1 victory over San Jose State. Dyche has said she thought her squad was too timid in the final third of the soccer field and said someone had to take control in the Lobo attack.
The defending champions No. 2-ranked New Mexico women’s cross country team placed fourth among 23 teams, while the youthful men’s squad placed 23rd of 25 on Friday afternoon in Notre Dame, Indiana. Although the women’s team couldn’t accomplish a three-peat — having won the Joe Piane Notre Dame Invite in 2014 and 2015 — it remained competitive with solid top-five performances from Alice Wright (second place) and Calli Thackery (fifth), with times of 16:16.0 and 16:30.9, respectively, in the 5-kilometer race.
The New Mexico men’s tennis team hits the courts Friday to open the fall season, but its nationally-ranked doubles team will first head to Tulsa, Oklahoma to compete in the ITA All-American Championships. New head coach Ben Dunbar said he will accompany Hayden Sabatka and Bart Van Leijsen to compete in the tournament. Sabataka and Van Leijsen are the No. 15 doubles pairing in the nation, according to the ITA preseason rankings.
The UNM men’s soccer team got its first Conference USA win of the season on Friday night in a 4-1 victory over Florida International University. Head coach Jeremy Fishbein said the 1-0 loss to Kentucky on Sunday helped motivate his team to play their best against FIU (3-5-1, 1-2 C-USA). “It was a great performance tonight,” Fishbein said.
With autumn in the air, there is one big thing that comes into the minds of New Mexico sports fans: college basketball. The UNM men’s basketball team stepped back on the court on Friday afternoon for its first official practice. The Lobos finished the 2015-2016 season with a 17-15 overall record and went 10-8 in the Mountain West Conference, good for a fourth place finish.
After a quick start, the Lobos couldn’t finish the job in a 3-2 loss to San Jose State in San Jose, California on Thursday night. It appeared things were going smoothly for New Mexico (10-6, 1-2 MW), who started the first Mountain West road match of the season with 25-21 and 26-24 wins in the first two sets. However, after intermission, the Lobos ran out of steam, and UNM dropped the next three sets.
After dropping its first two Mountain West openers at home, New Mexico Women’s Soccer is in dire need of a leader. Head coach Heather Dyche said she hopes to see someone take charge in the attacking third of the field, an area the Lobos desperately need work in.
After a disappointing result last weekend, the UNM men’s soccer team is looking to get back on the winning track. The Lobos (5-3, 0-1 C-USA) fell 1-0 to the Kentucky Wildcats last Sunday during their Conference USA opening match. The statistics showed New Mexico edging Kentucky 12-6 in shots and 8-3 in corner kicks, but in the end it was only the Wildcats who got on the scoreboard.
New Mexico head coach Bob Davie said the young season has seemed to have had a lot of starts and stops, but things are about to ratchet up with nine straight weeks of football on the slate. The Lobos have put in a lot of practice for three games that were unconventionally spaced out from each other. The season opener was on Sept. 1, but the team has played only two games since after to last week’s bye.
With two starters on the New Mexico bench, the Lobos will look to steal a couple victories on the team’s trip to California. UNM is coming off a split in its first two conference home games of the year, winning the opener 3-0 against Air Force on Sept. 22, and dropping a 3-2 series to Boise State on Saturday. “Considering where we’re at, it wasn’t a bad weekend,” Nelson said. “We feel like we should’ve gotten both wins, but we’re playing down two starters.”
The New Mexico cross country team is ready to officially start its 2016-2017 season with high expectations at the Joe Piane Notre Dame Invitational this Friday in Notre Dame, Indiana. It was at the Notre Dame Invite last year that the New Mexico women’s cross country team finished in first place, and then stormed to its dominant performances in the program’s first-ever national title in November.
The Lobos were two offside rulings away from winning their Conference USA opener against the Kentucky Wildcats.Instead, they walked away from Sunday’s match with a 1-0 loss. A loss that broke a five-game winning streak. Less than two weeks ago, Kentucky held the No. 21 spot. A week later, it was the Lobos who inhabited that ranking.
New Mexico junior running back Richard McQuarley has been consistent in the running game so far, but he got to do something for the first time earlier this season — play in front of his mother as a Lobo. Head coach Bob Davie said the season opener was special for the running back, because his mother, Sharon McQuarley, flew in from Mississippi to make the game.
Sometimes following the gameplan and outplaying an opponent doesn’t translate into a victory. Occasionally a team just needs to get a break. New Mexico could manage to catch whatever it needed in a 2-1 loss to Air Force on Sunday afternoon.
The opportunity was there, but a sluggish start and a stumble at the finish cost UNM a perfect start to the Mountain West. New Mexico’s start to what would become a 3-2 loss to Boise State on Saturday was not how head coach Jeff Nelson drew it up in the pregame, and it took the Lobos an entire game to get going.
New Mexico’s Mountain West season started off with a bang. Unfortunately for the Lobos, it wasn’t in their favor. It took all but 15 seconds for Colorado College’s freshman Madeline Stesney to find the back of UNM’s net off of a cross from sophomore forward Clara Richter.
Although college basketball season has yet to begin, the University of New Mexico officially has a representative for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament for 2016-17. The NCAA announced on Thursday morning that Paul Krebs, vice president for athletics at UNM, has been appointed to the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee. Krebs will be one of only 10 members chosen from universities across the nation.
The Lobos certainly weren’t in midseason conference form, but the squad didn’t have to be. New Mexico came out in a 3-0 sweep over Air Force on Thursday night, while team captain Julia Warren watched from the bench with a big black brace on her right knee.
New Mexico running back Teriyon Gipson can’t outrun a past incident which has been brought to the spotlight, and could continue to have an effect both on and off the field. Multiple reports confirm Gipson was arrested in January while in Dallas on a pair of misdemeanor charges for marijuana possession and unlawful possession of a firearm.
If New Mexico has taken anything away from non-conference play, it’s that the Mountain West title is wide open and up for grabs. Everyone begins conference play with the same 0-0 record, but there have been some changes on how the Mountain West is stacking up this year. For starters, powerhouse Colorado State (6-5) has already lost more games than the squad lost all last season when the Rams were 26-4 and 18-0 in MW play.
Solutions by The State News
