Curzan earns measure of redemption in 200m back
After missing out on Team USA for the 2024 Paris Olympics, Claire Curzan held off Regan Smith to win the women's 200m backstroke at the U.S. Swimming Championship and qualify for the world championships in Singapore.
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Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Chancellor Julio Frenk suggests he'll be actively involved with UCLA athletics
Julio Frenk does not appear to be a university administrator content to watch his school's athletic program from the sidelines. In his last stop before becoming UCLA's chancellor, Frenk led an overhaul of the University of Miami's athletic department, bringing in a new athletic director and football coach after the Hurricanes were criticized for not making football a priority under Frenk's leadership. Advertisement That shakeup resulted in coach Mario Cristobal leading his team to a 10-3 season in 2024 that represented the Hurricanes' best finish in nearly a decade. Can UCLA fans expect a similar level of involvement in athletics from their new chancellor? In a word, yes. Read more: UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk vows to restore campus trust amid 'nervousness and anxiety' During a recent interview with The Times, Frenk indicated that he would be hands-on with UCLA athletics because of its importance to the university as a whole. 'I am [going to be involved] because I think athletics plays a very central role,' Frenk said. 'It is, first, an avenue for recruiting very talented students. Secondly, it benefits the other students. It enriches the student experience of everyone. But let me tell you, when we talk about the contribution to society, part of the reason many universities have a deficit, it's not because of football. Football actually has a positive cash flow for the university. Advertisement 'What we do in the United States that no other country that I know of does, is that universities are the place where we train Olympians, Olympic competitors, competitors who go to the Olympic Games. That function — just like the research function — has been delegated to universities and we are investing in having Olympic athletes. In most of the other countries, it's government-run high-performance centers. 'But here the federal government doesn't have to worry about that because universities do that and they fund that. And when we have the Olympics every four years, everyone is very proud to see the United States top the medal chart. That work starts in universities and that's why we also fund that. It's an intrinsic part of education. It enriches everyone's experience. It builds community. It also produces the best performing Olympic teams in the world.' Frenk's comments would seem to suggest that he is not considering any cuts to UCLA's Olympic sports even at a time when the school's athletic department has run up a $219.5-million deficit over the last six fiscal years. That deficit would be even higher had the university not agreed to provide $30 million to its athletic department as part of its most recent fiscal budget. Frenk also said that federal legislation was needed 'to create a much more predictable model' for football and men's basketball, controlling expenses while propping up the rest of an athletic department. UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk speaks during his inauguration ceremony at Royce Hall on June 5. (Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times) 'I acknowledge this costs money,' Frenk said of allocating resources to the revenue sports, 'but the money goes to be able to have all the other disciplines that do not generate money. The most direct way to do that would be to find other sources of funding. Right now, we use the revenue from football and that requires investments to fund the entire athletic operation. Advertisement 'It is time to have a conversation and create a legal framework that doesn't leave it to each institution or each state to find their own way in this. We're part of an ecosystem. I think the move to the Big Ten has been very positive in that respect. And those are the conversations we are having. How do we generate other sources of revenue — mostly to be able not just to maintain the excellence of the sports that are widely followed by the public, but also all the other sports, including, very importantly, the Olympic sports, which are such a source of pride?' Frenk has shown he will not tolerate failure in high-profile sports — or the perception that he is not doing everything he can to help his teams. As Miami's president, he led an upheaval of the school's athletic department after ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit criticized the Hurricanes during a September 2021 broadcast, mentioning a Miami Herald article stating that football was not a priority for Frenk. Herbstreit went on to say that Miami's athletic director, football coach and president were not in alignment about team needs like other powerhouse programs. Five days later, Frenk issued a statement saying that he wanted 'to make clear that the board of trustees and I, as president, recognize the essential part of our brand and reputation derived from athletics and we are fully committed to building championship-caliber teams at the U.' Frenk added that he would have his chief of staff and senior advisor engage with the athletic department to enhance his own commitment to sustain winning teams. Advertisement With the football team headed for a 7-5 finish that fell far short of preseason expectations, athletic director James Blake was fired before the end of the season and football coach Manny Diaz was dismissed a little more than a week after the final game. The Hurricanes then gave Cristobal a 10-year, $80-million contract, with Frenk attending the introductory news conference and calling his new coach's selection 'a bold vision for the future.' UCLA football went 5-7 last season under first-year coach DeShaun Foster. