Sports briefs
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Patriots and Kyle Dugger agree to a four-year deal worth up to $66 million
The Patriots are re-signing safety Kyle Dugger to a four-year contract, a person with knowledge of the situation told The Associated Press on Sunday.
The new deal is worth a base salary of $58 million, which includes $32.5 million in guarantees, and has a maximum value of $66 million, according to the person who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because terms have not been announced. The deal was first reported by NFL Network.
Dugger started all 17 games last season and led the Patriots with 71 solo tackles and two interceptions. The 28-year-old has totaled nine interceptions and 343 combined tackles over the past four seasons since being drafted in the second round out of Lenoir-Rhyne in 2020.
The Patriots originally used the one-year transition tag on Dugger. They had until July 17 to reach a long-term deal with him, or he would have made the average of the top 10 salaries at his position next season, which would have been around $14 million.
Instead, the Patriots will not only keep one of their biggest offseason priorities on the roster, but they have secured him for multiple seasons as new coach Jerod Mayo leads New England’s rebuild.
Tennessee hires
Marshall’s Kim Caldwell as the Lady Vols’ coach
Tennessee athletic director Danny White has moved quickly and gone outside the historic Lady Vols’ program in hiring Marshall coach Kim Caldwell as only its fourth head coach in the NCAA era.
White announced the hiring Sunday, within a couple of hours of the women’s national championship game. It’s a game the Lady Vols have not played in since 2008 when they won their eighth and last national title under Pat Summitt.
Caldwell will be introduced at a news conference Tuesday, wrapping up a search that started April 1 when White fired Kellie Harper after five seasons at her alma mater and a 108-52 record. She replaced Holly Warlick, promoted to replace Summitt and fired after going 172-67 in seven seasons.
“From the beginning, our goal has been to find a dynamic head coach who can restore our women’s basketball program to national prominence,” White said in a statement. “Kim Caldwell is the ideal person to lead us.”
Tennessee will pay Caldwell $750,000 in base pay a year through March 2029 under the memorandum of understanding signed Sunday morning. The agreement includes a clause for a pay raise before May 1 of any season she wins a national championship.
Caldwell won the 2024 Maggie Dixon NCAA Division I Rookie Coach of the Year award for her work at Marshall, going 26-7 to earn the program’s second NCAA Tournament berth ever and first since 1997. She is 217-31 in eight seasons as a head coach.
She led her alma mater Glenville State to the 2022 Division II national title and has earned seven NCAA Tournament berths. Caldwell won the Pat Summitt Trophy for the 2021-22 season as the WBCA’s NCAA Division II coach of the year.
Caldwell said in a statement she was humbled to accept this job at a historic program.
“I can’t help but reflect on accepting the Pat Summitt Trophy three seasons ago and be moved by the great responsibility and opportunity of now leading and building upon the incredible Lady Vol tradition she built,” Caldwell said.
In her one season at Marshall, Caldwell went 17-1 in winning the Sun Belt Conference regular season and tournament titles.
Marshall ranked in the top five nationally in seven statistical categories. They led the nation in 3-pointers attempted and third in 3s made per game with more than 10 per game. The Herd ranked fourth nationally in averaging 85.3 points a game.
The Herd ranked second in forcing 24.2 turnovers per game while setting a program record for most wins in a season. Marshall hadn’t won at least 20 games since 1990-91.
White said Caldwell has a winning formula with a “high-octane offense and pressure defense” that produces results.
“In this new era of college sports, it was vital that we found an innovative head coach with a strong track record of winning titles,” White said. “We are eager to return the Lady Vols to a championship level, and we’re confident that Kim Caldwell is the coach who can lead us back to the top.”
The native of Parkersburg, West Virginia, helped lead Glenville State to the 2011 Division II tournament as a player. She started coaching as an assistant at Ohio Valley University later that year, spent a season back at Glenville State followed by three seasons as an assistant at Sacramento State.
