Post and Courier

GSU, UNCG lead SoCon men’s, women’s golf

April 16, 2012

The College of Charleston men’s tennis team defeated Davidson, 5-2, in its regular-season finale to three-peat as Southern Conference regular-season champions on Sunday.

The Cougars (15-4, 9-1) locked up the No. 1 tournament seed in the SoCon championships on April 19-22 to be held at The Citadel and CofC.

Men’s golf
Senior Stephen Jaeger, who was the 2010 and 2011 Southern Conference men’s golfer of the year, led defending champ Georgia Southern to a one-stroke lead after the opening round of the SoCon men’s tournament at Daniel Island Club’s Ralston Creek course.

The Eagles are at 2-over-par 290, one shot ahead of second-place Wofford. The College of Charleston is tied with Furman for fifth at 295. The Cougars were led by senior Henry Smart of England, who is tied for second at 2-under 70.

The tournament continues through Tuesday.

TEAM STANDINGS: Georgia Southern, 290; Wofford, 291; Samford, 293; Chattanooga, 294; College of Charleston, 295; Furman, 295; Elon, 297; Appalachian State, 300; Davidson, 305; Western Carolina, 306; UNC Greensboro, 308.

INDIVIDUAL LEADERS: Stephan Jaeger, Chattanooga, 66; Henry Smart, College of Charleston, 70; Darren Cook Appalachian State, 70; Lewis Gruber, Georgia Southern, 71; Jack Adkins, Elon; Drew Aimone, Samford, 72; Brannon Hudson, Wofford, 72; Bill Nabors, Samford, 72; Tanner Norton, Elon, 72; Austin Reeves, Furman, 72; Scott Wolfes, Georgia Southern.

Women’s golf
UNC Greensboro posted an 18-over-par 306 to take the first-round lead in the Southern Conference tournament at Moss Creek Plantation’s North Course in Hilton Head.

Greensboro leads second-place Elon by four shots. Furman is third at 311, while Charleston is fourth at 314.

Three players are tied for the individual lead at 2-over-par 74 — Furman’s Alexa Rancourt, Greensboro’s Begonia Sarabia and Elon’s Martyna Mierzwa.

Senior Leigh Whittaker of the College of Charleston is tied for fourth with an opening 75. Former Porter-Gaud standout Elizabeth Thompson opened with a 78 for Wofford and is tied for ninth.

TEAM STANDINGS: UNC Greensboro, 306; Elon, 310; Furman, 311; College of Charleston 314; Western Carolina, 315; Samford, 317; Chattanooga, 317; Wofford, 319; Appalachian State, 329; The Citadel, 351.

INDIVIDUAL LEADERS: Martyna Mierzwa, Elon, 74; Alexa Rancourt, Furman, 74; Begonia Sarabia, UNC Greensboro, 7; Fanny Cnops, UNC Greensboro, 75; Lauren Lebak, Elon, 75; Leigh Whittaker, College of Charleston, 75; Jordan Britt, Chattanooga, 77; Maria Juliana Loza, Chattanooga, 77; Sarah Butts, Samford, 78; Anne Marie Covar, Wofford, 78; Ana Lucia Martinez, 78; Blaire Minter, Western Carolina, 78; Daffodil Sanchez, Furman, 78; Lauren Smith, Appalachian State, 78; Elizabeth Thompson, Wofford, 78.

Softball
The College of Charleston suffered a 4-3 loss to first-place Georgia Southern in a back-and-forth Southern Conference series finale in Statesboro, Ga.

Former Hanahan High standout Ashton Jarrett led the Cougars with two hits.

The Cougars next play a doubleheader on Wednesday at 2 p.m. at Charleston Southern.

Sand volleyball
The College of Charleston concluded its regular season with a third-place finish at the Fiesta on Siesta tournament in Siesta Key, Fla.

The Cougars also placed second among the seven schools that currently sponsor sand volleyball as an NCAA sport.

The Cougars’ top pair of Elyse Chubb and Lizzie Theesfeld placed fifth out of 55 teams. Sailing

The 7th-ranked College of Charleston women’s team placed among the top 10 at the Emily Wick Trophy regatta.

Live5News.com

Cougars Down Samford With Six-Run Fourth Inning (VIDEO)

April 15, 2012

Post and Courier

State Report: CofC sailing advances to nationals

April 15, 2012

MOUNT PLEASANT — The No. 3-ranked College of Charleston sailing team won the SAISA Team Race Championships on Saturday to advance to the ICSA Team Race National Championship on June 3-5 in Lake Travis, Texas.