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) Last month, while making his first public remarks about UCLA athletics at a UC regents meeting, Frenk referenced the role athletics played in the school's institutional identity, mentioning legendary basketball coach John Wooden and the Bruins' dominance in Olympic sports with the school set to host the athlete village for the 2028 Olympics. Frenk also mentioned how UCLA's recent move to the Big Ten Conference was made with 'the goal of stabilizing the program and positioning it for long-term success.' The chancellor referenced the school's national championship in men's water polo, a Final Four appearance in women's basketball and a national runner-up finish in women's gymnastics as part of a haul that also included six team and four individual conference titles, the most of any Big Ten team. Advertisement Ultimately, an athletic department is only as healthy as its highest-profile sports. UCLA's football team needs to fully capitalize on the recent buzz created by the arrival of transfer quarterback Nico Iamaleava after finishing 5-7 in coach DeShaun Foster's debut season. The men's basketball team must maximize the ability of transfer point guard Donovan Dent to make everyone around him better if it hopes to make it to the second weekend of the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2023. Going forward, every UCLA team seems assured of one thing: Their new chancellor will be watching. Get the best, most interesting and strangest stories of the day from the L.A. sports scene and beyond from our newsletter The Sports Report. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Time Magazine
33 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
Kim Ng Made Baseball History. Now She's Taking On Softball
Kim Ng, who became the first female GM in the history of major North American men's pro team sports when the Miami Marlins hired her to run the team's baseball operations in 2020, is taking on a new challenge: building softball's version of the WNBA. In April, Ng was named commissioner of the Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL), a new professional start-up that begins its inaugural season on June 7. Ng (pronounced Ang, like Angus) spoke to TIME about why she's taking on her new role, the strategy driving the AUSL's rollout, and her future vision for the sport, which has garnered impressive TV ratings for coverage of its college postseason and returns to the Olympics in 2028. (This interview has been condensed for length and clarity) You left your job as the GM of the Miami Marlins in 2023, after leading the team to its first postseason appearance—following a full regular season —in 20 years. [ Management wanted to install a president of baseball operations above her, and Ng has said she and the team owner "were not completely aligned.' ] So before joining Athletes Unlimited as an adviser in 2024 and ultimately taking the AUSL commissioner job, what were you up to? That was eight months of being on my own. Doing my own thing, trying to live life a little bit. I had calculated that this is my first significant period of time off since being a sophomore in high school. Played some golf, visited a couple of friends, and just tried to get back into the swing of being a real person again. I was probably talking to [Athletes Unlimited co-founder and CEO] Jon Patricof for a couple of months and also doing some speaking engagements. It went by fast. Too fast. Why did you take this job? Part of this was what I spent the last 30 years doing, and that is trying to create opportunities for women, paving that path, mentoring. Making it easier for those coming behind me. I did that all through my baseball years, and now, having seen what was going on in the women's pro-sports landscape, it was incredibly exciting to think about being a part of it and lending my name to that effort. Taking on this role of being the very outward-facing, let's say, shepherd of the sport, I felt like I was ready for it. You grew up playing softball and played at the University of Chicago. What drew you to the game? First of all, my dad was a big baseball fan and grew up watching the Yankees. Big fan of the late-1970s Yankees. This was the sport my dad and I shared. Softball is really so similar to baseball. I'm not sure they're quite interchangeable, but in my mind, they are. And I was pretty good at it. Other attempts at women's pro softball haven't enjoyed sustained success. Why are you confident that the momentum that we've seen in other women's team sports in the U.S. in the last few years, particularly in basketball and soccer, is going to translate to softball? No. 1, I think Jon Patricof and [Athletes Unlimited co-founder] Jonathan Soros are very good listeners. That was one of the things that attracted me to the group. Then I think the greater acceptance from society, and how we view women and their ability as athletes, just led to this incredible moment. And the college metrics have been there for years. How do you try to connect those college fans with the pro space? There have to be these bridges to fill that gap. The softball landscape wants to be galvanized. In the inaugural AUSL season, the four teams—the Bandits, Blaze, Talons, and Volts—don't have home markets. Rather, the league will barnstorm to different locations—Rosemont, Ill., Wichita, Kan., Sulphur, La., Chattanooga, Tenn., Norman, Okla., Omaha, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Round Rock, Texas, and Tuscaloosa, Ala.