Hired in 2016 as head coach, Caldwell led her alma mater to six Mountain East regular season titles and four conference tournament titles. The four-time Mountain East coach of the year was 191-24, including 132-12 in league play. She went 35-1 and winning the 2022 national title and 33-3 and falling in the national semifinals in 2023.
This hiring caps White’s first high-profile coaching search at Tennessee since bringing football coach Josh Heupel from Central Florida only days after White was hired as AD in 2021.
While AD at Buffalo, White hired Bobby Hurley, now at Arizona State, and Nate Oats, whose Alabama Crimson Tide lost in the national semifinals Saturday, as men’s basketball coaches. White also hired Felisha Legette-Jack to coach Buffalo’s women’s program.
She went 199-115 with four NCAA Tournament berths before being hired to coach her alma mater Syracuse in 2022.
10,000 miles and 352 days later, a UK man runs the length of Africa
RAS ANGELA, Tunisia | Sore and sandblasted but triumphant, runner Russ Cook reached the northernmost point of Africa on Sunday, almost a year after he set off from its southern tip on a quest to run the length of the continent.
Dozens of supporters gathered on a rocky outcrop beside the Mediterranean in northern Tunisia, cheering on the British charity fundraiser, who has run more than 10,000 miles across 16 countries in 352 days.
“I’m a little bit tired,” Cook said — likely an understatement.
In the course of his journey the 27-year-old endurance athlete from Worthing in southern England crossed jungle and desert, swerved conflict zones and was delayed by theft, injury and visa problems.
Cook — known on social media by his nickname, Hardest Geezer — set off on April 22, 2023 from Cape Agulhas in South Africa, the continent’s southernmost point. He hoped to complete the journey in 240 days, running the equivalent of more than a marathon every day.
He and his team had money, passports and equipment stolen in a gunpoint robbery in Angola. He was temporarily halted by back pain in Nigeria. And he was almost stopped in his tracks by the lack of a visa to enter Algeria, before diplomatic intervention from the Algerian embassy in Britain managed to secure the required documents.
Cook, who has spoken about how running helped him deal with his own mental health struggles, previously ran about 3,000 kilometers (2,000 miles) from Istanbul to Worthing in 68 days.
His African run has raised more than 690,000 pounds ($870,000) for the Running Charity, which works with homeless young people, and Sandblast, a charity that helps displaced people from Western Sahara.
“It’s quite hard to put into words, 352 days on the road, long time without seeing family, my girlfriend,” Cook told Sky News as he started running Sunday, accompanied by supporters who’d come from far and wide to run the final stretch with him. “My body is in a lot of pain. But one more day, I’m not about to complain.”
Cook said he planned to celebrate with a party, where British band Soft Play was due to perform.
“We’re going to have strawberry daiquiris on the beach tonight,” he said. “It’s going to be unreal.”
Collins follows Miami
win with victory at Charleston Open
CHARLESTON, S.C. | Danielle Collins powered to her second straight WTA title, following her Miami Open victory with the Charleston Open championship on Sunday.
Collins defeated 2017 Charleston champion Daria Kasatkina 6-2, 6-1 for her 13th straight match victory. She became the first player since Serena Williams in 2013 to win Miami and Charleston in consecutive weeks.
“Thank you for allowing me to live out my dream,” Collins told the crowd at the trophy ceremony.
Collins, a 30-year-old who has said this season will be her last on the WTA Tour because she’s suffering from endometriosis, has made it a memorable one. She led 3-0 in the opening set, where she broke Kasatkina’s serve twice as the crowd cheered the American’s every move.
Collins didn’t let up in the second set, taking a 5-0 lead before the Russian held serve.
Collins closed the match with a volley at the net, pumping her fist as her face broke into a smile.
Collins, who is ranked 22nd, has won 26 of her past 27 sets. The only set she dropped on the green clay came Wednesday against 2023 Charleston winner Ons Jabeur.