The Cougars compiled an 11-1 record over the three rounds for first-place honors followed by Miami (9-3) in second to clinch the other district national berth.

“We sailed very well today and made very few mistakes,” College of Charleston Director of Sailing Greg Fisher said. “We were strong off the start and sailed consistently and fast throughout the race.”

Sand volleyball
FAU slipped by the Cougars, 3-2, on Friday afternoon in the first day of the Fiesta at Siesta Sand Volleyball tournament. The Cougars had defeated FAU two weeks ago in dual sand volleyball action, but the Owls won the No. 1 and 2 seeds.

Tennis
College of Charlestons’ women’s team blanked its second opponent in back-to-back days with a 7-0 shutout of East Carolina.

The Cougars (22-5) are now winners of their last four regular season matches leading into the SoCon tennis championships held in Charleston next weekend.

As the No. 2 seed, the Cougars face the winner of the No. 7 and No. 10 seeds match in the women’s quarterfinals on April 20 at 1 p.m. at the Earle Tennis Center.

Softball
Jennifer Giles and Morgan Dowdy combined to strike out ten and Jana Matthews blasted her 22nd career home run to lead the Charleston Southern (25-19, 10-5 Big South) past Campbell (21-24, 6-6), 5-0, at Buccaneer Field.

CountOn2.com

College of Charleston baseball team goes bald to fight cancer (VIDEO)

Andy Wontor

April 13, 2012

Post and Courier

Cougars baseball team getting shaved for cancer research

Tommy Braswell

April 13, 2012

The cleanest-cut baseball team around is sure to be the College of Charleston following Saturday’s home game against Samford.

As part of a St. Baldrick’s Foundation event, players and coaches have agreed to have their heads shaved as part of an effort to raise money for childhood cancer research.

Initially setting a goal of raising $3,000, the team exceeded that last week and is now up to approximately $4,200. And one of the biggest fundraisers has been Cougars first baseman Rob Harding, who has helped raised $1,650.

“My father passed away when I was 20 months old from colon cancer. And my older brother was diagnosed with leukemia when he was born and was in treatment for three years and four months. Obviously, cancer has been a big part of my life,” Harding said.

Cougars coach Monte Lee said he was approached this spring by former University of North Carolina player Chase Jones about participating.

“He explained the program, and I said, ‘We’re in. We’ll do whatever we can to help,’ ” Lee said, adding that the Cougars would wait until the weather was a little warmer before shaving their heads.

St. Baldrick’s began in 2000, when three friends turned a St. Patrick’s Day party into a head-shaving event to benefit kids with cancer and raised more than $104,000.

From that beginning, St. Baldrick’s Foundation has raised more than $117 million for childhood cancer research.

Following the game, the Cougars will have a short T-ball game with 5-year-old Mack Shieder of Charleston, who threw out the first pitch for the recent College of Charleston-South Carolina baseball game. Shieder has been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia and acute myelocytic leukemia.

The players and coaches then will line up and three barbers from Thomas’ Barber Shop will give them a clean cut.

“I wrote on my web page that ‘I’m 22 and already losing my hair. I might not get it back,’ ” Harding said.

“The smile on Mack’s face when he threw out the first pitch in our game against South Carolina sent chills up my body. I thought to myself, ‘If this little boy that is going through so much in his life because of this disease can come out here and throw a baseball, why can’t I just shave my head bald and help raise money to save amazing young kids like him?’ ”

Post and Courier

College of Charleston women’s basketball adds Clark to staff

Tommy Braswell

April 13, 2012

Bob Clark was named associate head coach on the College of Charleston women’s basketball coaching staff, new coach Natasha Adair has announced.

This will be the third time that Adair and Clark have worked together. Both were assistants at Georgetown from 1998-04 and both were at Wake Forest from 2007-12 when Adair was the Deacons’ associate head coach.

“Having sat next to him for 11 seasons, I know and respect his basketball knowledge,” Adair said.

Clark has been in coaching for 36 years.

His other college coaching experience has been at Radford, Providence and Roanoke College. He graduated from Towson University.

