Drayage Brokersin Tucson, AZ

The Kentucky Wildcats are bringing in Kerr Kriisa from West Virginia, a transfer guard who is poised to be among the best shooters on the roster.

Kriisa spent three seasons at Arizona prior to that, averaging over nine points per game in each of his last two seasons.

Now, bringing his talents to Lexington, the Cats have added a weapon to their backcourt; however, they are also getting a player who isn’t shy and won’t back down.

Dallas Mavericks superstar Luka Doncic knows that as well from when Slovenia played Estonia in a FIBA World Cup quarterlies friendly. While Estonia was rolled by Slovenia, Kriisa did have a somewhat heated interaction with Doncic.

There were some tensions at the beginning of the game between Kerr Kriisa and Luka Doncic #FIBAWC #WinForAll @fiba pic.twitter.com/eoqQWa08Wj

— BasketNews (@BasketNews_com) August 26, 2022

After the game, Kriisa made it clear he wasn’t backing down to the NBA All-Star.

“We don’t let people just step on us,” Kriisa told BasketNews.com. “Otherwise, we could have just stayed in Estonia and not even come here. If somebody says something to us, we talk back. He showed a reaction, so it means it’s pretty easy to get into his head, too.”

Kriisa getting in the head of his opponents is something he’s done frequently during his days at Arizona and West Virginia, so expect to see him continue to bring that fire in Lexington.

The 6-foot-3 Kriisa has improved every season at the collegiate level, shooting over 42% from deep this past season with the Mountaineers.

On a roster that will need his scoring and grit, BBN should be pleased with the type of player they’re getting.

Be sure to follow our Twitter page and ‘like’ our Facebook page to get all of the latest Kentucky Wildcats news and views. And Go CATS!

The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:

The Arizona Board of Regents recently began the search process for the next president of the University of Arizona. I commend them for their desire to swiftly act and appoint a search advisory committee that is currently in the process of taking public input. There is no doubt that the new president will have some challenges to work through early in their tenure given the current situation at the University of Arizona. However, adversity also brings opportunities to set the direction for the University moving forward.

In a recent article published in the Arizona Daily Star, committee members were quoted saying what is important to them in the overall search for a president. Priorities included regaining faith in the institution, a values-based leader, a top scholar and recruiter in academia and priority in the areas that the university can lead. Diversity and continuing the legacy of serving underrepresented populations was also identified.

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I agree with these sentiments and would also emphasize the need to focus on candidates that have a strong background, understanding and commitment to the land-grant mission of the university which represents the best strategy to achieve these goals.

The University of Arizona has the proud distinction of being the only land-grant institution in Arizona and is built on the foundation of education being available and accessible to everyone. Land-grant universities were developed to provide excellence in teaching, research, and extension. The Morrill Act of 1862, Hatch Act of 1887 and Smith-Lever Act of 1887 outline and support the three pillars of the land-grant mission.

The Morrill Act established the educational role of the University while the Hatch Act provided funding for establishment of experiment stations throughout the state to find practical solutions to real world problems. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the Smith-Lever Act recognized the need for research and education opportunities to be extended across all the communities served by the land-grant university. The Smith Lever Act created the Cooperative Extension System which brings the science and research from the university and the teaching agendas directly to people to serve the public good.

These three pillars give the University of Arizona the opportunity to have an impact in virtually every community across our state and tribal communities. Cooperative extension alone has programs dedicated to agriculture and natural resources, family and consumer sciences, 4H Youth Development and tribal extension programs, perhaps the most ideal representation of community engagement that includes underrepresented populations.

The three pillars of the land-grant mission are just as relevant today as they were when they were first established in law. The next president will have the opportunity to restore the University of Arizona’s reputation as a top-land grant university, exhibit excellence in world class research to solve the real-world problems we all face and make all this available across the state. I hope the next president is selected with the proper background and skills to make that happen and we look forward to working with them to make it a reality.

Phil Bashaw, originally from southeast Arizona, is a University of Arizona alumnus and chair of the Ag 100.

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Arizona Wildcats

Kaluma received offers from both Arizona and Arizona State as he finished up his prep career in Glendale. That could lead him back to the Grand Canyon State and the Wildcats would provide a nice opportunity for him. Tommy Lloyd’s interest in Kaluma could ultimately depend on what happens in regards to the NBA draft, as Caleb Love, Pelle Larson, K.J. Lewis and Jaden Bradley have all declared for the draft, but have maintained their eligibility and could return to Tucson. The Wildcats will lose center Oumar Ballo, who has transferred, and forward Keshad Johnson, who is out of eligibility. Lloyd has four top-100 commits coming in and has already added Trey Townsend and Tobe Awaka to replace some of those losses, but adding another dynamic offensive piece like Kaluma would be a big win.

