Cal stuns Virginia Tech in double OT in ACC Tournament 1st round
The 15th-seeded Golden Bears (14-18) will play No. 7 seed Stanford on Wednesday in a second-round matchup between former Pac-12 rivals. Cal was coming off a 112-110 four-overtime loss at Notre Dame in Saturday's regular-season finale.
Sissoko scored the first two baskets in the second overtime and Stojakovic polished off an 8-0 run to give the Golden Bears the lead for good.
Stojakovic made 11 of 20 shots with three 3-pointers for the Golden Bears. Petraitis finished with 16 points and 10 rebounds, while Sissoko scored 12 with 10 boards. DJ Campbell didn't have a basket but made 10 of 12 free throws.
Brandon Rechsteiner scored 19 off the bench to pace the 10th-seeded Hokies (13-19). Tobi Lawal totaled 17 points and 12 rebounds. Jaydon Young missed all 11 of his 3-point attempts and scored 12.
Rechsteiner buried a 3-pointer with 27 seconds remaining in regulation after Virginia Tech had missed eight straight from beyond the arc to give the Hokies their first lead of the second half at 60-59. Campbell was fouled with five seconds left and he made the second one to send it to OT.
Virginia Tech took a four-point lead in the first OT, but Petraitis followed two free throws and a layup to pull Cal even at 65 with 1:40 left. Stojakovic sent it to a second OT tied at 67 with two late free throws.
It was the first double-overtime game in the first round of the tournament since Wake Forest beat Georgia Tech 114-112 in 2007.
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USA Today
6 hours ago
- USA Today
Which football helmet should you buy? It's not as simple as you think.
Which football helmets should I buy? It's what a Virginia Tech athletics equipment manager asked Stefan Duma, a faculty member at the university's department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics, in 2009. Duma's team had been working to better understand what causes brain injury. It had placed sensors in Hokies players helmets. It had simulated car crashes. The question seemed simple enough, until Duma and his colleagues delved deeper into it. 'We said, 'We don't know.' We can buy helmets and test because there's really no information available in what was good and what wasn't,' says Steve Rowson, who, as a graduate student, joined this little-known football helmet project that was about to take off. Duma's group simulated hits with a guillotine-like device that plunged a dummy headform down cables onto an anvil. 'We bought the helmets, and we saw huge differences," Rowson tells USA TODAY Sports. "But we also felt like everyone should have that information, so we developed the Virginia Tech helmet ratings based on that. And it was like the first independent, objective way of evaluating helmets.' The investigation that started in Duma's basement lab sparked a wave of discussion that would define standards used by youth, high school and college teams and expand to other sports. 'It wasn't like a pass/fail scale,' Rowson tells USA TODAY Sports. 'It was, 'Here are the best performers. Here are the next best. Here are the not so good performers,' and that really resonated with consumers. It was a little disruptive to the football helmet manufacturing industry.' Rowson is now director of Virginia Tech's Helmet Lab that has reached national acclaim for its testing and studies. It published the first independent safety ratings for varsity football helmets in 2011 and continues to ramp up the standard for what constitutes a five-star helmet. Just recently, it updated its rating system with new thresholds for those used in varsity and youth football and by bicyclists. 'The best helmets back in 2011 would be the very worst helmets today,' Rowson you ever wondered about the force of a hit to the head your kid sees in practice and in games, and how their helmets are tested to protect from them? Or how helmet recommendations are determined for various sports and age groups? We spoke with Rowson about the history of his lab, the methods and evolution behind Virginia Tech's STAR testing system and how it can help keep your athlete safe. What is the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab and how does it replicate impact? The lab is a collection of about 25 Virginia Tech faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students who study the forces that cause injuries all over the body and look for ways to prevent them from occurring. They consider over a million head impacts to develop football readings. As they learn more, they add test conditions or change methods. Sometimes, it's a complete overhaul. Their first varsity football helmet ratings were based on Duma's drop test. 'We were only considering linear acceleration in the head, and it's because there weren't really good methods to evaluate rotation of the head,' Rowson says. 'We didn't know how rotational acceleration related to brain injury really well at the time, but we knew enough about linear acceleration that it had a correlation to concussion risk. 'However, a few years later, we had new data to tell us how rotational acceleration related to brain injury, and we upgraded the football method to include both linear and rotational acceleration. We have a pendulum impactor, which pretty much looks like a big upside down hammer that swings down and then it hits a dummy headform that has a helmet on it. Think of a crash test dummy. That dummy headform has sensors inside it.' Helmet manufacturing has advanced, Rowson says, as the lab has. 