—to play games around the U.S. What's the strategy behind that? There was a very short period of time in which to launch. So Jon and Jonathan just wanted to get out there and really get an understanding of the markets. When you're talking about partnering with venues and markets, you want to have an understanding of who the stakeholders are, who the actors in the landscape are, and you want to make sure that you have really good partners who want you to be there, who are committed to making the partnership work. It's like dating. You're going to date before you get married. Now's the dating process, From 2011 to 2020, you worked in the MLB front office, and on May 29, MLB announced it was investing in the AUSL. Can you characterize the scale of MLB's investment? Listen, money is very important, but really for us, a lot of this is about how you're building your business. And it's making sure that you're creating long-term revenue streams and proving to potential sponsors that there is support behind you. It's really about people believing in what you are bringing to the table, people believing in women's pro sports, people believing in women's pro softball and our future. I think that's what the MLB deal signals to the world. And what do you think MLB support, financially and otherwise, allows the AUSL to do that it might not have otherwise been able to do without it? MLB and softball are from the same family. There's no reason why the fans from MLB should not consider softball to be their fraternal twin. I think, in terms of amplification and visibility, when you start thinking about the fan bases, this is a fan base that has been built over 100 years. And it's a fan base that spans 26 markets. So you're talking about incredible reach. When you draw these fans over, it's going to be a great meeting between softball fans and baseball fans. How does the reentry of softball into the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics—the games will be played in Oklahoma City—play into the AUSL strategy? It is very much in the forefront of our minds. It is incredibly helpful that we have the Olympics coming down the road, that it will be based in the United States, and that we have some runway to lead up to it and to make it a part of our intentional strategy. There's no doubt in my mind that the Olympics, for this sport, has been the main driver of the most eyeballs in a short period of time. Do you miss running an MLB team? At times. There are specific times of the year that I thought were just so cool, like spring training, and the trading deadline, and the feeling when you know you're in the hunt to improve your team. Being able to see those really tangible results quickly. Those are some of the items that I miss about being with an MLB team. If I wasn't working in this job, I think I would miss the camaraderie. And I think there's no other camaraderie like being with a team. I think you get to know each other well, very well. You spend a lot of time with each other, and there's a lot of trash-talking and fun that you engage in on a fairly regular basis. Given your turnaround of the Marlins, a team that hasn't enjoyed much success over the years, you'd seem to be an attractive candidate for a GM position. If an opportunity came forward, would you be interested in that? I don't know exactly what the future holds. For me, right now, this is what I am focused on. To see the great momentum over the last couple of months has been just so amazing. And I think there is quite a lot that we can do here. We've encouraged people to just sort of absorb the moment of where we are right now, and to understand that they are very much a part of history. They should try and have this founder's mindset, that this is something to build. This is not something that we take lightly, nor should we take it lightly. I have never been consumed with looking for the next step. I'm not at the beginning of my career, and so it's really about doing something with a purpose and making sure that, wherever I am and whatever I'm doing, I leave it in a better place. I think I did that with the Marlins for sure. And I think I will do that here as well. Is there a lesson you learned from being GM of the Marlins that you can apply to being the commissioner of the AUSL? It's not just lessons with the Marlins. There are lessons from all of my previous endeavors. One of the biggest lessons that I've learned is that you have to take people along with you on your journey, and you have to communicate. That means up and down. One very practical thing is having seen and experienced the great success that MLB has had on pace of play. I think that's one thing that sort of drives a lot of my thoughts about how to make the game even more appealing to softball fans. I just talked to the athletes the other day, and I showed them our MLB outcomes due to pace of game and some of the rule changes. A 2023 survey says that 86% of 18- to 34-year-olds indicated they're more likely to watch MLB games due to the new rule changes. So part of this is education. It's about showing those very distinct, very eye-opening outcomes, so that they understand why we are doing this. That's part of the communication aspect. In closing, how about a prediction? What's going to be the state of pro softball in the U.S. in five years? I think it's going to be healthy. It's going to take us some time. We have to ride this nice wave that we've gotten here. It's going to be eye-opening for potential fans and potential sponsors. It's going to be very similar to the entire women's sports movement. We're getting metrics on our social platforms and MLB's platforms. People are understanding the power of this. The merging of the two fan bases, it's going to be organization-changing for us. That then leads to fans in the stands. Huge fan engagement. Great family experiences at the games. I think viewership is going to go up quite a bit. And I think we will have even more people knocking on our doors, wanting investment opportunities, whether it's at the franchise level or at the league level. We're going to be very intentional and very concerted in our effort to connect with the college market, to draw those college fans, help them see that there is this elite talent that is coming over and that they can follow in the pro landscape. And then we jump right towards the Olympics, and then use that as another tremendous springboard for ourselves. So I think the future is really, really bright.
