Inside this November 2009 edition of the L Club Newsletter:

L Club Welcome

Season's Greetings!

Thanks to the vision and connections of Al Miller, The Summit of Strength & Conditioning and Sports Medicine Leaders has moved past the planning stages and is accepting early registrants. With some of the biggest and brightest minds in professional athletics, this event is unique to our university and the proceeds will directly benefit our organization. We are truly lucky to have coach Miller!

Another big part of The Summit is a special clinic hosted by world-renowned multi-sport coach Troy Jacobson. We will also host keynote speeches from Dan Reeves and Chris Mortensen. Feel free to pass the word along about this event to anyone you think might be interested. The registration is 100 percent online and can be accessed through www.ulm.edu/gradschool.

The 2010 Hall of Fame Weekend is right around the corner and we will once again be inducting an excellent class to represent our university and organization. Part of a full weekend of Warhawk athletics, this is a great time to come back to your alma mater, reconnect with former teammates and friends, and enjoy a variety of events on campus. We hope to see you there!

Best wishes for you and your family during the holidays.

Lisa Colvin

Lisa Colvin
L-Club President
(318) 342-1036
lcolvin@ulm.edu





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L Club to sponsor All-Star Strength Clinic

Bob Andersonby Bob Anderson

The ULM L Club will present the “all-star game” of strength conditioning and sports medicine clinics on the campus Feb. 19 - 20, 2010.

Appropriately named The Summit of Strength & Conditioning and Sports Medicine Leaders, the clinic will feature 16 speakers — all top individuals in their field. The clinic is expected to attract hundreds of coaches, athletes, strength coaches, athletic trainers, physical therapists and other sports figures to the ULM campus.

One of the headline speakers is ULM’s own Al Miller, a top college and National Football League strength coach for more than 30 years. Miller has participated and attended dozens of clinics of this type but he rates this one as probably the best in history.

“As far as I know, there has never been an event of this type to have as many top experts in sports conditioning and sports medicine under one roof at the same time,” says Miller, the former strength coach at ULM, Alabama and three NFL teams. “This is as star-studded a group as you could find anywhere. I have attended a lot of strength clinics but never one with a cast of as many of the very top people in the field as this one.”

Probably the best known figures on the program as far as the general public is concerned are 22-year NFL head coach Dan Reeves, one of only five coaches to win 200 or more NFL games, and award-winning ESPN reporter Chris Mortensen.

But the rest of the speakers are known throughout the sports world as among the best in their field of expertise. They include:

Nine of the speakers have present or past connections with the National Football League. In addition to Reeves, Mortensen, Hill, Billy Johnson and Miller, they are strength coaches Barry Rubin, formerly of ULM and now with the Philadelphia Eagles, and Johnny Parker of the San Francisco 49ers; Monroe native Bill Johnson, defensive line coach of the New Orleans Saints; and Steve Antonopulos, head athletic trainer for the Denver Broncos.

Coach Reeves will speak on “The Importance of Strength Training in Sports.” The other topics in the clinic will be:

Contact persons for the Strength Summit are Miller, (318-325-8188), Dr. Lisa Colvin, L Club president and dean of the ULM Graduate School (318-342-1036) and Robert Williamson, L Club executive director (318-342-1316).

The Strength Summit will be held at various sites on the ULM campus. Cost for “Early Bird” registration (Oct. 30 - Nov. 30) is $150 for professionals, $100 for high school coaches and $50 for high school or college students. The cost for “Regular” registration (Dec. 1 - Jan. 15) is $180, $140 and $75, and cost for “On Site” registration (after Jan. 16) is $210, $180 and $100.

DVD’s of the speakers and their approximately two-hour presentations will be available. The cost of a DVD for one session will be $20 for persons attending the Summit and a box set of all 16 sessions will be $300. For persons not attending the Summit, the costs will be $35 for one session and $400 for the box set.

Continuing education credit for attending the Summit can be obtained. Interested persons should contact the ULM Graduate School at www.ulm.edu/gradschool or by calling 318-342-1036.




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BIG season forecast For ULM men

It’s going to be a big season for ULM’s men’s basketball team.

Whether the team wins more games than it loses is not written in stone at this point but it will be a big season because the Warhawks are definitely bigger. Coach Orlando Early signed seven new players in the off-season including only the third seven-footer in school history, 7-0 Rory Burt.

Burt is the biggest ULM player to step on the court since 7-2 Wojciech Myrda set a NCAA record for blocks back in 2002. Unlike Myrda, who was a starter from day one, Burt will likely come off the bench this year but he and New Mexico Junior College teammate Fabio Ribero (6-10) give the Warhawks an instant infusion of needed size as they enter their fourth year of Sun Belt Conference competition.

