The Sports Arsenal

I haven’t posted on the blog in quite some time, for a variety of reasons. I’ve been rather busy, for one thing, and I’ve also had a little bit of “writer’s block”.

Another reason, at least when it comes to athletics at The Citadel, is that there hasn’t been a lot of things lately that seemed worth writing about. (Now, when it comes to discussing other issues and events at the military college, our cup runneth over.)

It hasn’t been an inspiring year for The Citadel’s varsity sports, other than the football team.

Ah yes, the football team. Now that is a different story. The gridiron squad had one of the more memorable seasons in the school’s long football history.

I wrote plenty about the team during the fall, of course. That group gets the highly desired honor of being the 2015-16 TSA “Team of the Year”.

I only wish there had been more competition for that title.

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The Citadel competes in 17 varsity sports, counting rifle as one (co-ed) entity. The military college competes in the SoCon in 16 of them (the exception is rifle, though that will change next year when the league resumes sponsorship of that sport).

The Bulldogs finished last in the conference in exactly half of those 16 sports: basketball, baseball, tennis, men’s cross country, women’s cross country, women’s golf, women’s soccer, and volleyball.

Not all of those are alike, of course. Expectations are different. No one is going to be overly critical of the cross country teams, for example (which were also reasonably competitive).

That isn’t quite the case for some of the other teams. I don’t like being harsh about these things, but the fact is that there were some very disappointing campaigns in 2015-16. A few of those teams have now had several consecutive rough seasons.

It isn’t easy to put winning teams on the field (or court) at The Citadel. Everyone knows this. However, I would like to think that varsity athletics can do a lot better than the sum total for this school year.

It is also true that several of the current coaches are relatively new to their positions (including the head coaches for basketball, tennis, volleyball, and soccer). It takes time to build programs at The Citadel; perhaps in a year or two the department will be bragging about multiple SoCon team titles.

I hope so. Boasting can be therapeutic.

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I’m going to try to get the blog going again over the summer. It is probable that not everything I write will focus on The Citadel.

That doesn’t mean I’m not counting the days until the football opener at Mercer, though…

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