The University of Alabama softball team’s season ended on Sunday after the Tide dropped the series-ending game against Hawaii in the NCAA Super Regional 5-4.

Hawaii won the game thanks to a two-run walk-off home run by Jenna Rodriguez in the bottom of the seventh inning to secure a spot in the NCAA Women’s World Series.

Head coach Patrick Murphy after the game said he felt Hawaii earned the win.

“I want to say congrats to Hawaii,” Murphy said. “That is awesome for them and their program. I know Bob [Coolen] has been at it there for a long time. They are going to do a great job at the World Series, so congrats to them. They played really well today.”

Hawaii’s Rodriguez gave Alabama trouble as she accounted for all five runs, starting with a three-run home run in the first inning to give the Rainbow Wahine a 3-0 lead. Tide pitcher Kelsi Dunne battled Hawaii well, recording 16 strikeouts and allowing 5 hits with 2 walks.

“They have great hitters,” Dunne said.

Two weeks ago, the Alabama Crimson Tide baseball team was fighting for the eighth and final spot in the SEC Tournament. After a sweep of Tennessee, the Tide was in and at the seventh seed.

The Tide took its 7th seed placing and had an early game to start the SEC Tournament at Regions Park in Hoover, Ala., where they faced in-state rival and No. 2 seed Auburn.

First-year head coach Mitch Gaspard was celebrating his 45th birthday that day. Gaspard received a present from right-handed pitcher Jimmy Nelson, who pitched his third consecutive complete game, and the Tide defeated the Tigers 7-1.

The Tide then moved on to face Ole Miss. They were held scoreless until the fifth inning when Josh Rutledge hit an RBI single. From there, local Hoover native Ross Wilson took over, landing three hits and reaching base in all of his five plate appearances. The Tide defeated Ole Miss 6-3.

“Playing in Hoover helps a little bit,” Wilson said, “but it’s the postseason, so you always want to step up your game. Hopefully I’ve done that so far.”

After a day off, the Tide aced nationally ranked Florida. Left-handed pitcher Adam Morgan held the Gators to two runs as Jake Smith powered the Tide on the offensive side with a two-run RBI, capping off a 5-2 victory over the Gators and earning a spot in the SEC Championship, where the Tide would face LSU, the defending SEC and National Champions.

“This is what we work for,” Gaspard said. He’s the first coach to lead the Tide to a championship appearance in a first year as head coach.

The Tide got off to a rocky start when LSU catcher Matt Gauder hit a two-run RBI. One inning later, LSU third baseman Mike Mahtook hit a homerun, putting the Tigers up 3-0.

Then Wilson made a diving catch to stop LSU in the top of the 4th and hit an RBI in the bottom of the 4th to make the score 3-1.

In the fifth inning, the weather came down hard forcing an 82-minute rain delay. After the delay, in the seventh inning, right fielder Jon Kelton stole second and third, and Andrew Miller drove Kelton in making the score 3-2.

In the bottom of the 8th, Smith hit a curve ball into right field driving one run in, tying the game at 3-3.

With the momentum and the crowd behind the Tide, Smith took the mound getting all three batters out. With the bottom of the 9th coming up, the grounds crew was pulling out the tarp again. Over an hour later, the 9th inning resumed.

“We really wanted to play through,” Smith said. “We had the momentum on our side.”

The Tide could not carry the momentum in the bottom of the 9th as LSU Pitcher Anthony Renaudo quickly got three outs.

In the 10th inning, Wilson was walked. He immediately stole 2nd, and then an LSU error helped him steal third during the same play.

With Wilson in position for the winning run, Smith stepped up to the plate and blasted the first pitch into right field. At the last second the wind took it hard right becoming foul. Two pitches later, Smith struck out.

In the top of the 11th, LSU pinch-runner Matt Furer had a single, and Tyler Hanover drove Furer in on a RBI, making the score 4-3.

After two quick outs the Tide had its chance to win the game, but Renaudo struck out all three batters, giving LSU their third consecutive SEC Championship.

Although the Tide bullpen couldn’t come though for this game, they made a big difference in the past two weeks.

