Posts tagged CU
CU men’s golfs team in sixth at NCAA Central Regional
May 16th
Buffs ten swings away from first place
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The University of Colorado men’s golf team opened strong here Thursday in the NCAA Central/Fayetteville Regional, with the Buffaloes in sixth place and definitely in contention for a top five finish and the berth into the NCAA Finals that comes with it.
No. 33 Illinois leads the pack with a 6-under 282 score, thanks to the efforts of two true freshmen that combined to go 11 strokes under what some call the “happy side of par.” No. 4 Texas is second (285), followed by No. 11 Oklahoma State (286), No. 22 Kent State (288) and No. 12 and host Arkansas (290).
The Buffaloes, ranked No. 58 by GolfStat and No. 67 by Golfweek, turned in a 4-over 292 to stand in sixth. No. 20 SMU is five back of CU, with the remaining seven teams in the field all at 300 or higher.
The top five teams out of 14 competing will advance to the NCAA Finals, set for May 28-June 2 in Atlanta, Ga., as will the top two individuals not associated with the five teams that qualify.
The four Buffs who contributed to the team score made the turn at 1-over; they had a collective hiccup on the first four holes on the front side (4-over), but played the last five at 1-under. The end result was Colorado placing four in the top 25 through 18 holes, matched only by Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, three of the nation’s top 12 teams.
“It was definitely a good start, which we chalk up to our primary focus today being was to be patient and have a great attitude,” head coach Roy Edwards said. “The guys were phenomenal with that. I’m really proud of them, and that’s really the main reason we enjoyed a solid round.
“We need to do the same thing for tomorrow,” he continued. “That’s to be patient, take it one shot at a time. Right now, they’re only thinking about their first tee shot (Friday). You cannot get ahead of yourself here. It rained overnight and the course was really soft, so it played as easiest as it’s going to get today. The scores are likely not going to be as low, so the emphasis will be on the importance of being patient. That’s what we’ll stress.”
Sophomore David Oraee led the Buffaloes with a 1-under 71, which has him tied for ninth individually. He had a steady round with four birdies and 11 pars against three bogeys; the four birds tied for 10th most in the field. Playing to even par much of the round, he finished with birdies on Nos. 7 and 9 with a bogeys sandwiched in-between to get it into red numbers on the 7,251-yard, par-72 The Blessings Golf Club course layout.
Freshman Philip Juel-Berg continued his stellar rookie season, posting a 1-over 73, which has him tied for 20th. He had three birdies, 11 pars and four bogeys on his day, as he made the turn at 3-over but played the front side at 2-under, thanks to birds on Nos. 6 and 9. There are 14 freshmen in the field; Juel-Berg finished currently is seventh among them, with three of the six ahead of him recording even-par rounds of 72.
CU’s No. 1 player and stroke average leader, senior Jason Burstyn, fashioned a 2-over 74, tying him for 25th; he had four birdies like Oraee, along with nine pars, four bogeys and one double. The latter came on No. 6, a 418-yard, par-4 that played as the day’s fourth toughest hole; that pushed him to 4-over on the day, but he bounced back and closed with birdies on Nos. 7 and 9.
Senior Derek Fribbs also shot a 74, with three birdies and 11 pars against three bogeys and a double. He got off to one of the hot starts of the day, standing 3-under after he birdied Nos. 12, 13 and 15 – a par-5, a par-4 and a par-3, respectively – but came back down to Earth with bogeys on No. 17 and then on Nos. 1 and 4. He was cruising along at even par until his final hole of the day, the 535-yard, par-5 No. 9, where he doubled after hitting his drive into a hazard. It was his first double bogey in six rounds.
“I was hitting it in their close and utilizing the slopes,” Fribbs said of his start. “But after a while, the putts weren’t falling. I still had opportunities on the back nine, I just couldn’t make any putts to take full advantage of things. The course played a little easier today than expected because you could hold your shots better than we thought, but we also had good course management today.”
Junior Johnny Hayes shot an 8-over 80, tying him for 60th, as he recorded two birdies and nine pars against five bogeys, a double and a triple. He scored the latter two in his first four holes to get to 5-over quickly, but settled down over the final 14 holes.
“Johnny had a rough start, but regrouped and then held it together pretty well for a bad start,” Edwards said. “For the most part, any time anyone made a mistake, they worked hard to make a bogey and nothing worse.”
Hayes certainly wasn’t alone in his struggles; the average score by the non-scorer for all 14 teams on Thursday was an 81.6; he actually tied for the fourth lowest as only three managed to break 80. Despite his troubles, he played the par-3 holes at a collective 1-under, tied for eighth best in the field.
Illinois freshman Charlie Danielson turned in the best round of the day to take the individual lead, as the 2012 Wisconsin state high school champion opened on the back nine and shot a 30, including five birdies over a seven hole span; he added two more birdies on the front side to finish with a 7-under 65. Freshmen dominated the top of the leaderboard Thursday, with Oklahoma State’s Jordan Niebrugge tied for second (67) and Illinois’ Thomas Detry fourth (68).
The field has been re-paired according to score for the second round; Colorado, the No. 10 seed here, will tee it up off the No. 1 tee beginning at 7:20 a.m. MDT with Kent State (No. 5 seed) and Arkansas (No. 2), who occupy the fourth and fifth spots ahead of the Buffs. The final round is set for a 7:50 a.m. start on Saturday.
CU media release
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CU study: Melting glaciers are largely responsible for sea level rise
May 16th
While 99 percent of Earth’s land ice is locked up in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the remaining ice in the world’s glaciers contributed just as much to sea rise as the two ice sheets combined from 2003 to 2009, says a new study led by Clark University and involving the University Colorado Boulder.
