Let's Go Lobos!

This weekend the University of New Mexico women’s rugby team has a chance to win the school’s second ever national championship (the first being from the UNM ski team a few years back. Yes, the University of New Mexico has a ski team. Quit laughing.)

Being a former rugger and a graduate of UNM (even played on the men’s team one game before blowing out my other knee), I’m really pulling for the Lady Lobos. They have put together a very formidable program, primarily from athletes in New Mexico!

They’ve made it to the final four, and today they’ll be facing off against a very formidable team in Penn State. But they have been training hard (You can see them practicing in the AM when driving past UNM on the way to work), they have a good coaching staff and they have spent all season training side by side with the men’s team (which gives them an advantage, IMO, because they have actual teammates to scrimmage with – something many women’s teams don’t have)

We’ll find out more today! I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed!

Tags:

UNM's New Prez

According to the Albuquerque Journal, the University of New Mexico has a new president. Finally, they picked someone to replace Louis Caldera, the former Clinton-era Secretary of the Army. Although I have to say, having graduated from the University of New Mexico, having someone running the show who had to run an institution like the Army would be a benefit when dealing with that damn teachers union! ;)

Instead of picking the “safe” candidate, New Mexico Tech President Dan Lopez, the regents at UNM went with president of Oklahoma State University, David Schmidly. Schmidly was picked in part because he comes from a larger institution with a medical school. Lopez was the safe pick because he was endorsed by the Hispano Roundtable , and because he runs a college in New Mexico and everyone would have been happy letting him try to run UNM.

(in disclosure, I went to New Mexico Tech for many years before finishing up at UNM, and I have experience with both campuses, and there’s a great deal of difference between New Mexico Tech and its 2200 students and UNM, with over 24K students, a med school and a law school. Both campuses are cool, but vastly different.)

Continue reading