Best darn sports column ever

Matt Helmus

Sports Editor

This week can be expressed in numbers for the Alma athletic community. 0, 1/2, 1 and 33 are the numbers for Scot teams this week. Each team on campus has one of these numbers that represent their play in the past week.

Let’s start with the men’s swim-ming and diving team. Their number is zero. That is the number of meets left for the team before the MIAA Championship Meet in East Grand Rapids on February 19, 20 and 21. The team has not won an MIAA dual meet this season and will head to GR hoping to show the league that they can compete. The team currently has a smatter-ing of swimmers that are within the top 20 times in their events. Hopefully this will translate into some points.

For the women’s basketball team 1/2 represents their week. The Scots are now halfway through their league schedule. The team went 4-3 in the first half but played very strong. The team could easily move past Albion and Kalamazoo in the standings, improving their position in the MIAA tourna-ment.

The women’s swimming and diving team has to be big fans of the number 1. They defeated St. Mary’s on Saturday to earn their first MIAA dual meet victory of the season. The team has several swimmers with competitive times and should continue to improve when they travel to GR for the league meet.

Hoping to improve this week is the men’s basketball team. They have now lost 33 straight MIAA contests. (The league record for a winning streak is 32 set by Calvin in the 1970s.) The Scots lost to Calvin and Albion last week by margins of 50 and 36 points. On average they are getting beat by 23.2 points in each league game. The Scots are a young team and with some luck will meld together and stop the losing streak. This week presents an opportunity for the team to do so. They will host league-leading Hope on Wednesday to finish out the first half of their league schedule. Then on Saturday they will travel to Kalamazoo to take on the Hornets. It should be noted that the Scots only lost to K'zoo by 6 when they played them earlier this season.

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