The Kansas volleyball team earned its first-ever first-place selection in a Big 12 preseason poll on Wednesday. In a survey of conference coaches, the Jayhawks tallied 173 points and six first-place votes, slipping past BYU (168 and four) for the No. 1 spot. The top seven teams have at least 141 points in a well-balanced league. KU is coming off a season in which it went 24-6 (14-4 Big 12) and hosted NCAA ...
Whether a coaching staff wants to supply them or not, Kansas coach Lance Leipold said on Wednesday, there have to be opportunities for players to tackle. "It’s hard because you’re trying to keep guys healthy and you want to be fundamentally sound and doing all these things," Leipold said, "but you’re still going to have to tackle people in this game, and that’s one of the things you don’t want to be ...
One day during spring football, Jalen Todd showed up late. The early-enrolling cornerback had committed a faux pas that was, as head coach Lance Leipold put it straightforwardly, “not good in our program.” “So Jalen was late and kind of heard about it,” Leipold said, “and from that day on, I think Jalen was in the building every day about like 6 a.m. and left at noon.” The head coach summed it up ...
Kansas linebackers coach Chris Simpson knows there's really no substitute for in-game experience. "It’s kind of like becoming a parent," he said on Tuesday. "Or maybe even a head coach, or whatever. It’s hard to say that you really know until you do it.” The 2024 KU linebacker room has the outward impression of an experienced group; the players expected to serve as its foremost contributors are two ...
Before he took his current job at St. John’s, Greg Youncofski had sported just about every possible assistant coach title except for “director of basketball operations.” Now, having joined Rick Pitino’s staff in that role in June, he’s completed the set — though, he concedes, “I know they keep coming up with all kinds of crazy titles in college basketball.” Before Youncofski was a program ...
Kansas co-offensive coordinator Jim Zebrowski had to apologize Monday morning to legions of quarterbacks he's coached over the years for a particular bit of praise he was about to give Ben Easters. "One of, if not the best, guys in the quarterback room I’ve had," Zebrowski called him. That's high praise for a player entering his redshirt junior season with one career drive to his name. But since arriving as ...