'The amount of change that we've seen in helmet design over the last decade is probably more than we saw in the previous 30 years combined,' he says. Understanding the impact and distribution of hits I asked Rowson, who has a master's and Ph. D in Biomedical Engineering from Virginia Tech, if he could come up with an analogy for the greatest impact a helmet sustains on a field. He did some math and got back to me with the following scenario: Head accelerations associated with concussion are comparable in magnitude to those experienced in unbelted car crashes at approximately 17 mph for college-level players and 10 mph for youth-level players. That's 100 times the acceleration of gravity for college players and 60 times for youth. However, damage from concussions can be cumulative. The lab tests helmets with the hardest hits as well as what Rowson calls 'everyday impact' players see on the field. 'They probably see that impact multiple times, and then, with our highest impact condition, not every player might see it,' he says. 'The ones who do are at risk of injury. The helmet influences how much force is transferred to the head during all those impacts. So if a helmet's too soft and too thin, it might not do great under higher impact energy or if it's optimized for high energy hits, it might do poorly at the low energy hits. So we have a comprehensive evaluation of it where you can't overdesign for really hard hit impacts or everyday impact.' No helmet is concussion-proof, the lab states on its website, and any athlete can sustain a head injury. It identifies the helmets that best reduce your chances. The Summation of Tests for the Analysis of Risk (STAR) score is calculated based on a helmet's performance in a series of impact tests that are sports-specific. Tests are weighted based on how often people experience similar impacts. The lower the score, the better the protection. Scores are assigned a number of stars between 1-5, with 5 stars being the best. 'Our ratings are representative of the average,' Rowson says. 'There is gonna be some in that (data) distribution who get hurt at really low head accelerations, and there's gonna be other people who don't seem to ever get hurt, even at high head accelerations, and that comes down to biological variance. Everyone has their own tolerance to head impact, everyone's material properties and their brain tissue's different. 'So it's kind of a predicted number of injuries for a given number of head impacts that we would expect to see on average, amongst a lot of people. We identify helmets that systematically reduce head acceleration and thus risk.' Coach Steve: Lessons to learn after suffering a concussion What's the difference between a four-and five star helmet? (Hint: They're both good.) Rowson says just about every varsity and youth football helmet they recently rated earned five stars. 'But that starts to dilute what a five star meaning is,' he says. 'The five star rating is intended to identify what the very best available protection is. And if every helmet that's being rated is five stars, it takes a little meaning away from that.'The ratings update rescales those areas to make the five-star winners truly standout performers. The new thresholds reduced the number of five-star helmets from 167 to 38 (bicycle), 33 to 11 (varsity football) and youth football (26 to 6). The lab still recommends any four or five star helmets. 'It's not just like everything got good,' Rowson says, 'it's they got good, but to different extents where we could identify meaningful differences.' Understanding helmet differences and unique risks According to Virginia Tech, varsity football helmets used to have corresponding youth versions, but there were often few differences between them. There was little data describing how risk differed for youth players. Today, the lab model for 'youth' football simulates a 10-to-12-year-old boy, the varsity model an18-to-24 year old male. 'A kid isn't necessarily just a scaled down adult,' Rowson says. 'Their head is bigger relative to their body than we see in a full grown male, their brain's still developing, and there's differences in kind of how they respond to a head impact. 'Every impact scenario we recreate in a lab is weighted based on how often a player is gonna see (it) on the field. We saw in our youth studies they don't hit their heads as frequently (and) when they fall to the ground, they have a heavier head and a weaker neck, and the helmet's pretty heavy relative to their body mass compared to an adult. So their helmet's more likely to follow through and strike the ground. So we see more side and back impacts in youth football than we do in varsity football.' As part of a groundbreaking 2012 study funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Virginia Tech researchers put sensors inside the helmets of seven players aged 7–8 years old for a season and measured their impacts. They found that 76% of the ones greater than 40 g (40 times the speed of gravity) and 100% of impacts greater than 80 g occurred during practices. "It was first data measuring head impacts in youth football players," Rowson says. Following the study, Pop Warner youth football outlawed drills that involved full-speed, head-on-blocking and tackling that starts with players lined up more than three yards apart, as well as head-to-head contact. According to The New York Times, Pop Warner officials said they were persuaded by data from the youth study that indicated the level of severity of some hits were similar to some of the more severe impacts college players experience. 