Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
By Times staff and wire reports
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 29, 2001
UM home, FSU away for super regionals
Miami stays home, while Florida State and Florida International take to the road in three of the eight Division I baseball super regional series, which begin Friday.
Miami (47-12) hosts Clemson (41-20) in Coral Gables, Florida State (46-17) travels to Athens to face Georgia (45-19) and FIU (43-19) plays Southern Cal (51-12) in Los Angeles.
FIU advanced Monday, beating Notre Dame 5-4 in the South Bend, Ind., regional after the Irish forced a final game with a 5-2 victory earlier in the day.
William Collazo held Notre Dame to two runs and seven hits over six innings to lead FIU in the the regional championship game.
Rice beat Baylor 5-4 in the other regional final in Houston.
All eight of the national seeds will play host to the best-of-three super regionals. The winner of each advances to the College World Series, which starts June 8 in Omaha, Neb. The sites were announced Monday by the Division I baseball committee, which set up brackets at the beginning of the tournament to determine the super regional pairings.
Wally Groff, chairman of the committee, said national seeds were given highest priority to host the super regionals.
"There is a possibility that certain things could have come up that a national seed wouldn't host, like quality of the field, security problems at the regionals or something as simple as school sites not being able to secure hotels and things like that," Groff said. "But the national seeds are given preference."
LSU and retiring coach Skip Bertman are hitting the road for a shot at one last national title. But they won't have to travel far.
The defending College World Series champion Tigers (43-20-1) play host Tulane (53-10) at Zephyr Field in Metairie, La.
The other sites and pairings: Mississippi State (39-22) at Cal State-Fullerton (44-16); South Carolina (48-18) at Stanford (46-15); Tennessee (44-18) at East Carolina (47-11); and Rice (47-18) at Nebraska (48-14).
All super regionals will be played on campus fields except for LSU-Tulane and Tennessee-East Carolina, which will be at Grainger Stadium, home of Cleveland's Single-A team in Kinston, N.C.
Each of the remaining teams placed bids to host a super regional. The range of bids ranged from the required minimum of $35,000 to a high of about $180,000.
"The matchup between these teams may be one of the premier in the super regionals," said Dennis Poppe, the NCAA's senior director for baseball and football. "Tulane obviously earned the right to host, and to accommodate the expected fan interest the committee opted to go for the larger field."
Zephyr Field, which seats up to 11,000, is the home of Houston's Triple-A affiliate.
The schools, about 70 miles apart in southern Louisiana, played twice this season with Tulane winning both.
The Tigers are trying for their sixth national championship in the past 11 years under Bertman, who is retiring at the end of the season after 18 years as coach.
OKLAHOMA CITY -- Lindsey Collins hit a home run and Jennie Finch pitched a four-hitter as Arizona beat UCLA 1-0 for the NCAA softball championship.
Collins hit a one-out home run over the centerfield fence in the top of the fourth inning for the only run. Finch (32-0) completed a perfect season by striking out seven and walking two.
The top-seeded Wildcats (65-4) won their sixth national championship.
PISCATAWAY, N.J. -- Even though Syracuse carried the momentum into overtime of the NCAA lacrosse championship, the smart money was on Princeton.
Proving again there is no better clutch team in the country, Princeton won its sixth national title after B.J. Prager scored with 41 seconds left in overtime to give the Tigers a 10-9 victory over the Orangemen.
Prager's goal came after Syracuse's Michael Powell tied the score with 16 seconds left in regulation. Princeton had blown leads of 8-4 and 9-8 in the fourth quarter.
"We never lost confidence," Prager said. "We were worried that they had the momentum, but we knew we had the best defense and the best goalie."
In winning its sixth NCAA title in the past 10 years, Princeton (14-1) denied Syracuse (13-3) a chance to become the first team to win eight national titles.
The Tigers have won four finals in overtime and 11 straight one-goal games in NCAA Tournament play, including three this season. They are 16-2 in NCAA games decided by two goals or less.
Princeton, which had lost four in a row to Syracuse, including last season's title game, is 6-1 in NCAA finals and 23-6 in NCAA Tournament play for a record .794 winning percentage. Ironically, Princeton's first title came in a 10-9 overtime win against Syracuse in 1992.
TENNIS: Georgia's Matias Boeker became the third player to sweep the NCAA men's titles. Boeker, part of the team championship last week, won the singles and doubles titles Monday to join Stanford's Alex O'Brien (1992) and Bob Bryan (1998) as the only players to win all three titles since the current format was adopted in 1977.