Post and Courier

CofC men’s tennis team downs rival Citadel, 6-1

April 11, 2012

The College of Charleston men’s tennis team continued its dominance through its Southern Conference regular season slate by taking down The Citadel, 6-1, in a crosstown rivalry match Tuesday afternoon at the Earle Tennis Center.

The Cougars (14-3, 8-0) have won seven straight with two matches remaining to play to secure a No. 1 seed in the SoCon Tennis Championships to be held April 19-22 at the school’s home facilities in Charleston and Mount Pleasant.

The Bulldogs (5-16, 0-9) didn’t go down without a fight. Two of the three doubles matches went into an extra game.

CHARLESTON 6, CITADEL 1
SINGLES:David Orces (Citadel) def. Mickael Trintignac, 6-3, 3-6, 1-0 (7); Tom Delme (CofC) def. Josh Cook, 6-1, 6-3; Kyle Parker (CofC) def. James Atkinson, 6-3, 6-3; Crescente Lesser (CofC) def. Dillon Berkabile, 6-1, 6-4; Alon Faiman (CofC) def. Peter Bleach, 6-3, 6-4; Brice Allanic (CofC) def. Elliott Sperr, 6-4, 4-6, 1-0 (6).

DOUBLES:Trintignac-Parker (CofC) def. Orces-Atkinson, 9-8; Berkabile-Bleach (Citadel) def. Delme-Billy Kenny, 8-5; Lesser-Faiman (CofC) def. Sperr-Alex Howle, 9-7.

Softball

Freshman Hope Klicker threw her first career perfect game in the second game of a doubleheader sweep by the College of Charleston (27-13) over S.C. State in Orangeburg.

Klicker struck out 16 en route to the Cougars’ 6-0 victory.

Stephanie Saylors pitched a complete game in the first game, striking out 10 in a 9-0 win over the Bulldogs.

Kelsey Hodgson hit a grand slam in the early game, capping a nine-run fifth inning for Charleston, which has won 11 straight.

Melissa Adams went 2for2 with an RBI triple, and Jennifer Giles came out of the bullpen to lock down her first career save as Charleston Southern edged Coastal Carolina, 4-3, at Buccaneer Field.

Adams’ triple produced a 3-1 lead in the bottom of the sixth, and CSU (23-18, 8-4) stretched the advantage to 4-1 a batter later on an RBI single by Kristin Kelleher.

Golf

Setting both program and tournament records with its three-round score, the CSU men won theCoca-Cola Invite in Spartanburg by 10 strokes.

The Bucs’ final score of 841set a tournament record, breaking ETSU’s mark of 847 in 2010. The Bucs’ 23-under par finish was also a tournament and program record.

Second-round adjustments resulted in improvements for the CSU women’s golf team, which shaved 12 strokes off of its score to move into seventh place at the Big South Women’s Golf Championship after two rounds of play in Ninety-Six.

The Bucs shot 321-309-630 and are five strokes behind sixth-place Presbyterian. Top-seeded Campbell leads after shooting a 594.

Battery

Charleston midfielder Jose Cuevas was named USL Pro Division’s player of the week after he scored a pair of goals to lead the Battery to a 2-1 victory against the Richmond Kickers in the season opener for both teams.

Basketball

College of Charleston’s Antwaine Wiggins was named to the 2012 CollegeInsider.com Mid-Major Defensive All-America Team.

Wiggins, a 6-7 forward, finished his playing career with 127 career steals and 122 career blocked shots. He also left his mark as the fourth all-time leading rebounder (702) and seventh all-time leading scorer (1,306 points) in the Cougars’ history as a Division I school.

Post and Courier

For CofC pitcher, new treatment worked

Jeff Hartsell

April 10, 2012

In the summer of 2010, Nick Osterman was pitching for the Forest City Owls of the Coastal Plains League. With two out in the eighth inning of a baseball game against the Thomasville Hi-Toms, he threw a fastball for strike three and felt something give in his right elbow.

“It was like a tearing-away sensation,” said Osterman, a fifth-year senior at College of Charleston. “It felt like there was a needle in my elbow.”

Osterman, a graduate of Stratford High School, had suffered a partial tear of the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. That injury sometimes requires repair through what is known as “Tommy John surgery.” Normal recovery time: One year.

“I wanted to get on the field for my senior year,” Osterman said. “I didn’t want to do surgery and sit out a year.”