Baylor Bears

Like many teams at this point, Baylor’s roster is relatively set headed into next season, but there might still be the opportunity to add another significant piece like Kaluma. The Bears had another strong season under Scott Drew in 2023-24 but will lose several key members of that squad this offseason including freshman stars Ja’Kobe Walter and Yves Missi who are headed to the NBA. Jalen Bridges also recently declared for the draft while guard RayJ Dennis is out of eligibility and forward Caleb Lohner is transferring. Drew already made a splash in the portal with the addition of Jeremy Roach and has a talented incoming freshman class headlined by forward VJ Edgecombe. Still, Kaluma would be a strong veteran piece to add to the roster and would also have an opportunity to reunite with high school teammate Jayden Nunn in Waco.

Iowa State Cyclones

Iowa State’s roster is pretty solidified at this point and the Cyclones will likely enter next season as a top-25 team and a Big 12 contender. However, adding one more piece like Kaluma could potentially put the Cyclones in the national championship conversation. Kaluma was signed to play under T.J. Otzelberger at UNLV before the head coach left for Iowa State and could entertain the opportunity to play for Otzelberger once again in the portal. Iowa State will have a revamped frontcourt next season with Tre King, Robert Jones and Hason Ward out of eligibility, while Omaha Biliew has also transferred. The Cyclones have brought in some nice pieces through the portal to mask that headlined by Joshua Jefferson, but adding Kaluma to that mix would make this an even deeper and more skilled roster.

San Diego State Aztecs

San Diego State continues to prove it is one of the winningest programs in college basketball under Brian Dutcher and could be appealing to a player like Kaluma despite what would typically seem like a move down from the Big 12 to the Mountain West. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of joining the Aztecs for Kaluma is seeing the previous success of his brother, Adam Seiko, who played at San Diego State for six seasons from 2017-23. Kaluma was also originally committed to another Mountain West school during high school, UNLV. Regardless of those factors, the Aztecs could use a bonafide playmaker with 21-point-per-game scorer Jaedon LeDee graduating. Dutcher has also lost Lamont Butler and Micah Parrish to the transfer portal, so a veteran scorer like Kaluma could ultimately be the perfect fit.

TCU Horned Frogs

TCU is just about a half hour away from where Kaluma grew up in Irving and a return back home could be possible based on where the Horned Frogs’ roster sits right now. TCU made the NCAA Tournament for the third consecutive year this past season but will lose its top seven scorers from that squad. A lot of those losses are in the backcourt and Jamie Dixon has already addressed that by adding Frankie Collins, Noah Reynolds and Brendan Wenzel out of the transfer portal. However, the Horned Frogs will also lose Chuck O’Bannon, JaKobe Coles and leading scorer Emanuel Miller from their frontcourt. Kaluma has a similar game to Miller and could be a perfect replacement. His veteran presence and familiarity with the Big 12 would also be beneficial for TCU.

hey came from Sierra Vista, the two men and young boys dressed in formal kilts, their wives and young girls sporting Victorian-style formal gowns.

Since Arizona Opera opened its 2023-24 season last October through last Saturday’s season finale, the group of friends have made the 70-minute drive to Tucson as an excuse to get dressed up.

“We made an event of it,” explained Krystle Harrell, who said she and her friend told their husbands that group dating at the opera was a wonderful excuse to gussy up. “We dress up. We get a hotel. We go out to dinner. We love to do it. Now we’re bringing our kids.”

Next season, Harrell and her friends will have to travel an extra 90 minutes to downtown Phoenix for their Saturday opera night on the town.

Arizona Opera, in its just-announced 2024-25 season, is presenting only one performance of each of its three operas in Tucson, at 2 p.m. Saturdays in January, April and next October.

The decision to downsize the performances in Tucson follows the company’s move this season to reduce the number of performances in Phoenix, to two from three.

“It’s an unprecedented challenging time for the arts,” said Arizona Opera President and General Director Joseph Specter. “We are hoping the community will stick with us.”

