Sticking with Zergiotis
Coach Edsall says the Uconn sophomore is his best option at QB.
There wasn’t much positive to take from Uconn’s 45-0 loss at Fresno State in the football season opener, but there was much to learn from it, as there always is from such a beating.
As important as anything, we learned that the Huskies have a quarterback, Jack Zergiotis, and are sticking with him.
“He’s got the best arm of any quarterback we have,” coach Randy Edsall said, as the team returned to Storrs for a workout Sunday “He’s accurate. We had a couple of dropped balls yesterday, but he’s our most accurate passer . ... He just outperformed Steven [Krajewski], based on the stats we took every day in practice. That’s how you do it. You outperform somebody, and he did. That’s why he’s our starting quarterback.”
Though the decision was obviously made earlier, Uconn didn’t announce a starting quarterback until game time. Zergiotis, a 6-foot-1, 175-pound sophomore from Montreal, was the logical choice to emerge from what began as a five-quarterback competition. He played 10 games as a true freshman in 2019 and threw for 1,782 yards, 418 in a game vs. East Carolina, 275 vs. Illinois and 270 vs. Houston.
He didn’t approach that level of production at Fresno State, completing 12 for 24 for 61 yards, a 13-yarder his longest completion of the day. Zergiotis didn’t throw an interception, though, and his one turnover, a fumble returned for the first score of the game, could easily have been ruled an incomplete pass. Zergiotis missed two wide-open receivers downfield that might have made it look better, though one play would have been erased by a penalty.
“He’ll learn from this. He’ll get better,” Edsall said. “Everybody can do a better job to help him. He can do a better job to help himself. It’s a matter of repetition, studying the playbook. Everybody thinks they’re a football expert, and they always want to critique the quarterback because that’s
all these little intricate things, and the tarnish gets in there, and you can’t get it out.
“When we were planning her memorial service in Florida, my sister has a lot of her stuff and we got some from my brother. We were polishing again, my sister and I, and we’re like, ‘Does this remind you of something?’ ”
Irvin was a longtime member of the Hartford Tennis Club, where a court and a tournament are named after her.
“I watched her play — it was sort of like a joke to see her play at the club because she was so superior,” said longtime Hartford Tennis Club member Tom Walsh of Clinton, who knew Irvin. “Most importantly, she was a lovely, lovely person.”
Irvin was born in 1927 in Akron, Ohio, and played a variety of sports growing up but stood out in tennis. When she was young, her parents would put her on a bus and let her travel around the state. By the time she was 14, she was an accomplished traveler, taking the train to Philadelphia, then New
York, to play in the U.S. championships.
These were the days of wooden rackets and amateur players. In 1968, the Open era began, allowing professional players to play in the major tournaments.
Irvin had grown up playing on clay in Akron, and her first major title was the French championship in 1951, but she struggled to win another. She lost at Wimbledon three times in the semifinals (1950, 1952, 1953) and once in the final to Hart (1951).
In 1955, at 28 years old, she suffered from an elbow injury and decided to retire from tennis.
“I am getting a little weary of the game now, and it’s time to start thinking about something else,” she told the Akron Beacon Journal on Sept. 2, 1955.
“I’ll do it by degrees. I’ll play a few selected tournaments until I decide to call it quits. I’ve got a lot out of the game, and I’ve had a good time.”
She moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, and got a job as a “copy girl” for the St. Petersburg Times.
After a while, she was feeling pretty good, so she started playing again. She beat Hart, who was then No. 1 in the world, in a tournament in Miami in February
1956. She happened to be in England for the Wightman Cup, an annual competition between Great Britain and the U.S., so decided to try again at Wimbledon. She defeated Hall of Famers Gibson (who would go on to win Wimbledon the next two years) and defending champion Louise Brough to advance to the final. Fifteen thousand people watched as she defeated Angela Buxton 6-3, 6-1 in 50 minutes.
“Wimbledon was the most cherished win,” she told The Courant in 1989. “It sure did surprise me.”
Her son Scott, who lives in Florida, went to Wimbledon with her in 2000 for a ceremony recognizing past champions.
“It was then that it really struck me what my mother had accomplished,” he said.
Irvin went to New York in the fall of 1956 and beat Gibson to win the US Open title, then capped off her career in January of 1957 by beating Gibson once again in the Australia Open, while also teaming up with her to win the doubles title.
She had met Karl Irvin Jr. in Australia, and a month after she won the championship, they were married. She retired again, this time for good. She and Karl had four children and moved first to Darien, then West Hartford in 1962. Karl died of a heart attack at age 54, leaving her with four teenagers to raise.
Her children — Mark, Scott, Lori and Karen — went to Hall High School, where three of them played tennis. Lori and Karen teamed up to play doubles, and Karen played singles after Lori graduated in 1979. Karen competed in gymnastics in college because it was hard to follow her mother’s act.
Irvin loved any kind of game and was fiercely competitive, even when she got older.
“When she was in her first retirement home in Orlando, they had an annual Olympics, they called it,” Karen said.
“They competed in every sport they had there, bocce, pool, Wii bowling.
“We’d go see her and here was her Wimbledon trophy in her case and on top of the case were 14 cheap plastic trophies that she won in the ‘Olympics.’ Seriously. She was proudly displaying these 14 plastic trophies above her Wimbledon trophy.”