Category: Sports
MIDDLEBURY — After a pair of hard-fought wins in Maine this past weekend, the NESCAC champion Middlebury College men’s hockey team finds itself back in familiar territory against a familiar foe: The 19-4-4 Panthers will host SUNY Plattsburgh on Saturday at 7 p.m. in what will be their first NCAA appearance since 2007, when Middlebury made its 13th straight trip to the dance.
Saturday night’s NCAA Division III quarterfinal against the 18-5-3 Cardinals will be a rematch of a Feb. 2 game at Kenyon Arena won by the Panthers, 5-3.
HANCOCK — Rice Memorial senior and Ferrisburgh resident Katie Cutting made it back-to-back titles in both the slalom and giant slalom at Thursday’s high school alpine girls’ state championship meet, hosted by Middlebury Union High School at the Middlebury College Snow Bowl.
Vergennes junior Greta Krahn took second behind Cutting in the GS and was seventh in the slalom.
Rutland won the team competition with 109 points, ahead of Mount Mansfield (139) and Champlain Valley (160). Middlebury (381) was 15th.
WOODFORD — The Middlebury Union High School girls’ Nordic ski team completed its run to second place in Division II on Wednesday with a strong showing in the classic races held at Prospect Mountain Nordic Ski Center in Woodford.
The Tiger girls finished with 118 points, trailing only Fairfax (75), and finishing well ahead of U-32 (146). Those three teams were also 1-2-3 after March 1’s freestyle racing in Craftsbury.
Sophomore Dominique Powers led MUHS on Wednesday by taking second place in the individual race 18:23.7, followed by classmate Britta Clark in sixth.
MIDDLEBURY — The Middlebury College men’s basketball team’s dreams of a deep run into the NCAA basketball tournament ended with a cold-shooting first half in Pepin Gymnasium on Saturday night, when Rhode Island College upset the Panthers, 75-59.
The 25-4 Panthers scored just five points in the first 10 minutes against the swarming defense of the smaller, but quicker Anchormen. They trailed at the half, 37-22, after hitting just eight of 30 shots in the first 20 minutes.
VERGENNES — On an elevated mat with more than 1,200 fans watching in the Vergennes Union High School gym, Otter Valley’s George Mitchell and Middlebury’s Bryan Ashley-Selleck, both juniors, on Saturday night won state titles at the Vermont state high school wrestling championship meet.
They and the other top-three finishers — including Tiger senior Kaden Odell, second at 145 pounds; and Vergennes sophomore Geoffrey Grant, second at 171 — became eligible to compete at the New England championship tournament this Friday and Saturday in New Haven, Conn.
MIDDLEBURY — The Middlebury College men’s hockey team continued its late-season surge on Saturday, when the 17-4-4 Panthers dismissed visiting Tufts, 6-2, in a NESCAC quarterfinal.
The win was the Panthers’ 10th in 11 tries and sends them to next weekend’s NESCAC final four at top-seeded Bowdoin. The Panthers will take on No. 5 Trinity, and the Polar Bears will face No. 6 Hamilton. Middlebury tied Trinity on the road, 2-2 on Jan. 15. The Panthers defeated Bowdoin, 5-2, in Middlebury on Jan. 30.
VERGENNES — The No. 7 Vergennes Union High School boys’ basketball team accomplished all of its goals in Tuesday night’s first-round Division II playoff game against visiting No. 10 Springfield.
The 13-8 Commodores advanced to the quarterfinal round, avenged their loss in the 2009 final to Springfield with a 47-37 win, and helped senior forward Connor Merrill reach the coveted 1,000-point plateau.
VERGENNES — The host Vergennes Union High School cheerleading team saw its four-year championship streak snapped at Saturday’s state meet, but the Commodore girls still came away with some hardware on their home floor.
The Vermont Principals’ Association reconfigured the divisions this year, consolidating what had been a three-division competition into a two-division meet. That decision meant a move for the four-time defending Division-II champion Commodores into D-I, where they had to do battle with heavyweights Rutland and Essex, who have traded off the D-I crown for years.