Coach Orlando Early, beginning his fifth season as ULM coach, thinks his team will be better this year for four reasons. “We will be stronger because we have more depth, we have a lot of good shooters, we have more experience and we have much better size, which you have to have in a league as tough as the Sun Belt." Coach Early already has a pretty good big man in 6-8, 275-pound junior Rudy Turner but any time he came out for rest or because of foul trouble, he left a large hole. Burt and Ribero give Coach Early big bodies to fill that big hole.

Not only Turner but three other members of the top six from last year’s 10-20 squad that was 6-12 in the Sun Belt return. Four of the returnees were double-digit scorers — 6-6 Malcolm Thomas averaged 12.3 points and 4.8 rebounds, sixth man Dynile Forbes (6-2) averaged 11.0, 6-7 Lawrence Gilbert scored at a 10.9 clip and Turner produced 10.2 points and 6.8 rebounds a game.

Back also is former all-conference player Tony Hooper (5-11) after an injury redshirt year as well as 5-8 point starter Kenny Averette (6.1 points and a team-leading 96 assists), 6-2 defensive stalwart Jarvis Hill (7.9 points) and 6-1 Brandon Williams (1.6 pts.).

Burt is the most visible of the newcomers. He redshirted his first year at New Mexico JC and has raw talent to go with his size. He averaged 9.0 points, 8.3 rebounds and 1.7 blocks in six games before being forced to take a medical redshirt.

Ribero played two seasons at NMJC, averaging 6.8 points and 8.7 rebounds as a sophomore in helping his team go 21-9. He and Burt came to ULM with their coach, Johnny Voight, when he joined Early’s staff.

Another major addition to the ULM roster is 5-9 point guard Warren Fusalier of Lafayette, a former MVP in the Louisiana prep finals and a juco standout at San Bernardino Valley Community College. Fusalier averaged 11 points and 4.3 assists as a sophomore at San Bernardino and helped his team compile a 27-9 record. He played prep basketball at Northside High in Lafayette where he averaged 14 points and seven assists as a senior.

Other Warhawk additions are forward Tommie Sykes (6-4) of Odessa, Texas, Community College and guard Colby Carr (6-3), named New Orleans area Player of the Year as a senior at O.P. Walker High. Sykes was an all-region and all-Western JC Conference as a sophomore at Odessa.

Guard Hugh Mingo (6-3) of West Monroe and South Plains Community College is another addition to the ULM roster but he is currently sidelined with an injury.




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EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK: Summit and Water Ski Crown big for L Club, ULM

Bob Anderson

By Bob Anderson

The ULM Hall of Fame induction ceremonies are coming up in April, 2010. This is an event that is always the high point of the year for the L Club. The Hall of Fame is our baby. We have help from the university as a whole but we control the process, we select the inductees, we stage the show.

In February, however, there will be another L Club happening that will rival the Hall of Fame in its significance. The Summit of Strength & Conditioning and Sports Medicine Leaders will be the first major project besides the Hall of Fame to be undertaken by the L Club.

Let’s emphasize that word “major” because this is definitely a major league event. I’m not an expert on strength, conditioning and sports medicine but even an amateur like me has heard of most of these speakers and anybody who has read their qualification will be awed by their expertise. It is probably the best collection of experts on this field ever assembled outside a few national conventions and the like. A guy who knows a lot more about sports conditioning and medicine than I do, Al Miller, thinks so.

Al is one of the top names who will speak at the Summit. He is also the man most responsible for this event. A lot of other people are working hard to make this a success like L CLub Executive Director Robert Williamson, L Club president and Graduate School dean Dr. Lisa Colvin, plus her assistant Jeff Hendrix, but Al is the guy who came up with the idea of the Summit and he is one of the few people who have the prestige and contacts to line up such an all-star list of speakers.

Al Miller is, to put it simply, one of the greats of the strength and conditioning field. He was also a darn good receiver at ULM who went on to be the strength coach at Northwestern State, ULM, Alabama (where his boss was the great Bear Bryant), and then on to the NFL where he worked for 21 years as strength coach with the Denver Broncos, New York Giants and Atlanta Falcons. He knows just about all there is to know about strength training and athletics and he knows just about everybody who is somebody in the business. We’re very fortunate that he has come back to Monroe and is helping the L Club and ULM.

If you are a coach or associated with athletics in any way, you need to come to the Summit Feb. 19 - 20, 2010. If you are nothing but a weekend athlete or just a sports fan, you will enjoy it and learn from it. And you will be proud that your alma mater and the L Club is presenting such an event.




