Paying another visit to the variety store...



Still winning

Winners win.... and, usually, it becomes the norm, a habit, if you will.

Throughout a stellar four-year basketball career at Pymatuning Valley High School, Olivia Holt and her teams won a plethora of games.

A four-year letterwinner for coach Jeff Compan’s Lakers, Holt’s four PV teams posted a combined record of 74-13 (.851), winning a pair of Northeastern Athletic Conference championships and a Division III sectional crown.

Now a freshman at the University of Mount Union, the daughter of Gus and Michelle Holt — not to mention the niece of Lakers’ all-time girls basketball scoring leader and Ashtabula County Basketball Foundation Hall of Famer Melody Nowakowski — has continued to, surprise!... win.

The 5-foot-9 guard and her Purple Raider teammates have dominated this winter and are headed to the Division III NCAA Tournament.

Mount Union, which qualified for the nationals by defeating John Carroll to win the Ohio Athletic Conference Tournament championship, will carry a gaudy 25-3 record into a first-round matchup against Wisconsin-Whitewater (21-6) in a game that will be played Friday at on the campus of Thomas More, located in Crestview Hills, Kentucky. Tipoff is set for 5 p.m. Whitewater, a member of the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, received an at-large bid.

If the Purple Raiders prevail in the clash with Wisconsin-Whitewater, they will advance to a second-round clash between the winner of Friday’s nightcap, which will feature Piedmont, Georgia and Thomas More on Saturday at 7 p.m.

The winner of that second-round game will advance to the Division III Sweet 16.

Holt and the rest of coach Suzy Venet’s Raiders are rated 14th nationally by ESPN/USA Today and 18th by D3Hoops.com. Whitewater is rated No. 21 by D3Hoops and 24th by ESPN/USA Today.

The host for the first two rounds, Thomas More, is the big dog in this hunt, having run up a 28-0 record and being rated No. 1 by both ESPN/USA Today and D3Hoops and winning the Presidents’ Athletic Conference Tournament. Piedmont (20-8) won the Great South Athletic Conference Tournament.

As is usually the case with highly successful programs such as Mount Union, freshman have to wait their turn... earn their stripes, if you will.

Holt, a public relations and sport business major, is no exception, having played in nine games and a total of 18 minutes while wearing No. 5.

She is playing for one of the top players in Mount Union history in Venet, who was named OAC Coach of the Year on Monday.

Venet becomes the first woman in conference history to be an OAC Most Valuable Player — she won the honor twice as a Purple Raider (1997, 1998)  — and then an OAC Coach of the Year.

From an OAC standpoint, it has been Venet’s most successful year. Mount Union won both the OAC regular-season and tournament championships, accomplishing it for only the second time — and first time since Venet’s senior year (1998).



Down to four

As Joe “Mr. Sports” Pete — aka, The King of Ashtabula County Media — reported in his column Saturday, former area coaches Tom Bruney and Devlin Culliver were among the final eight candidates to be in the running to fill the vacant head football coaching position at Harding High School in Warren.

But Bruney, who coached locally at Lakeside, and Culliver, who coached locally at Harvey, didn’t make the cut for the final four.

Bruney, Culliver and the other six candidates interviewed last Wednesday.

According to a story by Mike McLain of the Tribune Chronicle in Warren, after that round of interviews, the field was narrowed to four — Todd Filtz, Dan Reardon, Jeff Bayuk and Rick Rios. Filtz coaches at Maple Heights. Reardon is at Ursuline. Bayuk has been an assistant at Howland, and Rios coaches at Toledo Rogers.

Those four were interviewed Monday by the Harding athletic commission, which will present its recommendation to the board of education at its next meeting.

Each of the eight original candidates interviewed with four groups, including the athletic commission. A point system was used by three of the groups (excluding the commission) to select the four finalists. Those groups were made up of board members, booster club representatives and members of the community.

“What was really nice about the process is that we concurred with the recommendations we got from the community panel,” Trina told McLain. “It was pretty unanimous who the top four guys were.”

In addition to Bruney, now the coach of Brook High School in West Virginia, and Culliver, who was an assistant Warrensville Heights and now at Shaw since resigning as coach at Harvey, where he still teaches art, the other candidates not to make the final four were  Luke Ethington of Maurice J. McDonough High School in Maryland and Andy Thornton of Columbus Brookhaven High School, according to McLain.

Culliver was one of 27 (originally 26) applicants for the Lakeside job, which ending up going to Ryan David.

McCormack is the sports editor of the Star Beacon. Reach him at donmac@suite224.net.