Instead, Osterman opted for a relatively new treatment known as platelet-rich plasma, or P.R.P. On July 31, 2010, Dr. Bright McConnell of Charleston Sports Medicine withdrew some of Osterman’s own blood and spun it in a centrifuge, concentrating platelets and growth factors up to 500 percent. The P.R.P. was then injected into Osterman’s torn ligament, the goal to promote growth and healing.

Six months later, Osterman was back pitching for the Cougars. He appeared in 14 games and had two saves for Charleston last year, and this season is 2-0 with a 3.24 earned-run average in 11 games.

“He’s probably better now than he’s ever been,” said Cougars coach Monte Lee.

Osterman joined a list of celebrity athletes who have used P.R.P. to well-publicized effect, setting off something of a P.R.P. boom among sports medicine physicians. Scientific studies have not caught up to the anecdotal evidence on P.R.P — and most insurance companies are not paying for it yet — so weekend warriors should use caution when considering the procedure for their own aches and pains, experts say.

The theory behind P.R.P. makes sense, according to Dr. David Geier, director of sports medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina.

“You take a small amount of the patient’s own blood, put it in a centrifuge and spin it off to get rid of the white and red blood cells,” he said. “What remains is the plasma, and that’s where the platelets and all the growth factors are. You inject that into the area you are trying to heal. What you are trying to do is stimulate an inflammatory response, which is what helps the injury to heal.

“In theory, the science makes a lot of sense.”

So much so that famous athletes such as Hines Ward and Troy Polamalu of the Pittsburgh Steelers, running back Ahmad Bradshaw of the Giants and golfer Retief Goosen have used P.R.P. for various ailments. Even Tiger Woods has reportedly used P.R.P. injections to help his ailing knee.

Rigorous scientific studies have yet to support anecdotal evidence as to how well P.R.P. works, Geier said.

“The problem is we started doing it a lot, and then came the randomized blind studies,” he said. “And people who had P.R.P. really weren’t doing any better than people who had a placebo or standard treatment.”

According to McConnell, one problem is that there is a wide variety in how and to what injuries P.R.P. treatments are applied, and in follow-up care.

“We are trying to get the orthopedic community to come together and define what it is that we are calling P.R.P.,” McConnell said. “One issue is, what concentration of platelets are you achieving? The companies marketing P.R.P. and centrigues, they are kind of all over the map. Some don’t concentrate platelets more than twofold, and the data is that you need at least four or fivefold concentrations to get the growth factors you need.

“Does it work for everything? Is it fairy dust? No. But in my experience is, and I think the literature supports it, P.R.P can be very positive with certain chronic conditions — tennis elbow, jumper’s knee, Achilles tendon problems, ligament tears for pitchers. The data is very strong for that.”

Geier said he suggests P.R.P. for patients who have exhausted other options.

“It’s almost never a first-line treatment,” he said. “There aren’t that many studies that show it helps, and insurance doesn’t pay for it. But for people who have tried all the standard treatments and still can’t play or do what they like to do, it’s potentially an option.”

The Cougars’ Osterman and his coach, Lee, certainly are believers.

“We thought Nick was done,” Lee said, recalling when he was told about Osterman’s injury. “Any time you hear about an injury like that, you generally don’t come back from that, at least without surgery.”

McConnell informed Osterman of the P.R.P. alternative, and the pitcher went for a second opinion to Dr. James Andrews. He is a renowned orthopedic surgeon and top practitioner of Tommy John surgery, the ligament- replacment operation named after the former major league pitcher.

“Dr. Andrews said, ‘I wouldn’t operate on this,’” McConnell said. “He recommended the P.R.P. treatment. Ninety percent of the time with a problem like Nick’s, a partial tear where there is a scaffolding of tissue to work with, it heals them. The bottom line is, you can look at non-surgical management for this, unless it is a complete blowout that needs to be reconstructed.”

The P.R.P. treatment is not inexpensive, averaging between $600 and $750, and insurance companies are generally not yet paying for it, McConnell said. But compared with $15,000 to $20,000 for a Tommy John surgery, it can be quite cost effective. And a recent study by the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic in Los Angeles reported promising results in using P.R.P. to treat injuries such as Osterman’s.

Osterman said his injections were not painful. He did not throw for six weeks to allow the ligament to heal, then began a six-week throwing program before returing to action.

“The recovery was quick, and I’ve been perfectly healthy ever since,” he said. “I’m really glad Dr. McConnell recommended it. I think it’s a good alternative to surgery.”