Crooked Necks

Posts Tagged ‘NCAA’

University of Arizona basketball is a source of pride for hundreds of thousands of alumni that have come out of the Tucson, Arizona based school. With over 25,000 students attending the college commonly referred to as U of A or simply Arizona there is a tremendous following of the University of Arizona basketball schedule with the winter moods of many people being dependent upon how well the current Arizona basketball coach did the night before.

Arizona has been playing basketball since the early twentieth century with their initial win coming in the first game the program ever played. A 1904 contest that resulted in a victory over the Morenci YMCA team marked the first of what would become many wins in the storied tradition known today as Arizona Wildcat basketball. Long before joining the Pacific 10 Conference (Pac-10) in 1878 many of the games during their first decade of existence came against local YMCA competition, a practice that was surprisingly common in that era. In fact, the University of Kentucky which has the current record for most men’s basketball wins also began their tradition with a single win over a Lexington YMCA team in 1903.

While Cornell basketball is only one of the 36 varsity sports at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York it is the one sport that most Americans think of when their minds wander to Cornell athletics (which is not very often).

Cornell basketball made history during the 2009-2010 season by cracking into the top 25 in the ESPN/USA Today coaches poll for the first time in decades. In fact, the last time the Cornell Big Red hoops team was ranked in the top 25 Harry Truman was in office and the date was January 3, 1951. That date marks over 59 years between appearances in the top 25 polls.