SLATE: More Academic Honors

The Big 12 office is continuing to pump out award lists for spring sports, and yesterday’s list were the Academic All Big-12 teams for Women’s Tennis. Six Wildcats were named to the list, all on the First Team, doubling the amount of selections from 2019. Senior athlete Ines Mesquita, and juniors Maria Linares and Anna Turco were on the first team last year, and were joined this year by junior Margot Decker, and sophomores Ioana Gheorghita and Rosanna Maffei. Congrats ladies!

K-State Athletics has released a budget report for the 2020-21 fiscal year, and includes multiple budget scenarios in anticipation of revenue reductions because of the coronovirus pandemic. The numbers go from a fairly optimistic 5% reduction across the board, to as much as 25%, with the biggest reductions coming from lost football ticket sales. In addition, AD Gene Taylor has instructed coaching staff to pull back their own program’s budgets by 10% for the coming fiscal year to help ease the overall impact.

In a partnership between Lafene Health Center and the K-State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, K-State will be able to offer approximately 270 COVID-19 tests per day to university students, faculty, and staff. This will be targeted at people who have symptoms or have been exposed to someone with COVID-19, but is not available to the greater Manhattan community at this time. Opinion: This should help shift some burden of testing off the Riley County Health Dept and KDHE (and private labs), while also helping provide some means for K-State students and employees to (potentially) return to K-State in the fall with added confidence, while also potentially paving the way for the return of fall sports at K-State.

Nostalgia Watch Party Update — due to a lack of available inventory, and lack of participation, we will not have the mid-week basketball game watch party this week. We are looking at bringing it back next week, potentially with the 1994 K-State @ KU basketball game (Altman’s win over #1 KU in Allen FH).