'We're like, 'Wow, all our hardest hit impacts are coming from this one (Oklahoma) drill,' ' Rowson says. 'And out of all the games we collected, we didn't see that kind of impact happen a single time. We're like, 'We don't think you should be doing this,' and the coach was really receptive. It was just a local youth football team, and it was a dad coaching who had that drill in there, because that's what he did when he was a kid.' A follow-up study of football teams comprised of players aged 9–12 suggested head impact exposure could reduce significantly by limiting contact in practices to levels below those experienced in games. Coach Steve: Why are boys sports declining? Former NBA star looks for solutions How helmet ratings differ by sport Their helmet research always starts in the real world, Rowson likes to say. They learn how people are getting hurt and they match those conditions - the speed at which they're hitting their head, where they're hitting their head, their acceleration profile – in the lab. With cycling, the researchers look at a fraction of the head impact points as football. (One hundred as opposed to over a million). They don't put a sensor on everyone because cycling is an individual sport and crashes are rare. Instead, Rowson says, they identify riders involved in crashes and collect their helmets. They buy the same helmet and start hitting it until they match the damage profile, then back calculate the location and velocity at which they hit their head. For snow sport, researchers have traveled to big events on mountains and set up cameras from various angles. Through video tracking, they calculated their head impact speed into the ground. The lab now has nine helmet ratings: Varsity football, youth football, flag football, hockey, bicycle, equestrian, soccer, snow sport, whitewater and polo. They'll be announcing rating programs for baseball and softball soon. 'Essentially, we're trying to cover all sports,' Rowson says. 'The ultimate goal is for us to be able to provide data to everyone on what's available.' The lab doesn't formally advise any leagues, but often, the leagues come to them. A full time faculty member is assigned to direct outreach, host tours, run STEM activities for kids and answer questions. The questions, it seems, come every day. 'Sometimes they're very technical, sometimes they're more general: What does this mean and how do we use it?' Rowson says. We know now from Duma, the Virginia Tech professor of engineering whom its football team sought out in 2009, how a seemingly innocent one can lead to a scientific explosion. Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons' baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here. Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at sborelli@
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Yahoo
Seattle's Cal Raleigh calls his 40th homer 'a cool milestone' during the catcher's historic season
ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) — Cal Raleigh reached another landmark in his incredible season Saturday night when he drilled his 40th home run deep into the right field bleachers at Angel Stadium. Becoming the seventh catcher in major league history to hit 40 homers has been all but inevitable for Raleigh ever since the Seattle Mariners slugger got to the All-Star break with 38 — and then won the Home Run Derby. Raleigh still felt the 40th was special, mostly because it broke a tie and propelled the Mariners to a valuable 7-2 victory in their playoff chase. 'It's a cool milestone to hit, and I'm very thankful for it, and it's a cool moment for sure,' Raleigh said. 'I look back to 20 or 30, and that was cool, and 40 is definitely very cool as well. I'm not trying to downplay it, but I'm glad we got the win tonight, and I'll look back one day and it will be cool.' Raleigh is the first player in the majors to hit 40 this season, doing it before the calendar even turns to August. He crushed a 2-0 fastball from struggling Angels reliever José Fermin, driving it 416 feet with a 113.5-mph exit velocity. The shot put the Mariners up 3-2, and they added three more runs in the inning to take control of their second win in three games in Anaheim. 'I'm sure it feels great to get to 40,' Seattle manager Dan Wilson said. 'I'm sure he wants to get to 41 as soon as possible, because he knows it helps us win ballgames, and at this point, that's what he's looking for. Knowing Cal, he wants us to win. But a big milestone for sure. The season, the numbers that he's put up is pretty staggering. This is just another one of those notches on the belt.' Although he was the Mariners' designated hitter Saturday, Raleigh joined an elite club of hitters who primarily played catcher during their 40-homer seasons. Johnny Bench and Mike Piazza did it twice, while Roy Campanella, Todd Hundley and Javy Lopez were joined in 2021 by Kansas City's Salvador Perez, who set the single-season record for catchers with 48. Perez's mark is eminently reachable for Raleigh, who would need to average just one homer a week for the rest of the regular season to top it. Raleigh is only the fifth player in Mariners history to hit 40 homers, and he joins elite Pacific Northwest company: Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Nelson Cruz and Jay Buhner. 'They're really good players,' Raleigh said. 