Kasatkina, who is ranked 11th, played with a heavy wrap on her right thigh. She struggled with her serve throughout, regularly putting herself behind.
The way Collins has played, it was an impossible hole from which to dig out.
Nationals pitcher Stephen Strasburg announces his retirement
WASHINGTON | Washington Nationals pitcher Stephen Strasburg announced his retirement Sunday, ending the 2019 World Series MVP’s injury-filled career.
Since leading Washington to its only World Series title five years ago, the 35-year-old Strasburg pitched just 31 1/3 innings over eight starts.
“I realized after repeated attempts to return to pitching, injuries no longer allow me to perform at a major league level,” Strasburg said in a statement. His retirement had been listed on Major League Baseball’s transaction page Saturday.
General manager Mike Rizzo, who selected Strasburg with the No. 1 overall pick of the 2009 amateur draft, said the right-hander was on “the Mount Rushmore of the Nationals.”
“When he was on the mound, he was as good as any pitcher in baseball — ever,” Rizzo said Sunday before the Nationals played the Phillies. “Unfortunately for him and for us, it wasn’t as we wanted it to be.”
Strasburg was 113-62 with a 3.24 ERA over 13 seasons and made three All-Star appearances. He led the National League with 18 victories in 2019 and then delivered a dominant postseason, going 5-0 with a 1.98 ERA over six appearances. That included wins in Games 2 and 6 of the World Series in Houston.
He signed a $245 million, seven-year contract in December 2019 but threw only 528 pitches over 31 1/3 innings in the majors after that, going 1-4 with a 6.89 ERA. He had surgery for thoracic outlet syndrome, a nerve and blood disorder that led to the removal of a rib and two neck muscles.
Strasburg has not pitched since June 9, 2022, when he lasted 4 2/3 innings in his lone start of the season before going back on the injured list. He did not report for spring training in 2023 or 2024.
“You just feel for somebody like that who was such a good player for a long time,” said Washington pitcher Patrick Corbin, who signed with the Nationals before the 2019 season in part to join a rotation that included Strasburg. “It’s just unfortunate with the injuries and some setbacks. He tried everything to come back and be part of this team and things just didn’t work out.”
Washington started planning for a retirement news conference last August but didn’t call for one as Strasburg and the Nationals discussed restructuring his contract. The deal called for him to receive $35 million annually, with $11,428,571 a year deferred at 1% interest. The deferred money was payable in equal installments of $26,666,667 on July 1 in 2027, 2028 and 2029, with an interest payment of $3,999,974 on Dec. 31, 2029.
Strasburg was viewed as a franchise cornerstone when Washington drafted him. He arrived in the majors almost exactly a year later, when he struck out 14 in a debut against Pittsburgh on June 8, 2010, in a performance that was quickly dubbed “Strasmas.”
Within three months, Strasburg underwent Tommy John surgery and was lost for most of the 2011 season. The Nationals shut him down late in the 2012 season, and criticism of the team was amplified when it lost to St. Louis in the NL Division Series.
Strasburg threw 150 regular-season innings five times, including a NL-high 209 in 2019. That was before he struck out 47 over 36 1/3 innings that October.
“He was a horse out there on the mound,” Washington manager Dave Martinez said. “Not every day he felt good, but every five days he’d take the ball and give you everything he had no matter what.”
Nationals owner Mark Lerner released a statement congratulating Strasburg on his career.
“It was a privilege to watch him grow as a player and a person throughout his illustrious career,” Lerner said. “He gave us so many memories that will live in our hearts forever.”
In his statement, Strasburg thanked coaches, teammates and medical staff, and he acknowledged the “unwavering support” of fans throughout his career.
“Although I will always wish there were more games to be pitched, I find comfort knowing I left it all out there for the only team I’ve known,” Strasburg wrote. “My family and I are truly fortunate and blessed to have experienced this baseball journey in the Nation’s Capitol.”
—From AP reports