Specter said Arizona Opera has been dealt a triple blow since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered live entertainment for a year. It all started with its 2020-21 season, which should have been five performances. Instead, the company hosted a series of outdoor and streamed concerts, which resulted in a seismic drop in ticket revenues and an even bigger decline in contributions. With no butts in the seats at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, the company wasn’t reaching its target audience of contributors, whose gifts comprise 70% to 80% of the company’s $7.5 million operating budget.

But it is the pandemic’s drawn-out hangover that is hurting not only Arizona Opera but arts across the board. Audiences have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, which Specter and others in the arts attribute in part to the lingering recession — people are choosing to forego season tickets and instead buy single tickets and attend fewer events — and partly to people getting out of the habit of attending live performances.

During the pandemic, subscribing to streaming services replaced live entertainment and by the time live performances returned, people had gotten comfortable being entertained in their living rooms.

Add to that equation the loss of a large segment of older audience members, who are still uncomfortable returning to live performances.

In the two years since the height of the pandemic, Arizona Opera has only been able to fill on average 30% of Linda Ronstadt Music Hall; the numbers are proportionately higher in Phoenix, at 70%, Specter said. By combining two performances into one, Specter said the hope is that the one performance will be before a fuller house and the company would save the money it would have spent on the second performance.

Arizona Opera will mount three operas at Music Hall in the 2024-25 season, which opens in October with “Beyond Downtown,” a new collaboration with San Jose, California’s Opera Cultura and New York’s On Site Opera to present “energetic and unexpected” site-specific opera performances to reach new and more diverse audiences. Specter said they are in the development stages of how that will look, but it might be reminiscent of this season’s outdoor concert performances in Tucson and Phoenix. The last one was held at the Tucson Museum of Art on April 26.

Next season is a radical departure for the company, which historically has opened its season in October and presented four fully-staged operas through April.

The first staged opera next season comes in the new year with Puccini’s beloved “La Bohéme” on Feb. 1, 2025, followed on April 19 by the critically-acclaimed soprano Leah Hawkins making her role debut in a projection-based concert production of Verdi’s “Aida.” The season finale won’t come until Oct. 4, 2025, with Héctor Armienta‘s new opera “Zorro,” sung in English and Spanish.

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Arizona Opera also will host a recital with tenor Stephen Costello and pianist Anthony Manoli on April 30 as part of the 2025 Tucson Desert Song Festival. For the first time in its years-long collaboration with the song festival, the opera will bring the recital to its Phoenix audiences on April 1 as part of its ongoing partnership with Arizona State University School of Music, Dance and Theatre.

Specter said Arizona Opera’s focus is on rebuilding financially so that it can continue innovating and presenting high-quality opera and educational programming to its birth city of Tucson and Phoenix. Since last fall, Arizona Opera has brought performances to 150 schools — 50 in Tucson — exposing 55,000 children to opera in their classrooms.

He admits, though, that the task can seem daunting, especially when he considers the recent impact the state of the industry has had on other American opera companies.

Tulsa Opera in Oklahoma last June canceled most of its 2023-24 season and lost its general director in the process. The company cited financial struggles “exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to a report in the Tulsa World newspaper.

In the months that followed Tulsa’s announcement, Western New York’s renowned Chautauqua Institution announced sweeping operational changes to its opera company and conservatory to dig out of its financial crisis. Part of that meant downsizing the company’s young artists program from 24 students to eight and eliminating backstage positions, according to a report in the Buffalo News.

San Diego Opera last April canceled its production of “The Falling and the Rising,” which was postponed from 2020 to this May.

Opera Philadelphia in August reduced its staff by 16% to trim $2 million from its budget. Its longtime director also stepped down and the company postponed one show to the 2024-25 season as a cost-cutting measure.

Maryland Lyric Opera in October unceremoniously threw in the towel. The following month, Syracuse Opera canceled the bulk of its 2023-24 season and furloughed its staff (one full-time employee and three part-timers). The company has yet to announce where it will go from here.

“It’s easily the most challenging time in my 12 years in artistic management,” said Specter, who has been with Arizona Opera since 2016 after four years leading Austin (Texas) Opera and several years working on the fundraising end of New York Metropolitan Opera. “But this is primetime for creative solutions. It’s also primetime to be humble and realize opera is struggling.”

Specter said the changes to Arizona Opera’s programming and season calendar came out of a series of strategic planning meetings in January. The goal was to find ways to manage expenses to match the downturn in funding while still maintaining the opera’s “high quality and impact and continuing to be innovative.”

His message to Tucson operagoers like Harrell and her friends: “Stay with us. Go on this journey with us. We need the community,” he said.

Harrell and her friends said they are not too keen about attending a Saturday afternoon performance, but that doesn’t mean they will walk away from the opera.

David Behan said the group is willing to travel to Phoenix to see performances on Saturday nights. They did that in March for “Romeo & Juliette” when they weren’t able to get tickets for the Tucson performance, he said.

But, “we like the night performances,” said Behan, who was rocking a tuxedo-style waist coat, crisp white shirt and bow tie with his formal kilt and matching flash at the April 27 performance of “Don Giovanni.” “It gives us a reason to dress up like this. Saturday afternoon is not as fancy as the night.”

After a two game sweep of the number two ranked Tucson Roadrunners in the first round of the American Hockey League’s Calder Cup Playoffs, the Calgary Wranglers #SaddleUp into a best of five game series with the Coachella Valley Firebirds.

FLASHBACK TO ROUND ONE

After a regular season split (2-2) and a practically fantastical roster for the Roadrunners, the seventh ranked Wranglers seemed to be backed into a corner against Dylan Guenther, Josh Doan, Jan Jeník and Conor Geekie.

The Wranglers stifling ability to clear the puck on the penalty kill and take away the high percentage offensive zone areas and passing lanes froze Tucson’s offensive prowess.

Doan and Guenther, two of the team’s top performers for most of their time with the Roadrunners, were held to a combined for 25 shots on goal, with one goal credited to Guenther in game two of the series.

The story of the series does not rest solely on the negatives for the Roadrunners, but the light shines on Dustin Wolf, the Wranglers goaltender who spent most of the year in the NHL, for his save numbers against the Roadrunners.

The 86 saves on 89 shots alone is enough to paint the picture for just how important Wolf was to the Wranglers sweep, but doesn’t show the quality of chances created in the offensive end by Jakob Pelletier, Adam Klapka and Cole Schwindt to name three of the important players for Calgary.

Pelletier and Klapka missed time with the Wranglers alongside Wolf in the NHL this season, but all three fell back into their strides in the first round.

Of his two points on the postseason, Schwindt’s goal in game one was enough for the Wranglers to force Steve Potvin, head coach of the Roadrunners, to have sturdy goaltender Matthew Villalta, vacate his net, allowing a lockdown empty net goal late in game one.

Game two of the series had Calgary’s highest point accumulation, with nine players recording points.

For reference, 18 players appeared in the series for Calgary.

WAITING IN THE WINGS

Coachella Valley finished the season atop the Pacific Division with a commanding 103 points, as well as a 46-15-6-5 record.

Three rostered forwards for the Firebirds on the regular season finished within the league’s top 20 in points, T-5th Kole Lind (17-48–65), T-9th Max McCormick (32-28–60) and T-12th Cameron Hughes (25-32–57).

Goaltenders Chris Driedger and Ales Stezka finished in the league’s top 20 goaltenders in GAA, Driedger 4th at 2.26 with a .917 SV% (6th) and Stezka 9th at 2.48 GAA and a .914 SV% (8th).

SEASON HISTORY

Coachella took six of the seven meetings with the Wranglers on the regular season, winning all three games in Calgary (1-1, 1-2 & 3-26) and three of four at home (1-19, 1-31 & 2-1).

Coachella outscored the Wranglers 30-17.

The only goaltender on the Calgary roster to beat the Firebirds this season is Connor Murphy (not currently listed on Calgary’s active playoff roster).

PLAYOFF HISTORY

After defeating the Roadrunners in three games last season, the Firebirds went on to defeat the Wranglers in five games enroute to a Calder Cup Final appearance in the first year of the franchise’s existence.

Calgary won game two at home and game three in Coachella Valley last season.

Coachella Valley has proved to be better at winning games in Coachella Valley in the postseason with 10 of their 12 wins in last season’s playoffs being at the Acrisure Center in Palm Desert.

SERIES SCHEDULE

Game 1: Coachella Valley @ Calgary – 5/3 – 6 PM PST (9 PM EST) Game 2: Coachella Valley @ Calgary – 5/5 – 3 PM PST (6 PM EST) Game 3: Calgary @ Coachella Valley – 5/8 – 7 PM PST (10 PM EST) *Game 4: Calgary @ Coachella Valley – 5/10 – 7 PM PST (10 PM EST) *Game 5: Calgary @ Coachella Valley – 5/12 – 3 PM PST (6 PM EST)