“The starting pitchers have been great,” Gaspard said. “And when they are great your team has confidence. This time of year you need confidence to win, but you really need a handful of great starting pitchers with good defense, and we have that.

“Although we would of like to have won today, our team will walk away with a lot of confidence and will take it into whatever regional we end up in.”

The University of Alabama’s women’s golf team recently completed a successful season, finishing No. 3 in the country. It was the Tide’s best year in school history, eclipsing its No. 9 finish in 1987.

The team finished the NCAA Championship with a 5-over-par 1,157, which was 50 strokes better than the previous best showing for Alabama at this event.

Head coach Mic Potter described this season, his fifth at the Capstone, as surprising.

“I thought we had a good group of players, and by the end of the season, they began to complement each other,” he said.

Potter said he believes his team was successful because they know their goals as well as their potential.

“We have a core group of players who have bought into what the coaches wanted to do,” he said. “The girls work hard, both on the field and in class, and that is important to the success of the team.”

The team also had success at the individual level. Alabama finished with three players in the top 15: freshman Jennifer Kirby tied for 7th, sophomore Brooke Pancake took 12th, and junior Camilla Lennarth tied for 13th.

Kirby’s 7th place finish is the best individual performance in school history, five spots better than the previous best. This is coupled with her overall tournament score of a 4-under-par 284, yet another Alabama record.

Kirby said she wasn’t really nervous about the NCAA Tournament.

“We prepared well, which took away the nerves,” she said. “We had played in big tournaments before which took the edge off mentally. We had also played all the teams before this, so there was nothing new.”

Kirby said rather than focusing on her individual record, she instead focused on its impact on the future of the team.

“It means that the team is getting stronger,” she said. “The freshmen coming in will be better from playing next to the best.”

The team felt something in the air concerning their fortunes in the tournament, Kirby said.

“Even after the first few rounds of the NCAA Tournament, we knew we could win if we had the composure,” she said. “Even with Purdue [the 2010 NCAA Champions], we knew we could beat them if we had the mental toughness. We are good enough, and it will come eventually.”

Kirby is currently attempting to qualify for the U.S. Women’s Open.

Regarding the future outlook of the team, Potter said he has confidence in the program for the upcoming years.

“I don’t see any reason for the program not to be as good or better in future years,” he said. “Recruiting continues to go well. Hopefully, we can recruit even better players to replace those who have graduated.”

With the continued coaching, solid play by upperclassmen and the hopeful emergence of incoming freshmen, the Alabama women’s golf program will keep working towards the national championship title.

A redesigned TCBY will replace Strip Teas and Coffee in mid to late July, local TCBY franchise owner Charles Tiller said.

“The biggest thing we wanted was a progressive look and feel,” said Tiller, who owns two TCBY stores in the Tuscaloosa area and has been a franchise owner with TCBY for 25 years.

Instead of a typically styled TCBY, the new location will have a contemporary design and incorporate self-serve yogurt, coffee and a lounge setting for students. The store will also accept Bama Cash. Tiller also said he’s “looking at the Dining Dollar option.”

However, working with the current layout of the building presented a design challenge.

“We tried to incorporate electronic accessibility throughout the shop, including iPhone chargers and plenty of wall outlets for laptops and enough space for studying and relaxing,” Tiller’s design consultant Anne Elise Kindred said. “It was difficult to find enough space for customers and employees to function.”

Kindred is also a junior at the University majoring in interior design.

A large part of the appeal of the TCBY will be in the diversity of the store’s offerings, Tiller said. He and Kindred agreed that the combination of modern electronics access, self-serve yogurt, coffee shop and lounge space would appeal to the independent spirit of students.

“You’re setting the price of what you want,” Tiller said. “You can come in and just get a little cup of yogurt or you can really load up and enjoy.”

His long-time experience with TCBY, his membership on the company’s advisory board and the success of his two TCBY locations made Tuscaloosa an easy choice for a third store, Tiller said.

He also said the location’s business history was not a concern.

