Stanford women earn top overall soccer seed
Stanford, the No. 1 team in the country, earned the top overall seed in the NCAA women’s soccer tournament Monday. Meanwhile, Cal will host Santa Clara in the first round.
The Cardinal (18-1-0) are seeded to host the first four rounds, should they advance. The semifinals and championship game will be played at the College Cup in Orlando on Dec. 1 and 3.
Stanford opens aganst Utah Valley at 7 p.m. Saturday. Cal (13-5-1) and Santa Clara (13-6-1) were drawn into the bracket with South Carolina as the No. 1 seed. The winner of Saturday afternoon’s game faces a possible second-round matchup at fourth-seeded Ohio State.
Duke and North Carolina are the other two regional No. 1 seeds.
Fresno State AD Bartko resigns
Fresno State athletic director Jim Bartko has resigned for personal reasons. Steve Robertello has been appointed as interim athletic director.
Bartko has held the position since January 2015. There were no details on why Bartko decided to step down. School President Joseph Castro credited Bartko for helping modernize the department and improve academics, and for hiring football coach Jeff Tedford.
Michigan State’s sophomore Miles Bridges headlines the Associated Press preseason All-America men’s basketball team as the leading vote-getter by a wide margin for the fiveplayer squad.
The 6-foot-7 swingman received 61 votes from the 65-member national media panel that selects the weekly AP Top 25 poll, 14 more than Notre Dame senior forward Bonzie Colson — the preseason ACC Player of the Year and the No. 2 vote-getter.
Arizona junior guard Allonzo Trier, Villanova junior guard Jalen Brunson and Missouri freshman forward Michael Porter Jr. rounded out the rest of the five-man team.
West Virginia head coach Bob Huggins has agreed to a fouryear contract extension, which runs through the 2021-22 season. Huggins, 64, will earn $3.75 million this season, including a base salary of $250,000. Ultimate: Vermont has become the first state in the United States to recognize “ultimate” — the game that started as Ultimate Frisbee — as a high school varsity sport.
A committee that oversees high school sports in the state, the Vermont Principals Association, unanimously approved ultimate last week as a varsity sport starting in the spring of 2019. U.S. Soccer: Former U.S. national-team forward Paul Caligiuri, 53, and former midfielder Kyle Martino, 36, are the latest candidates for U.S. Soccer Federation president in the wake of the Americans’ failure to qualify for next year’s World Cup.
Caligiuri, 53, started every U.S. match at the 1990 and 1994 World Cups, and scored five times in 110 international appearances.
Martino, 36, had one goal in eight international appearances, playing for Columbus (2002-06) and the LA Galaxy (2006-07). He is among the studio analysts on NBC’s coverage of England’s Premier League.