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"Grand Niece" Natalie Berrena honored by Big Ten


Natalie was named the Big Ten Field Hockey Offensive Player of the Year for captaining the Nittany Lions to an undefeated Big Ten Championship. Penn State Coach Char Morett claimed Big Ten Coach of the Year honors also.

I’ve known Natalie for about six years. While she was in high school, she worked at the Tavern where her paternal grandfather was a bar part time bartender (as I’ve mentioned before, her maternal grandfather was John Bach a former Penn State basketball coach and current assistant coach with the Chicago Bulls). I also dated her mother for a while after I moved back to State College.

It’s been interesting watch Natalie develop from an overwhelmed walk-on freshman to the All Big Ten (and probable All-American) player that she is today. I can remember during her freshman year, Natalie coming to me frustrated saying that the only reason that she was on the team was that her coach Char was good friends with Tavern owner (and my former roommate) Pat Daugherty and was just doing Pat a favor by letting her walk on. While that wasn’t true (Char is a good friend of mine and when I specifically asked her she said “absolutely not – Natalie just doesn’t realize how good she is”), it was an indicator of how insecure Natalie was at the time.

Since then her self confidence has grown considerably but she still remains quite unassuming. She was genuinely surprised when she was named one of the team’s tri-captains at the beginning of the season – and she was really overwhelmed when I told her that Char had leaked it to me that she was actually the leading vote-getter for captain. Typical of Natalie, she underestimated how popular she was with her teammates.

Now she’s adding “rock star” (the nickname given to her by her field hockey teammates) to her personal portfolio. Her musical career seems to be following the same path as her athletic career. Two years ago, with a ton of coaxing, you might get her to tackle a tune at a karaoke night or, if you were really lucky, she would belt out one of her personal compositions on her keyboard at home. Nowadays, she’s front and center as the lead singer for the “JR and Natalie” band. Once field hockey season is over and she has more time to practice with the band, she’ll be playing keyboard with them and they’ll be doing some of her original songs (she was positively gushing the other day when she told me how exciting it was to hear the whole band doing her music during practice sessions.

Next challenge for her? Maybe the world of fashion. “W Magazine”, a New York based monthly was on campus a couple of weeks ago interviewing Natalie for a feature on college fashion and style. They took a bunch of photographs of her and her apartment but whether the article makes it to print or not remains to be seen. Considering the roll that she is on now, I wouldn’t bet against it. One thing is for sure, if Nat makes the magazine, you’ll hear about it here first.

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Bride of Chucky II

Chucky was out prowling Monday night looking for a new bride.

Some of the contenders were:

Chiquita Banana Aunt Jemima
Catwoman Pocahontas

Chucky even had to fight off the Burger King for this one:

For more photos of Chucky’s exploits, go here.

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An almost perfect weekend

Here we go with my weekly PSU athletic report. I really didn’t plan on doing this on a weekly basis but we just kept winning and the superstitious side of me said “don’t do anything different”.

Friday afternoon started off with the #6 ranked women’s field hockey team travelling to #9 Indiana to take on the Hoosiers in a match to decide the #1 seed in the conference tournament. Penn State had already clinched at least a share of the title but Indiana could have tied them with a victory. However, the women were not to be denied. They won 4-3 in overtime, their school record 17th straight win, to become the third Penn State athletic team to lock up sole possession of a Big Ten Championship.

Then later Friday night, the #3 ranked took on #11 ranked Wisconsin here in Happy Valley. The women were the only undefeated team in the conference and came into the match with a two game lead over Wisconsin. The ladies knocked out a 3-1 victory over Wisconsin to get a stranglehold on the conference title a little over halfway through the season.

Saturday the football team remained atop the conference with a 33-15 win over Purdue. Penn State controls their destiny in their hunt for a BCS bowl bid. Win the next two games and they will be headed to either the Fiesta, Orange, or Sugar Bowls. The victory sets up a huge battle for next Saturday when Wisconsin comes to town. Wisconsin and PSU are currently tied atop the conference and Saturday’s game will go a long way toward determining the conference champ. On the national scene, Penn State will move up to #8 in the BCS rankings when they are announced tomorrow.

On Saturday night, the women’s volleyball team hosted Northwestern in a conference battle. The ladies won easily in a 3-0 sweep of the Wildcats. The win not only kept the team undefeated in league play but it gave them a 3 game lead in the championship race virtually insuring that they will claim a third straight league title.

On Sunday the 20th ranked men’s soccer team took on Michigan. The men had already locked up the Big Ten title but this battle was to ensure that they finished the season undefeated within the conference. Sure enough, they prevailed 3-2 in overtime.

The men’s soccer game was the final Penn State Big Ten conference battle of the weekend and left the Nits with a perfect 5-0 conference all sports record and stretched our athletic teams records to an absolutely incredible 37-1 in conference play. We have locked in three B10 titles (field hockey, mens soccer, womens soccer), have a solid three game lead in volleyball, and control our destiny in football. No Big Ten athletic program has ever claimed all five fall team titles but we have an excellent chance of doing so. Also, all five of our programs are ranked in the top twenty in their respective sports and no other school in the country can currently make that claim.

While conference play was finished for the weekend, there were still two other contests to be held. The #1 ranked womens soccer team had already locked in their Big Ten championship but they went on todefeat Navy 5-0 in their final match of the season to remain the only unbeaten untied team in the nation. This was the first perfect season in the short history of the womens soccer program.

