Happy New Year to Cougs Everywhere!

Greetings, and Happy New Year to all of you in Coug Land. If your 2022 stunk, I hope things are looking up as the calendar turns. If your 2022 was great, I hope things stay that way!

In terms of Washington State Cougars athletics, 2022 was pretty...decent. The football team was ok, winning some games it was supposed to win and losing others it was supposed to lose, and getting embarrassed twice in bowl games. The men’s basketball team was fine, what with a good NIT run to end 2021-22 and a really, really bad start to 2022-23.

The women’s hoops team was a bright spot, making its second consecutive NCAA Tournament run. Unfortunately, it ended the way the previous tournament appearance did, with a 1-and-done appearance. the beginning to 2022-23 has gone, yep, ok, as the women started the season 10-3, but sit at 0-2 in conference play.

The baseball team was a tale of two seasons in one, going 27-26. The team finished as one of the hottest in the Pac-12, but unfortunately, the season was sabotaged by a disastrous 1-10 start to conference play. On the bright side, the 2023 season starts next month! The Cougs will head to Arizona to face Villanova and UC Riverside, beginning February 17.

The volleyball team was, once again, its usual solid self, and remains one of the more consistently competitive programs at WSU. The Cougs earned yet another NCAA Tournament berth, and won their first round tilt over UNLV before succumbing to eventual final four entrant San Diego.

Individually, Cougar tennis player Michaela Bayerlova probably had the best season the most standout season. The Krumbach, Germany native played her way to becoming the first tennis All-American in WSU history, getting all the way the the NCAA quarterfinals and achieving a #19 ranking, best in school history.

All of those WSU individual and team efforts resulted in a second consecutive Boeing Apple Cup trophy for WSU. We’ll take it!

On to 2023, with a renewed hope that all Cougar athletes perform at a high level.

One WSU-related “good riddance” to 2022, for me anyway, is the fact that the next football recruiting class will be for 2024. For the love of all that is holy, can we do better than this nonsense?

Sincerely, a concerned alumnus.

Basketball

Both the men and women are in action Sunday. The men face the USC Trojans, coming off their annual “we led UCLA most of the game but then crapped the bed” home game against UCLA. For real, this has happened more times than I can count in my lifetime.

A little bit after the men’s game concludes, the women face the Colorado Buffaloes. Both games are available on the Pac-12 Networks.

This Week in Parenting (with a dash of “You Suck if...)

Before Christmas, the kiddos were helping Mrs. Kendall make buckeyes. If you’re unfamiliar, buckeyes are little ball-shaped sweets that consist of a peanut butter mixture mostly encased in chocolate. They’re sublime. I walked into the kitchen, and the 11 year-old said, “We’re making Schweddy balls, but we haven’t added chocolate so they’re not quite Schweddy yet.” I don’t know if I’ll ever live down the time I let him watch that sketch.

Later in the week, we went out to Destin to spend a day and night away from the house (mostly because I had a free hotel night I needed to redeem). We were out at dinner, and there was a party at the table next to us, consisting of two women and one guy. Suddenly, the 11 year-old was incredulous. He’d spotted one of the women as she removed her flip flops, and then rested her bare feet on the booth seat. “That is disgusting,” he said. I agreed. He wasn’t done. “I’d tip her to put her shoes back on.” You can imagine his apoplexy when she stretched out her bare, disgusting foot and rested it on the chair across from her, between the legs of her male companion.

If you’ve ever exposed your bare feet and placed them on a publicly-used piece of furniture. You suck, and you’re disgusting. Stop sucking, and stop being an a**hole.

The next day, as we were packing to leave the hotel, I noticed that the teenager had, for reasons I will never be able to comprehend, left our “to go” box from the night prior in the microwave. Not the fridge. The microwave. I asked him why he’d decided the microwave was the best place for leftovers. “So it would be there.” Um, because you thought that if you put the container in the fridge, it may have disappeared into a wormhole? I was speechless.

Non-Sports

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