'They're some of the best that's ever come through here, so very honored to be a part of that group. It's a cool thing. Just try to keep going and see how far we can take it.' Raleigh also tied Griffey (1998) for the most homers in Seattle history through 105 games of a season while becoming only the eighth player in major league history to hit 40 in his team's first 105 games — just the second to do it in the 21st century, joining Aaron Judge (2022). Raleigh even reached his latest landmark on a day when his AL MVP candidacy indirectly got a boost: Judge, the obvious front-runner for his third award in four seasons, went on the 10-day injured list with a flexor strain in his right elbow — although the Yankees superstar's absence isn't currently expected to be lengthy. Raleigh's production has actually slowed in July. He came into Saturday night's game batting .162 with just 11 hits in 18 games this month, although six of those hits were homers. Raleigh had two hits and struck out three times Saturday night, but Wilson has seen progress in Raleigh's approach at the plate in recent days. 'I think for the most part, it's an adjustment period,' Wilson said. 'Teams start to pitch around you a little bit, and I think you become aware of that and start making the adjustments there. But I think he's just been very consistent pretty much all this season, and I think that's what's been so great for me to see, and for all of us to benefit from. He's just been so consistent, and to do this while raising his batting average at the same time, pretty incredible.' ___ AP MLB:
Associated Press
12 hours ago
- Associated Press
Seattle's Cal Raleigh calls his 40th homer 'a cool milestone' during the catcher's historic season
ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) — Cal Raleigh reached another landmark in his incredible season Saturday night when he drilled his 40th home run deep into the right field bleachers at Angel Stadium. Becoming the seventh catcher in major league history to hit 40 homers has been all but inevitable for Raleigh ever since the Seattle Mariners slugger got to the All-Star break with 38 — and then won the Home Run Derby. Raleigh still felt the 40th was special, mostly because it broke a tie and propelled the Mariners to a valuable 7-2 victory in their playoff chase. 'It's a cool milestone to hit, and I'm very thankful for it, and it's a cool moment for sure,' Raleigh said. 'I look back to 20 or 30, and that was cool, and 40 is definitely very cool as well. I'm not trying to downplay it, but I'm glad we got the win tonight, and I'll look back one day and it will be cool.' Raleigh is the first player in the majors to hit 40 this season, doing it before the calendar even turns to August. He crushed a 2-0 fastball from struggling Angels reliever José Fermin, driving it 416 feet with a 113.5-mph exit velocity. The shot put the Mariners up 3-2, and they added three more runs in the inning to take control of their second win in three games in Anaheim. 'I'm sure it feels great to get to 40,' Seattle manager Dan Wilson said. 'I'm sure he wants to get to 41 as soon as possible, because he knows it helps us win ballgames, and at this point, that's what he's looking for. Knowing Cal, he wants us to win. But a big milestone for sure. The season, the numbers that he's put up is pretty staggering. This is just another one of those notches on the belt.' Although he was the Mariners' designated hitter Saturday, Raleigh joined an elite club of hitters who primarily played catcher during their 40-homer seasons. Johnny Bench and Mike Piazza did it twice, while Roy Campanella, Todd Hundley and Javy Lopez were joined in 2021 by Kansas City's Salvador Perez, who set the single-season record for catchers with 48. Perez's mark is eminently reachable for Raleigh, who would need to average just one homer a week for the rest of the regular season to top it. Raleigh is only the fifth player in Mariners history to hit 40 homers, and he joins elite Pacific Northwest company: Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Nelson Cruz and Jay Buhner. 'They're really good players,' Raleigh said. 'They're some of the best that's ever come through here, so very honored to be a part of that group. It's a cool thing. Just try to keep going and see how far we can take it.' Raleigh also tied Griffey (1998) for the most homers in Seattle history through 105 games of a season while becoming only the eighth player in major league history to hit 40 in his team's first 105 games — just the second to do it in the 21st century, joining Aaron Judge (2022). Raleigh even reached his latest landmark on a day when his AL MVP candidacy indirectly got a boost: Judge, the obvious front-runner for his third award in four seasons, went on the 10-day injured list with a flexor strain in his right elbow — although the Yankees superstar's absence isn't currently expected to be lengthy. Raleigh's production has actually slowed in July. He came into Saturday night's game batting .162 with just 11 hits in 18 games this month, although six of those hits were homers. Raleigh had two hits and struck out three times Saturday night, but Wilson has seen progress in Raleigh's approach at the plate in recent days. 'I think for the most part, it's an adjustment period,' Wilson said. 'Teams start to pitch around you a little bit, and I think you become aware of that and start making the adjustments there. But I think he's just been very consistent pretty much all this season, and I think that's what's been so great for me to see, and for all of us to benefit from. He's just been so consistent, and to do this while raising his batting average at the same time, pretty incredible.' ___ AP MLB:
