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Sports Briefs: Cole takes pay cut, signs new contract with Hurricanes
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Published: July 2, 2009
RALEIGH -- The Carolina Hurricanes are keeping physical forward Erik Cole, agreeing yesterday to a two-year contract. Cole will make $2.8 million next season and $3 million in 2010-11.
Cole, the Hurricanes' third-round pick in 1998, took a pay cut to stay in Raleigh. He made $4 million last season while completing a three-year deal he signed in 2006.
Carolina dealt Cole to Edmonton last summer, then re-acquired him at the trade deadline. His return re-energized the Hurricanes -- and All-Star Eric Staal in particular -- down the stretch, with points in 15 of the final 17 games in the regular season. He struggled in the playoffs with no goals and five assists in 18 games.
Cole had 18 goals and 24 assists in 80 regular-season games.
Cole became the second of Carolina's potential free agents to re-sign this week. Playoff hero Jussi Jokinen previously signed on for two more years.
Also yesterday, the Hurricanes signed Patrick Dwyer and Michael Ryan, restricted free-agent forwards, to two-way contracts.
Basketball
■ First-round draft pick Eric Maynor officially signed a two-year contract with the Utah Jazz yesterday. As the 20th pick in the draft, he will be paid $1.3 million for his rookie season.
Maynor, who played high-school basketball at Fayetteville Westover, was the two-time Colonial Athletic Association player of the year at Virginia Commonwealth.
■ Kobe Bryant insisted that his contract status with the Los Angeles Lakers wouldn't be an issue, and it wasn't. Bryant chose not to terminate the final two years of his contract and will remain with the Lakers, a team he wanted to leave just two summers ago.
Team spokesman John Black confirmed Bryant's decision yesterday. Bryant, the MVP of the NBA Finals, had until Tuesday to become an unrestricted free agent but downplayed questions about his future plans throughout the Lakers' five-game finals victory over Orlando.
■ Matt Matheny, the men's basketball coach at Elon, has added Will Roberson to his staff as an assistant.
Roberson spent last season as an assistant at Emory and was a graduate assistant at Clemson in 2006-07. He also has been a high-school head coach and the director of basketball operations at Davidson, his alma mater.
■ The National Association of Collegiate Women Athletics Administrators (NACWAA) will posthumously honor Kay Yow, the former women's basketball coach at N.C. State, as the winner of its 2009 Award of Distinction.
Yow, who died in January after a long battle with breast cancer, coached college basketball for 38 years and was one of only six Division I women's coaches with more than 700 wins.
■ Catalin Baciu, a 7-2 center at Clemson, is recovering from arthroscopic surgery on his right shoulder.
The school said yesterday that Baciu, a sophomore backup from Romania, had the surgery last month and that he should see limited action in workouts the next two to three weeks as he heals.
Football
■ Tickets for the New York Urban League Football Classic between Winston-Salem State and Morgan State are now on sale at the WSSU ticket office in the Anderson Center and by phone at 336-750-3220, with prices ranging from $25 to $60. The game will be Sept. 19 at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.
The Classic is now in its 38th year.
■ A Jefferson County (Ky.) school-system report released yesterday on the heat-related death of Max Gilpin, a 15-year-old football player in Louisville, concluded that a coach and his staff did not break any high-school athletics rules and found evidence that Gilpin was ill with a headache and other symptoms before practice.
Gilpin collapsed while running sprints at the end of a preseason practice last August and died three days later of septic shock, multiple organ failure and heat stroke. Coach David Jason Stinson has been charged with reckless homicide in a rare criminal case. He has pleaded not guilty and a trial is set to start Aug. 23.
Soccer
■ Brazil ended Spain's one-year reign as the world's No. 1-ranked soccer team in the latest FIFA rankings, and the United States moved up two spots to No. 12 and its highest ranking since June 2006.
Brazil climbed four spots to gain the top spot for the first time since July 2007, Spain slipped to No. 2 after its Confederations Cup loss to the U.S., the Netherlands was third, Italy fourth and Germany fifth. Russia, England, Argentina, France and Croatia rounded out the top 10.
