It's the Bond Shymansky Showcase! Starring Bond Shymansky!

If you're looking for something else to do this weekend while in Atlanta for the Big South qualifier, and the CNN Center doesn't appeal to you because, well, you don't want to risk getting shot, you can take a field trip over to Georgia Tech for the ACC/SEC Challenge. Florida State, Virginia, Duke and host Ga Tech will represent the ACC while Auburn, Alabama, Tennessee, and Ole Miss will battle for the SEC.

Then maybe you can explain to the rest of the class how the ACC only got one team into the NCAA Tournament. KER-POW.

Georgia Tech head coach Bond Shymansky said, "We are looking forward to hosting such a competitive tournament this weekend to use as a gauge of our team's progress."

Which actually means he's looking forward to luring all those recruits onto campus to gauge their interest in becoming part of the Ramblin' Wreck...

...and by "Wreck" I'm in no way hinting at that bit about the ACC only getting one team in the NCAA Tournament again. BLAM.

You gotta admire all these teams, though, letting everyone see them in the spring when they're not at their best. It's kinda like taking a girl out on a date when you have the flu and just had your wisdom teeth removed.

"Yuh looog nice dunigh. (Achoo!) [Sniff]."

Jolene Nagel: Renaissance Woman

Congrats to Duke head coach Jolene Nagel, who will be inducted into the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame on February 19. We assume Chautauqua is indian for "obscure area of New York," as Nagel was a graduate of Panama Central High School.

In the Post-Journal article announcing the ceremony, quite a laundry list of Nagel's past athletic achievements is given, including her stint as a club coach for the Columbia Comets, her inclusion as a 1979 Division 3 All-Stars second team for basketball, and her sixth place in the Section 6 diving in 1975. You remember 1975, right? The Cincinnati Reds beat the Boston Red Sox in the World Series, Gerald Ford was president, and the Bee Gees weren't a punchline.

Not to be overlooked is Nagel's work with horses. The Duke head coach showed horses from "1970-1979 in 4-H, PONY Association and quarter horse competition. Nagel was New York State Fair-Master Showman and had a first in Western Horsemanship."

Master showman! Anyone with a passing knowledge of fair hierarchy knows that master showman is nothing to sneeze at. It's this kind of background that no doubt prepared her for the rigors of Duke.

DukeVolleyball.com, back in the day

One of the best things about the Internet is that if someone puts up a website and then abandons it, the website stays there forever. There's no expiration date on the World Wide Web.

Case in point, the above Duke Volleyball page -- which can be found at http://www.duke.edu/~samvb/index.html -- was created in a time before CSTV.com and XOS, where whoever had any kind of HTML skills at all was made "webmaster." Check out the groovy horizontal rules and wicked animated GIF, all staples of website design back in the mid-'90s. Groovy.

Karen Weatherington, of course, is now the assistant coach at Butler, while Linda Grensing is, somewhere, I'm sure.