The new research found that all glacial regions lost mass from 2003 to 2009, with the biggest ice losses occurring in Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes and the Himalayas. The glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic sheets lost an average of roughly 260 billion metric tons of ice annually during the study period, causing the oceans to rise 0.03 inches, or about 0.7 millimeters per year.
The study compared traditional ground measurements to satellite data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, missions to estimate ice loss for glaciers in all regions of the planet.
“For the first time, we’ve been able to very precisely constrain how much these glaciers as a whole are contributing to sea rise,” said geography Assistant Professor Alex Gardner of Clark University in Worcester, Mass., lead study author. “These smaller ice bodies are currently losing about as much mass as the ice sheets.”
A paper on the subject is being published in the May 17 issue of the journal Science.
“Because the global glacier ice mass is relatively small in comparison with the huge ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, people tend to not worry about it,” said CU-Boulder Professor Tad Pfeffer, a study co-author. “But it’s like a little bucket with a huge hole in the bottom: it may not last for very long, just a century or two, but while there’s ice in those glaciers, it’s a major contributor to sea level rise,” said Pfeffer, a glaciologist at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research
ICESat, which ceased operations in 2009, measured glacier changes using laser altimetry, which bounces laser pulses off the ice surface to determine changes in the height of ice cover. The GRACE satellite system, still operational, detects variations in Earth’s gravity field resulting from changes in the planet’s mass distribution, including ice displacements.
GRACE does not have a fine enough resolution and ICESat does not have sufficient sampling density to study small glaciers, but mass change estimates by the two satellite systems for large glaciated regions agree well, the scientists concluded.
“Because the two satellite techniques, ICESat and GRACE, are subject to completely different types of errors, the fact that their results are in such good agreement gives us increased confidence in those results,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, a study co-author and fellow at the university’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
Ground-based estimates of glacier mass changes include measurements along a line from a glacier’s summit to its edge, which are extrapolated over a glacier’s entire area. Such measurements, while fairly accurate for individual glaciers, tend to cause scientists to overestimate ice loss when extrapolated over larger regions, including individual mountain ranges, according to the team.
Current estimates predict if all the glaciers in the world were to melt, they would raise sea level by about two feet. In contrast, an entire Greenland ice sheet melt would raise sea levels by about 20 feet, while if Antarctica lost its ice cover, sea levels would rise nearly 200 feet.
The study involved 16 researchers from 10 countries. In addition to Clark University and CU-Boulder, major research contributions came from the University of Michigan, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, Trent University in Ontario, Canada, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies in Boulder, NASA’s ICESat satellite was successfully operated from the CU-Boulder campus by a team made up primarily of undergraduates from its launch in 2003 to its demise in 2009 when the science payload failed. The students participated in the unusual decommissioning of a functioning satellite in 2010, bringing the craft into Earth re-entry to burn up. ICESat’s successor, ICESat-2, is slated for launch in 2016 by NASA.
-CU media release-
CU men snag a “sleeper” high school basketball player for next year
May 14th
CU capitalizes on San Antonia b-ball pipeline
BOULDER – University of Colorado men’s basketball head coach Tad Boyle and his coaching staff announced Monday they have signed George King, a 6-foot-5, 205-pound forward from San Antonio, Texas to a National Letter of Intent. King will be a freshman at CU beginning of the 2013 fall semester.
King will be one of four true-freshmen on the Buffaloes team that will also feature a pair of redshirt-freshmen. He joins fellow freshmen Tre’Shaun Fletcher, Jaron Hopkins, and Dustin Thomas. The incoming class also features redshirt-freshmen Wesley Gordon and Chris Jenkins, both sat out this past season.
“He can rebound, block shots, shoot and defend,” Boyle said of CU’s latest addition to the roster.
Boyle also said CU was “kind of late to the party” in recruiting King, who conceded he was a “late bloomer” and didn’t start attracting major attention until late in his senior season and went through the April signing period unsigned.
During his senior year, King averaged 16.6 points, 11.5 rebounds and 1.6 blocks per game in leading the Brennan Bears to a 39-3 record and an appearance in the 4A state semifinals. He shot 60 percent from the field and was named both TABC All-State and District 28-4A MVP. As a senior he recorded 25 double-doubles and had two 20-20 games with 23 points and 20 rebounds against Warren (Nov. 12) and 20 points and 20 rebounds against Lanier (Jan. 29) including 12 rebounds in one quarter.
King was an all-area selection as a junior.
“They believe in me and I believe in them,” King told Rivals.com on signing with the Buffaloes. “I’ve only been to Colorado a handful of times and it was my first time in Boulder,” he said. “I knew I liked it as soon as I stepped foot in Boulder. It has a beautiful campus, really nice people.”
“They have a really good coaching staff, the players and I really clicked. I got up and down with the guys and got a good feeling. (The coaches) like that I’m good sized, I’m skilled, that I can shoot and that I have a lot of potential.”
CU returns two seniors (Ben Mills, Kevin Nelson) on the 2013-2014 roster; along with three juniors (Askia Booker, Spencer Dinwiddie, Beau Gamble); and four sophomores (Xavier Johnson, Josh Scott, Eli Stalzer, Xavier Talton).
By the end of the summer, the Buffs will have graduated three student-athletes (Jeremy Adams, Sabatino Chen, Shane Harris-Tunks). Andre Roberson, who had one more year of eligibility remaining, declared for the NBA Draft on April 28. His sister, Arielle Roberson was nationally ranked as a freshman, will be a sophomore on CU’s women’s basketball team next season.
CU sports media release
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