Jeff Mercer saw a more fight in the batter’s box Sunday evening than he did Saturday. There was more hard contact, more advancing of runners, and a superior overall offensive approach from the Indiana hitters. “I did feel like we were better today,” the Indiana baseball coach said. But the Hoosiers still didn’t score any more runs. Indiana lost 3-1 to Ohio State on Sunday after losing 3-1 to Nebraska on Saturday night, continuing a losing streak that now stands at five games. Nebraska has clinched the Big Ten regular season championship — and there is no conference tournament this…
Author: Dustin Dopirak
Indiana transfer forward Jerome Hunter announced on his Instagram page Sunday that he will be going to Xavier after three years at Indiana. He still has three years of eligibility remaining with 2020-21 not counting against his eligibility because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Indiana announced just over a week ago that Hunter would be leaving the program. The No. 59 rated player in the Class of 2018, Hunter had to sit out his entire freshman season with an undisclosed leg condition. In the two years since, he never quite reached the promise of his recruitment, but did become a key…
Tommy Sommer struck out two of the first three batters he faced and three of the first six. He was eight batters into the Nebraska order before anyone hit a ball out of the infield on him. But in the course of that start, the Indiana junior left-hander cracked open the blister underneath the fingernail he split last week and it caused enough problems to make sure his day didn’t last long. After giving up a walk, an infield single and another walk to load the bases with one out in the second, Sommer surrendered a bases-clearing double by freshman…
MT. VERNON — Daryl Thomas didn’t want his son Kyle to play basketball out of a sense of obligation or feeling that he was supposed to follow in his father’s footsteps. The former Indiana forward and captain on the 1987 national championship squad wanted his son to develop a love of the game naturally, because he believed if Kyle’s desire to be great was organic and not manufactured, it would ultimately carry him much further. So even though Daryl was the coach at Chicago’s Montini Catholic High School himself at the time, and even though Kyle played the game throughout…
Jeff Mercer thanked Dan Hartleb for the opportunity to play the game. After dropping two games in Bloomington in mid-April before the weather made it impossible to play the third, Hartleb put his Illinois team back on a bus to play a road game Tuesday against an Indiana team for which every game matters in its hope for a Big Ten championship. The Illini entered the day in seventh place in the league, so the game was in no way necessary for them, but they made the 2 1/2 hour trip anyway. “Coach Hartleb was kind enough to work with…
The attack was not much different than so many others Indiana faced on a night when the Hoosiers played almost entirely with their backs to the wall. Marshall junior midfielder Vitor Dias collected his own rebound on a shot off an Indiana defender, then took another left-footed shot just to IU goalkeeper Roman Celentano’s left. Celentano got his hands on that one just like he had so many others in a performance that helped make him the College Cup’s Most Outstanding Defensive Player, but this time he didn’t knock the ball quite out of harm’s way. It hung around near…
In Year 3 at South Florida, Michael Durr found his game coming together in just about every way. The 7-foot, 250-pounder found enough shooting range to trust himself outside the paint and a smooth enough stroke at the free throw line to have no reason to fear getting fouled. He was a better rebounder, a better defender, and a more prolific scorer. Even though his field goal percentage dropped a tad, that was in part because he was more willing to take chances and step away from the rim. He finished with 8.8 points and 7.9 rebounds per game, career…
Indiana fell 6-1 to Michigan on Sunday after winning 13-8 on Saturday but losing 10-3 on Friday, dropping the series to the Wolverines. The Hoosiers are now 24-12, which puts them a game behind Nebraska at 25-11 for first place in the Big Ten baseball standings, and in a virtual tie with 25-13 Michigan for second in the league. Indiana right-hander Gabe Bierman struck out six batters in 7 1/3 innings on Sunday and kept the Hoosiers within striking distance into the eighth inning when they trailed 3-1. However, Michigan scored three runs on a bloop double by Wolverines left…
If you were to have designed in a laboratory a foundational five-man class for a new Indiana basketball coach in the 21st century, it would have looked a lot like the national top-10 ranked group Archie Miller signed in 2018. In itself it constituted a modern basketball lineup with a pure point guard, three wings who were prolific high school scorers listed between 6-6 and 6-7, and a high-energy 6-8 forward who could work as a small-ball five man. That sort of length is also a prerequisite for the pack-line defense Miller brought to Bloomington, as Virginia’s best teams under…
Herbert Endeley had been preparing for a moment like this. One that could turn an entire game on its head and make everything that had happened before it completely irrelevant. Soccer works that way sometimes. You can have the ball the majority of the time, create far more opportunities around the net and generally spend most of the game attacking your opponent’s goal, but if you don’t put anything in the back of the net, none of that matters. “Sometimes the team that dominates,” Pittsburgh coach Jay Vidovich said, “doesn’t always win.” So even though No. 3 seed Indiana spent…