Tip-ins

Changes at the Top. In Kansas State's 68-64 win over top-ranked Kansas on Jan. 17, senior guard Anthony Beane once again delivered in the clutch. He scored the Wildcats' last eight points, marking the eighth time in his K-State career he has contributed the winning or tying points in the final minute. (Similarly, he made the winning shot in the 1992 juco national championship game when he played for Three Rivers Community College in Missouri.) His record for delivering when it absolutely, positively has to be there has earned him the nickname Federal Express from his teammates. Also on Jan. 17, the No. 1—ranked Tennessee women went down to Rutgers, the first upset ever of a No. 1 women's team by an unranked team. During the first half of the 87-77 win, Lady Knight senior forward Caroline DeRoose, a native of Belgium, discovered she had her shorts on backward. At intermission her teammates wouldn't let her turn them around, so as not to jinx her eventual 35-point performance. In the 1990 Belgium Cup final, DeRoose suffered a similar sartorial screwup. She grabbed the wrong jersey—wearing number 9 instead of her usual 6—and led her club team to victory by scoring a career-high 47 points.

Road Warriors. Last week's arctic freeze, which brought as much as 20 inches of snow to some southern states, left a number of teams stranded on road trips. After losing 82-40 at Western Kentucky on Jan. 16, the Missouri—Kansas City women's team spent the next four days in a motel in Shepherdsville, Ky. Their only conditioning drills were running stairwells and tossing bags of dirty laundry like medicine balls. One state away, coach Dick Fick and his Morehead State men's team spent the same four days in a Nashville hotel, unable to make the bus trip back to Kentucky. "My wife's been on this whole trip," said Fick. "One reason she and I are still together is that I'm gone a lot. We've been together now for eight straight days, so we might be history."

Coach Gets Cut by Players. Murray State coach Scott Edgar vowed several weeks ago to shave his head if his team won five straight games. When the Racers polished off their fifth straight win with an 82-77 defeat of Memphis State on Jan. 19, the players were not about to let him off the hook. They immediately sat him down at the free throw line and, with a hundred wildly cheering fans looking on, hacked away his locks. Said forward Antwan Hoard, "Coach used to have pretty nice hair, but he doesn't have any anymore."

Truth in Advertising. At week's end, SMU was last in the Southwest Conference in scoring, at 70.4 points a game, and sixth in shooting percentage, at .423. So is it any wonder that one of the Mustangs' new sponsors is Acme Brick?

PHOTO

BARRY JOHNSON

The Racers' streak resulted in a close shave.