“We have gone into spaces that have had people in the past and we haven’t had a problem competing,” he said. “I do not have any doubt that this will do well.”

Tony Pasarello, chief marketing advisor for TCBY, agreed.

“It’s hard to blame the location for past closures, since it’s so highly-visible and highly-trafficked,” Pasarello said. “No location, however good, takes the place of a menu and setting that’s in tune with customers’ wants and needs.

“There will be a big grand opening, but it will follow a soft opening during which we’ll fine-tune the operation to make certain that the grand opening totally exceeds customer expectations,” Pasarello said.

The Tim James gubernatorial campaign was an embarrassment to Alabama.

I’ve been interested in local, state and national politics for as long as I can remember and there are few politicians I actually consider dangerous. Tim James, like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, is one of them.

After a close primary race with Bradley Byrne and Robert Bentley, Tim James was (hopefully) unable to gain enough votes to secure a place in the July run-off election. That outcome will be a relief to many Alabama voters who fear that James would have a good chance of winning the runoff vote.

Tim James is disturbing as a potential governor for three reasons.

First, of all the tough issues facing our state, such as job creation, the budget, corruption in Montgomery, the need for an education lottery and the lack of funding for our public schools, Tim James chose the multi-language drivers test as the subject for his main commercial.

Really, Mr. James?

For the average voter, the only thing that they could associate with Tim James’ gubernatorial campaign was his commercial on this topic. He never released a detailed plan to fix a major issue that faces our state.

Second, due to the national and worldwide attention of his “English-only” agenda, Tim James has hurt Alabama’s reputation as being a tolerant state that wants to bring in businesses from around the world. To foreign car companies such as Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai that have invested billions of dollars in our great state, this commercial was a slap in the face.

The negative publicity Alabama received from media outlets could hurt our potential to convince other foreign industries to invest in this state by establishing a business here. Which could hurt Alabama’s potential to create jobs.

Finally, Tim James claimed in his commercial that offering the driver test only in English would save money. Honestly, how much money do you think is being spent to offer that test in different languages? Not much. Not to mention that we would lose federal subsidies for not offering the test in the multi-language format we now have in place. So in the end, Alabama would lose money.

I realize that Tim James’s campaign was probably trying to advertise to the less politically versed crowd with this commercial — which is fine. What he failed to realize is that, while this commercial may have worked fifty years ago, Alabamians just did not want to be seen as prejudiced towards legal immigrants who primarily speak another language.

The bottom line is that Tim James’ message of intolerance simply could not be tolerated by the people of this state. Alabama Republicans stood up as one on June 1st and said, “No, Tim James, you didn’t make sense to me.”

The streets filled with hundreds of fans pounding homemade drums, bodies completely painted, waving flags, beers in hand, screaming uproariously. The SWAT team and police officers lined the streets watching the sea of people with resignation. As the roar of the crowd swelled, I could feel a “Roll Tide” forming in my own throat.

But this wasn’t an Alabama championship: this was an Atlético soccer game victory on a Wednesday night in Madrid, thousands of miles away from Tuscaloosa.

My time studying in Spain has been like that—an odd mix of can’t-put-my-finger-on-it familiarity and slap-me-in-the-face differences.

One second I’m realizing that life across the entire Atlantic Ocean isn’t that different. I’m with a group of Spaniards drinking a few beers on a Friday night in a plaza, laughing at the same old jokes, and I’m reminded of sitting out on the porch of a house party chatting with friends on a muggy Tuscaloosa night.

The next second I’m amazed by yet another cultural difference. I’m watching my Spanish friends fail their classes and laugh and say, “Well I didn’t go to class anyway, I’ll just try again next year, it’s no big deal,” and thinking of the articles I’ve written about stress, exams and the counseling center (not to mention my own mid-term and final exam panic attacks).

This was by far the most important thing I could have learned: we’re all just kids out there, trying to make our way in the world. It doesn’t matter where we come from or what we look like.

And at the same time you can’t forget that we were all taught different things. We all have different traditions and priorities and pasts.