Something else in which all L Club members and Warhawks should take great pride is the latest national championship won by the ULM Water Ski Team.

Collegiate water skiing is not a major sport and does not receive the attention and devotion that football or basketball does. It also does not receive the media coverage these sports get.

That’s too bad because winning 22 national titles is a heck of an achievement, even if the sport is twiddle-winks. And water skiing is not twiddle-winks. It takes great training, dedication, a lot of hard work and, most of all, talent. It was almost impossible for me to ever stand up on roller skates, much less water skis. I imagine many of you were like that, too.

So I’m very proud of the Warhawk water skiers. They’ve won four straight national titles and their total of 22 is much more than all the other colleges in the country combined. Our team competes against the best — the runnerup in the latest national meet was Alabama. All of us in this part of the country know how tough it is to compete against Alabama.

Some people my turn up their nose at this achievement because water skiing is not a NCAA sport. But I bet there are a lot more colleges with water ski teams than with snow ski teams, for example, and snow skiing is a NCAA sport.

To Coach Treina Landrum and her “United Nations” team of skiers, we say thanks and congratulations for a tremendous job. These are dedicated athletes, especially those from countries where it’s hard to find an ice-free place to ski (some have to sometimes go to other countries to practice their sport). Here’s the list of team members and their homes below:




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Women’s basketball hurting but healing

In early November, the ULM women’s basketball roster looked like an emergency room chart:

Ashley Wallis — torn meniscas;
Kassie Courtney — torn Achilles tendon;
Sumar Leslie — torn hamstring;
Marion Zollicoffer — flu;
Shannon Davis — recovering from ACL surgery.

Fortunately, Mona Martin still has a lot of good basketball players but she looks forward to the day she can just be the head coach instead of assistant doctor. When that happens and the Warhawks are healthy, she thinks “we’ll be pretty good.”

The reason for her measured optimism is part medical and part maturity. When her players heal, this will be a more mature basketball team than the 2008-09 edition that was so, so good at times and so, so ordinary at others.

In November the Warhawks swept to victory in Marshall’s tournament in Huntington, WV, then came back home to soundly whip one of Conference USA’s strongest teams, Southern Mississippi, 75-57. In mid-January they demolished the best Troy team since the Trojans joined the SBC in 2005 in a TV game, 70-42. Then in the opening round of the Sun Belt Tournament, ULM upset one of the conference’s resident powers, Western Kentucky, on its home court, 71-62.

Overall, however, the road was not friendly to the Warhawks, who won only four times against 11 losses on foreign courts. The main reason was youth—three of the nine Warhawks who started at least one game were freshmen and two others were sophomores.

This year the experience factor favors ULM—the squad includes three seniors and four juniors. Last year ULM had two freshmen manning the position where experience perhaps matters the most, the point. This season the two—Leslie and Elizabeth Torres—are back and well experienced after combining for 19 starts in 2008-09. Leslie was second on the team with 79 assists, averaged 6.5 points and had the team’s best three-point accuracy with .400 percent. Torres had 48 assists and averaged 4.5 points.

“The main improvement we need is in our consistency,” says Coach Martin. “We were so up and down last year. We have lots of good players but we’ve got to play well in every game, especially on defense.”

The only graduation loss was leading scorer Lottie Moore, who led the team in scoring (12.0), steals, blocks and assists. She leaves big shoes to fill but the Warhawks landed a star replacement in junior college product Priscilla Mbiandja (5-8) who led ULM in scoring (18) and rebounds (12) in the exhibition game victory over Arkansas-Monticello.

One member of the injury list, Kassie Courtney, will probably miss the entire season while Wallis could be back for part of the season and the others are expected to back on the floor for all but a few games.

The top returning scorer is senior Jesse Carrier (5-10), who was second in scoring (10.1), second in three-point (.372%) shooting and first in free throw (.878%) accuracy. Leslie (5-6) and Torres (5-6) are expected to divide the point duties, Carrier will be the shooting guard, Mbiandja will be the small forward and 6-0 Sannisha Williams (7.4 pts., 6.2 rebs.) and 6-1 senior Shannon Davis (3.7 pts., 5.0 rebs.) will start at the post positions.

ULM should have good depth and more size than usual at the post positions with 6-2 junior Jordan Rawson (1.8, 1.7) and sophomores Larrie Williams (6-2, 2,8m 1,7) and Marion Zollicoffer (6-1, 1.5, 1.2) in reserve along with senior Wallis (5-10, 6.7, 3.2) when she is healthy again.