Lastly, the #6 ranked and Big Ten Champion womens field hockey team traveled to Chapel Hill to take on the #3 ranked Lady Tarheels in a big intersectional battle. Unfortunately, another perfect weekend was not to be when the girls lost a heartbreaker to North Carolina 3-2 in overtime. The loss ended the girls school record 17 game winning streak. The girls ended their season at 17-2 and will go for the Big Ten Tournament title beginning Saturday.

Almost a perfect weekend, but 7-1 is pretty darn good anyway.

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Credit where credit is due

Penn State has been receiving lots of good press because of their spectacular implementation of the “White Out” theme at the Ohio State game this year.

The reality of it all is that we really weren’t the ones that started it. We kind of borrowed the idea from Michigan who has been alternating “Maize Outs” and “Blue Outs” at the football games for four years. The Michigan football team picked up the “Maize Out” idea from the Michigan Hockey team.

The Michigan hockey team undoubtedly got the idea from the Winnipeg Jets who created the promotion for the 1986 Stanley Cup Playoffs.

One of the more effective color implementations was a Texas A&M “Red, White, and Blue Out” shortly after 9/11.

However, as good as out “White Out” was, it really can’t top the Michigan “Maize Out” shown below.

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Now that winter has arrived…

it’s time to shift to my “other job”.

I’m fortunate in that my two passions don’t overlap their seasons. Warm weather months get dedicated to golf – I’m a little off this year with only about 80 rounds played, normally I’d hit over 100 but the asthma knocked me out for a month. Cold weather months see my focus switch to Penn State basketball (practice started 12 days ago).

A friend of mine, Tim Beidel, runs a website, PennStateHoops.com, dedicated to the Nittany Lion basketball program. Tim resides in Portland Maine and started the site years ago as a way of remotely keeping up with the basketball program. He was frustrated that he had a really hard time finding information anywhere about Penn State basketball team and realized that others must be in the same boat so he started the site.

I started buying season basketball tickets when the school built our basketball arena, the Bryce Jordan Center in 1995. Like Tim, I lived in New England and couldn’t find any info on PSU basketball. I started trolling around the web and stumbled onto his site then. It was a godsend for those of us looking for PSU BB info. I started hanging around the site then, occassionally posting to the site forum.

A few years down the road, I met Tim and we hit it off (90%+ of the people on these boards I wouldn’t want anything to do with but Tim is an exception). We’ve been able to get together once or twice a year since then, either for a summer golf tournament, fall football game, or winter basketball game. Despite Tim being a married non-drinker and me the polar opposite we get along quite well (in addition to sharing a common perspective on Penn State basketball, our political and social views seem to jibe 100%).

Tim runs the website as a hobby and it’s become quite popular among the PSU hoops community. Fortunately, Tim has been able to keep the lunatic fringe often found on internet boards at bay (he even got some nice props in a story by a Harrisburg sportswriter). Penn State has numerous former players playing professional ball in Europe who use the site to keep up to date with the team. We also have recently been recruiting heavily in Europe – we have three players on the squad from overseas – and their friends and families use the board to keep track of their hometown heroes.

Over the years my contribution to the board has grown. In addition to regularly posting on the aforementioned forum, I have assumed responsibility for tracking our recruiting efforts by maintaining the “UncleLar Recruiting Matrix”. The matrix is a compilation of published reports of whom Penn State is targeting with their recruiting.

By NCAA rule, a school’s coaching staff can’t comment on anyone that they are recruiting. That creates a huge void which is filled by numerous internet recruiting services (for both football and basketball). The two biggest are the Rivals Network and the Scout Network. Each of these networks is a conglomeration of individual school sites which are run by local professionals. Blue White Illustrated runs the Penn State site on the Rivals Network while Fight On State is the Scout Networks Penn State site. Both of those websites are run by local professionals who also publish local magazines.

However, this area is so football oriented that staffs of BWI and FOS give short shrift to basketball, even during basketball season. That has opened up a niche within a niche for Tim’s board and he is able to put together a better product as a hobby than either of the professional organizations can. As evidence,

Tim’s board receives 10 times the traffic that either the BWI basketball board or the FOS basketball forum does and my recruiting matrix is also more complete that either the BWI recruiting table or the FOS table.

With basketball season just around the corner (we have an exhibition game next Thursday), basketball recruiting activities will pick up and I can settle into my “second job” just as my golf “job” winds down.

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It’s a winter wonderland…

but I’m too damn lazy to go out and take photos. Woke up today with about an inch of snow on the ground and more falling. Fortunately, the ground temp is above freezing so most of it is melting but it is sticking to vegetation.

By now the temperature have risen enough (my outdoor thermometer says 34) that it’s turned to rain but the higher elevations are getting hit with snow – the forecast for the area says the precip will shift back and forth from rain and snow all afternoon with accumulations up to 6-9 inches in the surrounding mountains.

Many of the trees in the area still have a substantial number of leaves still on them so I expect numerous power outages from falling limbs as the snow accumulates on the tree branches.

This is the earliest significant snowfall that I can remember for a while.

ED Note: I knew if I waited long enough I could find shots on the web. Here’s one from on campus – to see more go here.

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While Larry makes Martinis, Shannon makes Headlines

Larry, that’s not to say that I’m not impressed with your feat. Oh, and watch the thumb comments, eh? 🙂

Since Larry has already made his big headlines in the corporate world, I figure that I should start making mine if I want to retire and make martinis anytime soon! I don’t have the time to post the picture here… well, I’ll give it a shot. But anyway, check out the article in all it’s glory by visiting http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/10232005/business/69484.htm.

Okay, now for the picture thing… here goes nothing.

Yeah, I tried the picture thing and it didn’t work. Oh well, you’ll see it on the website. I hope all is well with everyone! (I fixed it for you – UL)

Shannon