I could see that part as I came to class 15 minutes late and still beat my professor by another 15 minutes. Or when I waited to meet some friends at 1 p.m. and they didn’t show up until 1:40 p.m., apologizing for being “a little bit late.” Or when I realized there wasn’t one clock on the entire campus of the university I’m visiting here.

I first noticed while trying to run errands around 2 or 3 p.m that every shop was closed for the siesta.

As different as Spain has seemed to me at times, it helped me reach another important conclusion about my own country and culture.
I took an international journalism class this semester. I was the only American in the class of all Spaniards.

One of the first lectures of the class was about President Obama’s first year as president with a focus on health care. In a fit of patriotic passion, I prepared myself to defend my country and my president against whatever condescending things my professor had in store.

Yet I was completely and pleasantly surprised. My professor merely began explaining a few things so the students in the class would have a better understanding of the environment in which Obama was working.

I had never learned about my country through the eyes of a foreigner teaching from books not written or published in my country.

I realized we are a very different nation, with, for example, our focus on time and individualism, and we appear strange through the eyes of my peers.

Being here has invoked in me a sense of pride, of enlightenment and, at times, even of shame about where I come from. Still, I wouldn’t give it up for anything in the world.

I am still in Madrid and will be moving to Barcelona for the summer. I will head back to Tuscaloosa in August. I am so excited about coming back and finally being in the homeland after seven long months.

Twenty years from now, when Alabama Democrats look back and ask when, exactly, they became irrelevant in Alabama politics, they will find their answer in Tuesday’s primary results. Given the choice between a Harvard educated lawyer and an uninspiring product of the state’s Democratic machine, Democratic voters chose the transparently self-serving Ron Sparks.

Sparks, who seems to believe all of Alabama’s problems can be solved by legalized gambling, will not be governor. He will, however, become the very public face of the deficiencies within the Alabama Democratic Party and the special interests controlling it.

The defining question for voters in the general election is not whether they should vote for Sparks or not, but why he is even a candidate.

His large margin of victory over congressman Artur Davis indicates astonishingly poor judgment on behalf of Democratic primary voters. The voters, however, were acting at the recommendations of the Democratic leadership.

Davis is detested by Democratic powerbrokers in Montgomery. They feared he would be hard for them to control in the governor’s seat.

Even black political leaders like Joe Reed threw their weight behind Sparks, simply because Davis refused to play their games. That Democratic primary voters played along with the machine bosses is a sad reflection on the state of the party. Having a voter base incapable of making rational choices is the most severe problem confronting any political party.

Of course, the Democratic Party of Alabama faces other challenges. This is a very red state, and 2010 is shaping up to be a very Republican year. The Democratic candidate was likely to lose regardless of the primary outcome.

Yet, with Davis, Democratic voters could have done something bold and historic. They could have given Republicans a reason to at least consider supporting their nominee. Remember, in 1998, Alabama elected Democrat Don Siegelman over the bumbling Republican incumbent Fob James. Siegelman lost reelection in 2002 by only 0.23 percent.

So it is, or was, possible for Alabama to elect a Democrat to the Governor’s Mansion. Indeed, for nearly a century, political races in Alabama were decided almost exclusively in the Democratic primary. Some counties still have no Republican elected officials.

In several counties, however, Republicans have offered themselves up for local office in an attempt to break the Democratic hold on school boards and county commissions. Increasingly, Alabama is moving in a direction where most races will be decided in the Republican primary. Ron Sparks’ candidacy will acerbate that trend.

The outcome of the Democratic primary is all the more appalling when contrasted with the results of the Republican race. Republicans, like Democrats, had the opportunity to choose an extremely bright candidate with a compelling vision for the state. That candidate, Bradley Byrne, won, although he will have to compete in a runoff election later this summer.

Byrne’s victory was a thankful repudiation of lowest common denominator politics represented by GOP candidate Tim James. James, who received substantial media attention for a campaign ad calling for English-only driver license exams, will now make the runoff only if a recount puts him ahead of Robert Bentley. That is unlikely, however, as James is currently in third place.

Republicans can take pride that James floundered. They also can take pride that former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore finished with only 19 percent of the vote, a distant fourth.

