Tuesday Items

-- Giving some consolation to what is in all likelihood a lost season, the baseball team took two of three from UNC over the weekend, which kept their slim ACC tournament hopes alive. They'll need to sweep Clemson, have Carolina sweep Boston College, and have Virginia take a game from Virginia Tech.

In this piece by Tim Peeler, Elliott Avent offers a bit of coachspeak brilliance, and also points out all of the blown leads that have put the team in this difficult position:

“Momentum that isn’t used immediately seems to lose a little steam,” Avent said.

[snip]

“We had a 10-2 lead at Boston College and lost. We were ahead 7-0 at Duke on Sunday, and up 7-5 with two outs and two strikes on the hitter in the 10th inning, and lost. We had a 7-0 lead in our Sunday game against Miami, and lost."

The Sunday pitching has been a real bummer, but not so against the Heels, at least.

-- You should also check out this item from Peeler about saving all of the history that's being stored in Reynolds Coliseum.

This summer, with the help of Wolfpack football player Donald Bowens and athletics marketing intern Blake Scher, we’ll be uncovering, cleaning and, mostly importantly, saving all that we can. They’ve already gotten an education about the many hidden secrets of Reynolds Coliseum.

I hope one day to have many of those secrets included it in an NC State athletics museum.

We have talked with the folks at the Special Collections Division of the NC State Library about helping us preserve the most important stuff we find – after we save our own copies. The library already houses much of the historic files and film from years gone by. We are looking to convert the film from 16mm to a high-definition digital format that we can eventually use on GoPack.com or in video displays, if we can find the appropriate funding to make those costly conversions.

Very cool. And it'd be great if they could use some of it to beef up the various history sections on GoPack.com, which are terribly inadequate.

The university has tons of great stuff that people should be able to see. During my sophomore year, I wrote a paper about NC State basketball for one of my history classes and had the opportunity to look at the library's special collections--lots of old newspaper clippings, programs, photos, etc. Needless to say, that was the most fun I ever had writing a term paper.

-- DeShawn Painter is down to Maryland and NC State and could come to a decision in the next week.