Los Angeles Times
34 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Chancellor Julio Frenk suggests he'll be actively involved with UCLA athletics
Julio Frenk does not appear to be a university administrator content to watch his school's athletic program from the sidelines. In his last stop before becoming UCLA's chancellor, Frenk led an overhaul of the University of Miami's athletic department, bringing in a new athletic director and football coach after the Hurricanes were criticized for not making football a priority under Frenk's leadership. That shakeup resulted in coach Mario Cristobal leading his team to a 10-3 season in 2024 that represented the Hurricanes' best finish in nearly a decade. Can UCLA fans expect a similar level of involvement in athletics from their new chancellor? In a word, yes. During a recent interview with The Times, Frenk indicated that he would be hands-on with UCLA athletics because of its importance to the university as a whole. 'I am [going to be involved] because I think athletics plays a very central role,' Frenk said. 'It is, first, an avenue for recruiting very talented students. Secondly, it benefits the other students. It enriches the student experience of everyone. But let me tell you, when we talk about the contribution to society, part of the reason many universities have a deficit, it's not because of football. Football actually has a positive cash flow for the university. 'What we do in the United States that no other country that I know of does, is that universities are the place where we train Olympians, Olympic competitors, competitors who go to the Olympic Games. That function — just like the research function — has been delegated to universities and we are investing in having Olympic athletes. In most of the other countries, it's government-run high-performance centers. 'But here the federal government doesn't have to worry about that because universities do that and they fund that. And when we have the Olympics every four years, everyone is very proud to see the United States top the medal chart. That work starts in universities and that's why we also fund that. It's an intrinsic part of education. It enriches everyone's experience. It builds community. It also produces the best performing Olympic teams in the world.' Frenk's comments would seem to suggest that he is not considering any cuts to UCLA's Olympic sports even at a time when the school's athletic department has run up a $219.5-million deficit over the last six fiscal years. That deficit would be even higher had the university not agreed to provide $30 million to its athletic department as part of its most recent fiscal budget. Frenk also said that federal legislation was needed 'to create a much more predictable model' for football and men's basketball, controlling expenses while propping up the rest of an athletic department. 'I acknowledge this costs money,' Frenk said of allocating resources to the revenue sports, 'but the money goes to be able to have all the other disciplines that do not generate money. The most direct way to do that would be to find other sources of funding. Right now, we use the revenue from football and that requires investments to fund the entire athletic operation. 'It is time to have a conversation and create a legal framework that doesn't leave it to each institution or each state to find their own way in this. We're part of an ecosystem. I think the move to the Big Ten has been very positive in that respect. And those are the conversations we are having. How do we generate other sources of revenue — mostly to be able not just to maintain the excellence of the sports that are widely followed by the public, but also all the other sports, including, very importantly, the Olympic sports, which are such a source of pride?' Frenk has shown he will not tolerate failure in high-profile sports — or the perception that he is not doing everything he can to help his teams. As Miami's president, he led an upheaval of the school's athletic department after ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit criticized the Hurricanes during a September 2021 broadcast, mentioning a Miami Herald article stating that football was not a priority for Frenk. Herbstreit went on to say that Miami's athletic director, football coach and president were not in alignment about team needs like other powerhouse programs. Five days later, Frenk issued a statement saying that he wanted 'to make clear that the board of trustees and I, as president, recognize the essential part of our brand and reputation derived from athletics and we are fully committed to building championship-caliber teams at the U.' Frenk added that he would have his chief of staff and senior advisor engage with the athletic department to enhance his own commitment to sustain winning teams. With the football team headed for a 7-5 finish that fell far short of preseason expectations, athletic director James Blake was fired before the end of the season and football coach Manny Diaz was dismissed a little more than a week after the final game. The Hurricanes then gave Cristobal a 10-year, $80-million contract, with Frenk attending the introductory news conference and calling his new coach's selection 'a bold vision for the future.' Last month, while making his first public remarks about UCLA athletics at a UC regents meeting, Frenk referenced the role athletics played in the school's institutional identity, mentioning legendary basketball coach John Wooden and the Bruins' dominance in Olympic sports with the school set to host the athlete village for the 2028 Olympics. Frenk also mentioned how UCLA's recent move to the Big Ten Conference was made with 'the goal of stabilizing the program and positioning it for long-term success.' The chancellor referenced the school's national championship in men's water polo, a Final Four appearance in women's basketball and a national runner-up finish in women's gymnastics as part of a haul that also included six team and four individual conference titles, the most of any Big Ten team. Ultimately, an athletic department is only as healthy as its highest-profile sports. UCLA's football team needs to fully capitalize on the recent buzz created by the arrival of transfer quarterback Nico Iamaleava after finishing 5-7 in coach DeShaun Foster's debut season. The men's basketball team must maximize the ability of transfer point guard Donovan Dent to make everyone around him better if it hopes to make it to the second weekend of the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2023. Going forward, every UCLA team seems assured of one thing: Their new chancellor will be watching.