■ Ian Spooner, the women's soccer coach at Greensboro, announced commitments from a class of 15 yesterday, including forwards Mary Reinhardt of Mount Tabor and Hannah Coats of Reagan, defender/midfielder Brittany Crawford of Reynolds,
Reinhardt was Mount Tabor's leading scorer the last two seasons, Crawford was a three-year letter winner, and Coats scored 29 goals in her four-year career.
■ Midfielder Elisabeth Redmond of Duke has been added to the U.S. Under-23 women's soccer team that is in London to play two matches against the British U-23 team. The matches will be Friday and next Tuesday at the Bisham Abbey National Sports Centre.
Miscellaneous
■ Kernersville's Dylan Ferris had a third-place finish in the 800 meters at last week's USA Track and Field Junior National Championships and qualified for a spot on the U.S. team that will compete in Pan American Junior Championships later this month in Trinidad & Tobago.
Ferris, a 2008 graduate of East Forsyth High School and a rising sophomore at Stanford, finished the 800 in 1:51.89, just 35/100ths of a second behind winner Joe Abbott of Washington State. The Pan Am Junior Championships are scheduled July 31-Aug. 2.
■ University of North Carolina officials said yesterday that they have signed a 10-year contract for Nike to supply athletics equipment and apparel to its sports teams. The contract was signed in late May and made retroactive to July 1, 2008.
Nike will provide UNC teams shoes, uniforms, balls, coaching gear and other equipment. The athletics department also will receive $1 million from the deal, with those funds being used for lighting and sound improvements to the Dean Smith Center, and the university will receive $2 million for the Chancellor's Academic Enhancement Fund.
■ Former boxer Alexis Arguello was found dead at his home in Managua, Nicaragua, early yesterday. Presidential spokeswoman Rosario Murillo confirmed his death and an autopsy was pending. The La Prensa newspaper reported that Arguello -- who was elected mayor of Managua last year -- was found with a gunshot wound to the chest. He was 57.
Arguello retired in 1995 with a record of 82-8 with 65 knockouts and was a champion in three weight divisions.
■ Chowan, a private, predominantly Baptist college in Murfreesboro, yesterday became an official member of the CIAA, the nation's oldest historically black conference.
Chowan started playing football as the only non-historically black college in the league last season. Nine other programs will begin play at the start of the next school year.
■ Toni Paisley, a sophomore pitcher on East Carolina's softball team, yesterday was named Conference USA's co-female athlete of the year for 2008-09.
She is the first Pirate in any sport to win a C-USA athlete-of-the-year award, which is determined by a vote of conference athletics directors.
Paisley was the C-USA pitcher of the year and a first-team all-conference pick this past season after leading the league in wins (30), innings (270 2/3), earned-run average (1.22) and strikeouts (297).
■ Dara Torres plans to have major surgery on her arthritic left knee at the end of the summer and said on a conference call yesterday that she might not swim the 100-meter freestyle at next week's U.S. championships because it's painful to do a flip turn. She does expect to compete in the 50 free, which doesn't require a turn.
Torres, 42, says she has no cartilage left in the knee and that it swelled up badly when she practiced a few starts Tuesday.
■ Kentucky Derby winner Mine That Bird needs a new jockey again after trainer Chip Woolley and jockey Calvin Borel could not agree on a long-term commitment to ride the horse. Woolley wants a jockey committed to riding Mine That Bird through the Breeders' Cup in November.
Borel's agent, Jerry Hissam, said that Borel didn't want to give a multi-race commitment, but would gladly ride Mine That Bird again in the future, given the chance.
■ Dutch cyclist Thomas Dekker will not compete in the Tour de France because of a positive test for the blood booster EPO. The Silence-Lotto team said yesterday that the Dekker recently learned that a retested urine sample taken in December 2007, when Dekker rode for Rabobank, contained the banned hormone.
Marc Sergeant, Silence-Lotto's team director, added that he moved to suspend and replace Dekker ahead of the Tour, which will start Saturday.
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