Heard on the Hill: KU Alumni Association to host pep rally this weekend in Tulsa; video shows unveiling of Naismith’s rules in Kansas City; KU edging K-State in RecycleMania competition

Top o’ the morning to you as we delve right into your daily dose of news, notes and links from around Kansas University.

• If you’re headed to Tulsa to watch the first rounds of the NCAA tournament, you can catch up with the official pregame pep rally sponsored by the KU Alumni Association and Kansas Athletics.

The event features the KU basketball band, cheerleaders and mascots. There is a cash bar and a concession stand will be available.

The whole thing gets started at 3 p.m. Friday before the basketball team’s 5:50 p.m. tip-off against 16-seed Boston University. It’s at the Tulsa Convention Center, across the street from the BOK Center, where the games will be played.

If KU wins, they’ll do the whole thing again three hours before the start of the session on Sunday that includes the KU game.

The Alumni Association reports 4,603 KU alumni live in Oklahoma, 2,396 of whom live in Tulsa. I’ll bet a fair amount of those folks find their way to a game this weekend, and have picked the Jayhawks to win it all, just like our president.

• And speaking of the Alumni Association and basketball, here’s a quick video they produced that shows the unveiling of James Naismith’s basketball rules at a temporary exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins museum in Kansas City.

The rules were purchased by KU alumnus David Booth for $4.3 million at an auction. He intends to find a permanent home for the rules at KU. They should be on campus by June.

• Kansas State University, according to its student newspaper, is falling behind a bit in the RecycleMania standings.

What’s RecycleMania, you may ask? Well, it’s a big competition among lots of different schools across the country to see who can recycle the most material.

Though the RecycleMania website seems to be working (at least for me) in such a manner that I can’t get links to internal pages within the site, if you click around a bit, you can get to KU’s information through the “Participating Schools” link on the left side of the page.

It’s an eight-week recycling competition, and KU is in the “Per Capita Classic,” which measures how many pounds per capita of recyclables (bottles and cans, corrugated cardboard and paper) each school can muster.

Through week six, KU is in 248th place, out of 362 schools competing, with 3.19 pounds per person. That’s good enough to just squeak by Kansas State, which is in 251st place with 3.11 pounds per person.

That may be why the student newspaper is concerned, calling it “a problem facing all K-State students and faculty.”

The eight-week tournament began reporting on Feb. 6.

In case you’re curious, the best per capita recycling campus so far is Union College located in the always-fun-to-say-out-loud city of Schenectady, N.Y. They are recycling 27.89 pounds per person.

The worst is Central Connecticut State University, with 0.01 pounds per person.

• And I actually do have some Irish heritage (my great-grandfather came over to this country on an Irish potato boat), so I can wish a genuine happy St. Patrick’s Day to all. In between green beers, feel free to whip out your smart phone and send tips for Heard on the Hill to ahyland@ljworld.com.