MEGAN DAVIS:  Hello, Gopher fans. It’s Megan Davis with the Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to the Gold Standard, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota sports. 

So today’s going to be a pretty chill day just because it’s the middle of July. There’s not a whole lot to talk about, especially in the world of the Gophers. So let’s just get right into it. The first thing I wanted to talk about is going to be an upcoming story for me is that the U.S. girls under-19 volleyball team just won silver after losing to Bulgaria in the World Championships. 

And though, you know, it’s sad to lose to Bulgaria and the championships, it’s good for them that they placed silver. This is the fifth consecutive world championships that the under-19 girls have won a medal. And it’s huge news for the Gophers because two Gopher freshmen made huge contributions to the team, that being Jordan Taylor and Kelly Kinney. 

And they are both going to be incoming freshmen, so they haven’t even had the opportunity to, you know, make an impact on the Gopher team yet. So they’ll be super exciting to see their freshman season. Kelly Kinney did an interview a little while ago, and she said that she really wanted to win a national championship.

I mean, I feel like that’s the goal for most Gophers who compete for the University of Minnesota, but it’s good that it’s already out there. I mean, obviously, with her great performance at World Championships, I think that the Gophers women’s volleyball team is just one step closer to being able to achieve that goal. And so definitely some people to keep a lookout for in the upcoming season. 

My other upcoming story is going to be on the Bershers sisters, Tracey and her sister Zoey, just because it’s not very often that you get two women’s basketball players who are sisters and get to play on the same team. Especially because this will be Tracey’s last year of eligibility and she’s a transfer student. And then this will be Zoey’s first year. So, two completely different paths in their collegiate career right now. But I’m happy that they’re both coming to the U and I’m excited to see them play. 

And then I wanted to talk a little bit about my story last week, which was on the women’s rugby championship in 1988. It was so much fun to do that story. I had such a good time scouring through the Minnesota Daily archives and looking at what other sports reporters wrote in the past. And so I suggest you all read that story because it was super fun, and I think a lot of people don’t know about the history of women’s rugby on campus. 

And you know, we still have rugby team to this day and they don’t really get covered just because we have so many sports and there’s only so many sports reporters. But, it’s not like they’re not a part of the campus and I think that they deserve to be recognized for their achievements, you know, past and present. 

And also, Minnesota has apparently, you know, after doing some research, has quite a history in women’s rugby. And that’s why we have the new team, the Twin Cities Gemini, because of just kind of the history that Minnesota has with rugby. We’ve had a lot of different teams just because of the instability of the sport. But you know, there’s a huge community of women’s rugby players and I just had a fun time seeing all the different perspectives of that story.

Not a lot of huge news just because we have a lot of teams preparing for their upcoming seasons. You have football, preparing for the upcoming season, basketball. I don’t know if we ever talked about it, but Dawson Garcia was in training camp for the Pistons, I believe. So I don’t know where that will go or what will happen, but nice to see that he had a, you know, has a shot to make it onto a team, especially because he ran outta eligibility in college.

Other stories on the Daily, P.J. Fleck gets an extension, not a huge one, not really groundbreaking. I believe it is just a one year extension for his exact same salary to extend him to 2030. So not much there. He’s making the exact same amount of money. 

And he already had a seven-year extension that he signed in 2022. He’s the 11th highest paid coach in the Big Ten, which, in comparison to our record, I feel like is fair. That is all I have for Gopher sports. 

But for sports in general, Wimbledon just finished and Sinner won the Wimbledon beating out Alcaraz. The most intriguing thing about this to me was the fact that he had just had a doping scandal about less than 12 months ago, I believe. And so I’ve seen a lot of things be like “Maybe he shouldn’t have even been able to compete.”

You know, what does this mean about doping in the whole league in general? Because I think both the men’s and the women’s winners did just overcome doping cases and that is, you know, it’s causing some controversy. 

We also have more news from the kind of NIL story that I did a while ago. A lot of different teams are kind of what, where do we go from here? What should we do? How do we enforce it? You know, that’s kind of a big thing, like, how are they going to enforce it? 

That was a huge criticism I saw from a lot of people being like, yes, you established this new committee to say you’re gonna enforce it, but, what are you gonna do? Like just slap them on the wrist and tell them, no, you can’t do that? How are you supposed to go about punishment for this kind of stuff? 

Especially if you’re punishing them, usually, you know, you’re hurting the players ’cause you’re taking away the money that they earned. So that’s super interesting. And there’s also another fun article on the Athletic called “What happens when college football enters its own Moneyball era?” I think that’s fascinating just because it will be the new Moneyball era for college football because they’re gonna have to work around this salary cap.

If they actually enforce it, if they’re actually truly able to enforce punishments, then teams will have to work a lot harder and be a lot smarter about where their money’s going. But of course, people like Deion Sanders, who has to coach the University of Colorado Boulder, says that he likes the salary cap for college football.

And I think that’s the one benefit, is that supposedly what’s this is supposed to do is, you know, kind of limit that. But also like, for these teams who don’t have the big donors, don’t have millionaires sending money to these football programs, to actually compete on a large scale.

So who knows if that will actually happen, but it’s a nice thing to think about, that you know, maybe college football won’t be exclusively run by schools with large bank accounts behind their football team. 

And that’s all I have for today. This episode was written by Megan Davis and produced by Ceci Heinen. As always, we appreciate you listening in and feel free to send a message to our email inbox podcasting@mndaily.com with any questions, comments, or concerns. 

I’m Megan Davis and this has been The Gold Standard.