Redshirt freshman Nicole Tucker (5-10) is expected to contribute at the wing position and other reserves are sophomores Kathryn Lonsberry (5-10, 0.5, 0.5) and Portia Tucker (5-10, 1.4, 0.7) and freshman Ashley Wakefield (5-8).

ULM did not get much respect from the Sun Belt Conference coaches who picked the Warhawks sixth in the seven-team West Division in their pre-season poll.

The team will open its regular home schedule on Nov. 24 against Centenary. Sun Belt Conference play begins on the road at North Texas Dec. 15. The first home conference game will be against Troy on Dec. 30.



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ULM Athletic Foundation offers new membership programs

The ULM Athletic FoundationJoin the ULM Athletic Foundation and help ULM's student-athletes while enjoying the many benefits of membership. It's easy to join or update your membership.

Visit www.gowarhawks.net to join or update your memberships or contact Dan O’Dowd, Executive Director of the ULM Athletic Foundation at 318-342-5428 or odowd@ulm.edu.




ULM Athletic Foundation offers new membership programs

The ULM Athletic Foundation has added several new exciting membership programs: the "Young Grads" program and the "Jr. Warhawk" program.


The ULM Athletic Foundation 'Young Grad' ProgramThe "Young Grad" program is for any ULM alum who has graduated in the last five (5) years and is an excellant way for young alumni to support ULM athletics at an entry level. Membership is $50.00 per year and includes:

• Warhawk Frequent Flyer Pass (all sport plan – general admission seating)
• Invitation to Annual Kick-Off Party
• Preferred football parking permit
• Athletic Foundation Car Decal


The ULM Athletic Foundation Jr. Warhawk PorgramThe "Jr. Warhawk" program is a special membership for Warhawk fans age 12 and younger! Membership is $20.00 and all Jr. Warhawk Club members receive:

• Season ticket to all home Warhawk athletic events
• Jr. Warhawk Club T-shirt and membership card
• Invitation to exclusive Jr. Warhawk Club events
• Name on Jr. Warhawk Club Web site
• Autographed picture of Ace
• E-Birthday card (sent to parent ’s email)

The ULM Athletic Foundation is the pillar of support for ULM Athletics. It is composed of individuals and businesses with a common mission, which is as follows:

The mission of the ULM Athletic foundation is to raise awareness and financial support for the Warhawk athletic programs, positively promote all athletic events, grow the Warhawk fan and donor base, and enhance the lives of over 300 student-athletes.

For more information about any of membership programs available from the ULM Athletic Foundation, contact Dan O’Dowd, Executive Director of the ULM Athletic Foundation at 318-342-5428 or odowd@ulm.edu.




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Show Your Warhawk Pride!

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Apply today for the ULM Platinum Plus® MasterCard® with WorldPoints®Rewards from Bank of America.
   Apply today for the ULM American Express® Rewards Card from Bank of America.




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L Club Wrap Up From the L Club Executive Director

Dear L-Clubbers:

During this Thanksgiving season, I would like to ask that you take just a few moments to sit back and think about what you can be thankful for at this time of year.

I am thankful for each of you passing through the doors of our University on your way to a chance at a better life. An opportunity like this is priceless based on the knowledge we gained while in the classrooms. We should also be thankful for the friends that we made during our college careers.

I am thankful for your participation on one of our athletic teams. Each of you, no matter what your role, played a vital part in your team’s season. You each worked hard at your role to make the entire team better.

I am thankful for you coming through the doors of the athletic training rooms. This afforded the opportunity to see each of us grow during times of adversity and challenge. Each day we were faced with challenges that we were able to overcome by perseverance, dedication and hard work.

I am thankful for the opportunity this University has afforded me. I am thankful for the mentoring from Charlie Martin and Ricky Mestayer in the training room and many of the coaches I worked with during my student years. We need to look back and see what we have learned from our coaches and staff who led and guided us during our college years.

I am thankful for the opportunity and the challenge presented to me by the L-Club Board of Directors last spring as they elected me to be the Executive Director for the L-Club. This has been a challenge but it has been worth it.

Please take a few moments after you finish reading this to sit back and think about all that you can be thankful for at this time of year.

On behalf of the entire L-Club Board of Directors, please have a safe Thanksgiving season and a Merry Christmas as well. I look forward to seeing you on campus during the upcoming year.

May God Bless you and your family.

Go Warhawks!

Robert Williamson

Robert Williamson
L Club Executive Director
(318) 342-5428 /822-927-4295
rwilliamson@ulm.edu



Don’t forget to check out the “Lost Members” link located at the top of this newsletter – help us locate these lost teammates. Send any information to me at rwilliamson@ulm.edu.