James and Moore represent the most unseemly factions of the GOP, and they were rejected for it. In the end, substance won, which is good for Alabama, because the state needs a substantive conversation about how to address its most pressing challenges.

Too bad the Democratic Party won’t be able to have a proactive role in that debate.

– Tray Smith is the Opinions Editor of The Crimson White.

Cardboard tombstones, embroidered cloths and anti-war signs decorated Northwest Eighth Avenue on Memorial Day as Gainesville’s chapter of Veterans for Peace honored the lives of service men and women who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001.

A display of 5,473 cardboard tombstones, one for every soldier killed in the wars, lined both sides of Northwest Eighth Avenue on Monday. Visitors and volunteers placed flags on the tombstones of soldiers they knew personally. This year, members of Veterans for Peace, a national organization that opposes war as a legitimate means of conflict resolution, and volunteers from their sister group, CodePink, had to plant some tombstones alongside the north side of the road because there was no more room on the south side.

Scott Camil, who is the coordinator for the Gainesville chapter, said this was the fourth year that the group has set up the memorial and doesn’t know what they’ll do if they run out of space in the future.

“You’d think it wouldn’t come to that,” he said, “that we would realize before then that this [war] is not working.”

Camil said the group received mostly support from passers-by, but he was upset after he learned that about 100 tombstones had been dug out early Sunday morning and were thrown into the woods.

Volunteers did not see those who removed the tombstones, he said.

Veterans for Peace member Denny Bellesheim, who served two years in North Korea from 1966 to 1968, said he worries about what kind of world his grandchildren will inherit.

“I don’t understand why we kill a million innocent people to catch a handful of bad guys,” he said. “How much sense does that make?”

The memorial also displayed the Peace Ribbon, a banner of more than 50 handmade cloth panels embroidered with names of military and civilian casualties of the Iraq war. The ribbon’s images included weeping families and warheads falling on Noah’s Ark. The ribbon travels nationwide and is maintained by CodePink.

The $9.7-million cut in state funding for Shands at UF, which was approved by Gov. Charlie Crist on Friday, will likely adversely affect Florida’s under- and uninsured patients, according to a Shands press release.

“Elimination of this critical revenue source for Shands at UF was totally unexpected,” said Shands HealthCare CEO Tim Goldfarb in the release. “It is vital to supporting our responsibility to care for Florida’s most vulnerable and neediest residents.”

Shands at UF will likely lose an additional $12 million in federal funding through the Medicaid match program, according to the release.

A safety-net hospital provides care to low-income, uninsured or vulnerable populations, according to the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems’ website.

As one of 14 safety-net hospitals in the state, Shands “is among the largest Medicaid and charity care providers in Florida and we have a strong sense of commitment to serve those with little or no insurance,” Goldfarb said.

U. Florida students built a house, tore it down and are now building it again.

A team of 31 UF students constructed the solar-powered house to compete with 19 universities from around the world in the Solar Decathlon Europe competition in Spain.

The project was led by the Rinker School of Building Construction and the College of Journalism and Communications.

Eleven students are in Spain reconstructing the house for the competition, which will be held from June 18 to June 27 in Madrid. The other 20 students will arrive later this week to finish the details of the house, said Paige Mainor, a team member.

The 800-square-foot house was built at the UF Solar Energy Park in Gainesville with help of more than 125 UF students from four colleges, said Kathryn Watson, a communications director for the project.

In April, the house was dismantled and shipped in five containers to Madrid, where some of the students began reconstruction, said Maruja Torres-Antonini, the project’s co-principal investigator.

During the competition, contestants will be judged in 10 categories, ranging from architectural quality to comfort levels. There is no monetary prize, but winners will receive “eternal glory,” along with honor and positive attention for their school, Watson said.

The construction of the house built in Gainesville cost less than $500,000, Torres-Antonini said. Student Government also donated $7,200 in April to the group so more students could make the trip, according to Alligator archives.

After the competition, the house will be disassembled and shipped back to Gainesville. It will then become a permanent display at the Florida Museum of Natural History.