MEGAN DAVIS: Hello, Gopher fans. It’s Megan Davis with the Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to The Gold Standard, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota sports. This week, it’s just me in the booth, and I’ll be just covering a lot of the stories that I’ve published in the past two weeks and some of my upcoming stories. 

So I did want to cover a little bit more on the NCAA track and field finale, just because I know Regan covered it in the last podcast, but I recently did publish a story about Ali Weimer and the success that she’s had over her college career so far. She’d actually just graduated with her bachelor’s degree in sociology, so congratulations to her. 

But she also had a stellar performance at the NCAA finals in Eugene, Oregon. Where she broke her own 10k school record the same year that she set it and she does have more years of eligibility left so she will be coming back to pursue a graduate degree here at the U so I’m excited to see kind of how much further she takes her career because I do believe that is definitely not the best that she could ever do. 

And yeah, super exciting for her, especially because she’s also a star in cross country, she was the Big Ten cross country freshman of the year in 2022. It was a unanimous decision, which is super impressive. But yeah, that was super exciting.

And then my most recent piece, which came out two days ago, was on women’s rugby in the Twin Cities because the Legacy Cup, which is the new professional USA rugby championship for women, had their first-ever championship game here in Eagan, Minnesota. And that was super exciting because it’s the first time that women in the U.S. have had a professional league to go behind.

There was one before, however, it was amateur and was pay-to-play. And so though you had a lot of the top names in women’s U.S. Rugby there, you know, they deserve to get paid for what they’re doing. Especially if we want the U.S. Rugby team to be good on a national level and want to have U.S. women compete in U.S. states rather than compete in England, which is kind of where most of the rugby players go, just because they’re already hitting that pay level in England. 

They actually play their players, and they get a little bit better turnout just because rugby is not as popular in the U.S. as it is in England or Australia. So that was super exciting, and actually, that’s what my next story will be on. It will also be on rugby. I’m not going to tell too much about it because I’m super excited to write it, and I want people to read that story. 

But basically, there has been more women’s rugby history in Minnesota, Minneapolis, and specifically the U that I feel like a lot of kids these days or even adults, if you didn’t go to the U, wouldn’t know about. And so I was looking through the Minnesota Daily archives. And so hopefully you’ll have a fun story on that.

And if you do know anyone who participated in rugby, knew someone who participated in rugby in the ’70s and ’80s specifically, if they were on the women’s rugby team, please feel free to have them contact me at [email protected]. Because I’d love to hear from them. And sometimes it’s hard to find contact information for people online.

Other things is we do have Angelos Mantzouranis, so he is a hammer thrower. He won second at the NCAA championship, and he had a qualifying performance in April that is able to send him to the World Athletic Championship. He will be competing for Greece, but if you want to support the Gophers, I think that’ll be super interesting to watch, especially because it’s happening in September, I believe.

I know a lot of the last podcast was talking about men’s basketball and the new recruits that they have, and it is super interesting that the men’s basketball team will pretty much, they’re rebuilding, you know.

But I know we talked about this in an earlier podcast episode for the women, the women are not rebuilding. They’re starting five stays strong.

I did also write a story on that. Just kind of introducing some of the new recruits. We do have quite a few graduate students coming in for their last year of eligibility. And then we have two new freshmen who I’m super excited to see play. They’re the kind of main recruits, but I don’t think that recruiting was as prioritized as it was for the men’s team, just because the starting five of the women’s team currently has already proven that they can win.

And Mara Braun and before her injury, she was the star player of the team. And so with the addition of her, it seems that they have a very strong team and I really hope they make March Madness because I’d love to see them compete on a bigger platform. I think they could really handle it.

Regan last week also wrote a piece kind of predicting how the football schedule could go for the men, and I love stories like that, it was super interesting to read. Because even if the predictions aren’t perfect, I personally love it because I love seeing how other sports writers make their decisions and kind of weigh the options.

Because you know, some of those games could be upsets, some of them could be blowouts and you really never know until you watch it. She predicted that it would be a 9-3 finish, I believe. And who wouldn’t want that? I sure would. That’s kind of all I have for Gopher sports at the current moment.

I will say that free agency in the NBA has kicked off, and I’m a little shocked, I guess. Milwaukee decided that they did not want to deal with Dame anymore after he ruptured his Achilles, and they cut him loose. I know that Dame wasn’t happy being on the box, and I know that it was probably going to be a weird end to their little relationship, but it was very shocking to see that they just wanted to deal with the cap rather than even giving it a try. 

It doesn’t really look good for their franchise. And they got Myles Turner from Indiana, but they still have no picks. It seems like we already did this, where it was like, they’re going to make a bold move to try and keep Giannis on the team. 

The bold move is probably not going to work out. And then they’re going to do it again because Giannis is showing that he’s antsy and that he wants to leave. I’ll be really interested to see how their season goes next year, just because it’s looking pretty bad over there.

Also Timberwolves gave contracts to Randle and Reid. Randle’s is a three-year contract, and Naz Reid’s is a five-year contract. However, because of those two big contracts, they will be saying goodbye to Alexander-Walker, which I know is very sad because he was a part of the Timberwolves organization since the beginning. And so yeah, that’s a little sad. 

Denver had a really good start to their free agency and OKC is great.

And I don’t know, so many other good teams have added very strong pieces, except for the Golden State Warriors. They haven’t really done anything where I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s gonna be able to push them over the edge.”

To me, this kind of looks like they will be finishing the exact same as they were last year. They’ll still have a good team, obviously, and I think Anthony Edwards will get even better, you know, just as he gets older, but I just don’t know if that’s enough to really bring home the ring.

So who knows what will happen there? I mean, obviously things can change. Free agency did just begin, but also at the draft, their two major draft picks were both centers and, you know, helpful, useful, but they’re like project centers. They’re not, they’re not players that are fully developed yet and definitely need a lot of heavy coaching. They’ll definitely need a lot more time than maybe some of the other draft picks. 

I mean, obviously, all draft picks need time to adjust to the NBA, but from what I read, it’s looking like they’re going to need, like everyone who did the pre draft analysis was like, they will probably need more time than the other people drafted alongside them. And in a team like Minnesota, you have a little time, I guess.

But I don’t know. I feel like it’s kind of, I would start moving into that “It’s time to win now” phase. I don’t know, maybe because they know the West is so competitive, they’re going to try to win a little bit later, win in five years.

That’s everything I have. And my hot take of the day is people keep saying that Cooper Flagg is amazing and the best there ever was. And yeah, going to the Mavericks will really help him be a superstar, but in my opinion, he’ll always be the second superstar. I don’t think he’ll ever be the first superstar. 

I don’t think he’s going to be the one to lead a team, but I think it’ll be like a Dončić-Irving situation, you know? We all know who’s leading the team, but it’s not like the other guy is invaluable and necessary on the team. Anyway, that’s my hot take. 

This episode was written by Megan Davis and produced by Ceci Heinen.

As always, we appreciate you listening in and feel free to send a message to our email inbox at [email protected] with any questions, comments or concerns. 

And if you know anyone who did rugby in the 70s and 80s, email [email protected]. 

I’m Megan Davis, and this has been The Gold Standard. Adios!