It was a shot of a lifetime and junior guard Arike Ogunbowale nailed it for Notre Dame.

She threw a 3-pointer from the corner with 0.1 seconds left on the clock, beating Mississippi State 61-58, and giving Notre Dame its second women’s basketball title Sunday night in Columbus, Ohio.

Notre Dame scored its first title 17 years ago — also on Easter Sunday.

“We just kept fighting, and thank you, Jesus, on Easter Sunday,” Notre Dame Coach Muffet McGraw told The New York Times.

Ogunbowale was named the most outstanding player in the come-from-behind victory. She scored 16 of her 18 points in the second half.

Mississippi State dominated much of the game. In the second quarter, the Irish only had three points — setting an NCAA Tournament record for the fewest points in a period.

In the third quarter, Notre Dame was down 15 points, and with less than 2 minutes in the game, they were down by five.

Tied as the clock ran down, The Associated Press reports:

“Mississippi State star Teaira McCowan missed a layup with 27.8 seconds left, and both teams turned the ball over in a wild sequence. McCowan fouled out of the game stopping an Irish fast break after consecutive turnovers and that set up the final 3 seconds.

After Ogunbowale’s clutch shot, the officials huddled and put one-tenth of a second on the clock. A couple of Mississippi State players had already headed for the locker room, while Notre Dame players celebrated.

The court was cleared, and Mississippi State tossed a futile inbounds pass into the lane as the buzzer sounded.”

It was the second straight game that Ogunbowale hit a shot in the final second to carry the Irish. On Friday, her jumper with one second remaining in overtime knocked off previously unbeaten UConn in the semifinals.

Notre Dame had lost the title game four times over the last seven years. It nearly ended the same way for the Irish, had they not had the biggest game in the final since the women’s tournament began in 1982.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Wrestling is a big deal in Iowa. If you walk into any bar in the Hawkeye State during its high school wrestling tournament, chances are the event is blaring on every TV in sight.

Like many states, Iowa doesn’t offer separate sex divisions in high school wrestling, meaning that boys and girls must wrestle each other. Despite the local popularity of the sport, there’s not much of an infrastructure for its female athletes — only two girls have ever qualified to participate in Iowa’s state high school tournament since it started almost a century ago. Many athletes, coaches and fans of female wrestling want the status quo to change, including Charlotte Bailey.

The 47-year-old coachhas been coordinating the state’s only standalone wrestling tournament for girls since 2012. Bailey wants to see more girls involved in the sport, and says that parents can often be reluctant to have their daughters wrestling boys. She also thinks that girls have a better chance at long-term wrestling success — like making it to the Women’s National Championships — if they’re able to compete against each other at a young age instead of having to compete against boys. “Some [girls] will never know how good they would have been had they been wrestling their female peers,” Bailey said.

These barriers didn’t stop 17-year-old Felicity Taylor, a senior at South Winneshiek High School, from getting involved in the sport. After she was cut from the cheerleading team freshman year, Taylor tried out for wrestling instead. Now, she’s the first girl in Iowa high school wrestling history to win more than 100 career victories.

Achieving that record meant Taylor had to compete against more than a few boys who have a problem wrestling girls. “Some of them don’t like it,” said Taylor. “They’ll bump away from me, which frustrates me. You just gotta overcome that, and just deal with it, and know that they’re bumping away for you for a reason … they’re scared.”

Taylor wants to continue her wrestling career at the collegiate level after she graduates from high school, but there are just a handful of collegiate women’s wrestling programs in the U.S. — and at that level, women aren’t allowed to wrestle men, despite the fact that many female high school wrestlers never had leagues of their own.

Waldorf University in Forest City is the only college in Iowa with a dedicated women’s wrestling team. It’s one of 38 colleges that are part of the Women’s Collegiate Wrestling Association, a league separate from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which doesn’t recognize women’s wrestling. Tyreece Gilder, 32, is the team’s head coach. Gilder says if the NCAA recognized women’s wrestling, there would be an immediate boost in opportunities for women wrestlers seeking to compete at the collegiate level.

Getting that recognition is a goal of the Colorado-based group called Wrestle Like A Girl. Sally Roberts, a two-time World bronze medal winner and three-time U.S. National Champion wrestler, founded the organization to provide resources for women seeking to wrestle in college. Roberts, a 37-year-oldformer Marine, says the sport changed the course of her life from a young age. “It’s a sport that teaches girls life skills and how to own their space, own their bodies, own their voices,” she said.

That’s part of the formal pitch her group, and organizations like USA Wrestling and the U.S. Olympic Committee, have been making to the NCAA to open its doors to female wrestling. There are a host of NCAA membership benefits that male college wrestlers can receive that their female peers don’t have access to, including health insurance, scholarships, grants and internship opportunities. The WCWA provides its members health information and recognizes athletes who achieve certain GPAs, but doesn’t have the same financial assistance as the NCAA.

Seventeen NCAA colleges are ready to start women’s wrestling teams if the NCAA will sanction them — including the University of Iowa, which has won 23 men’s NCAA championships and produced World and Olympic medalists.

Girls seeking success in wrestling say they want the same benefits and opportunities as their male peers already have — and by providing them to college athletes, many more girls in high school, like Felicity Taylor, might be inspired to get involved in the sport.

“Why would you cut off half the population to such a great sport?” said Coach Gilder. “The sport offers so many benefits that it doesn’t make sense to keep that half of the population out of it.”

NPR’s Emily Sullivan produced this story for digital.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Scott Foster is a 36-year-old accountant who lives in Oak Park, Ill. More than a decade ago, he was goalie on Western Michigan’s hockey team. These days he plays in a rec league at a rink called Johnny’s Icehouse.

That rink is just a few blocks east of the arena where the Chicago Blackhawks play — and where, on Thursday night, Foster became a legend.

Just before faceoff against the Winnipeg Jets, the Blackhawks tweeted that they had signed Foster to an amateur tryout contract to be the team’s emergency backup goaltender: EBUG, for short. The team pointed to his .875 save percentage at Western Michigan University and his earlier career for the Petrolia Jets of the Western Ontario Hockey League.

The one-day contracts are generally unpaid, and Foster, a father of two young children, has come to the United Center before to be on call as backup goalie.

“Usually,” he said, “I just head upstairs, watch the game from the press box, have a bite to eat, and head home.”

The Hawks needed to have Foster around, just in case, because they were a little shorthanded on goalies since their standout netminder, Corey Crawford, is injured and Anton Forsberg got hurt just before the game.

Then fill-in goalie Collin Delia, making his own NHL debut, had to leave the game in the third period due to cramping.

That left just one man to preserve the Hawks’ lead.

“I don’t think I heard anything other than, ‘Put your helmet on,’ ” Foster said later.

With Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville grinning, Foster took the ice.

And he stopped one shot after another — seven times blocking the Jets’ attempts to score.

In a moment most rec-league players can recognize from our wildest dreams, the fans in the United Center began chanting his name.

With Foster’s able handling in the net, the Hawks sealed the win, 6-2.

“The initial shock happened when I had to dress,” Foster told delighted reporters after the game. “You just kind of black out after that.”

Foster even won the team belt, which goes to the player of the game.

“I think I’m just about hitting my prime,” he joked.

For the moment, he has incredible (if minimal) stats: his save percentage is 1.000. That’s even higher than the Hawks’ Corey Crawford, who has twice won the NHL’s goalkeeping trophy.

So where does the beer-league-turned-big-league hero go from here?

Back to work.

“You think there’d be a lot of pressure,” Foster said. “But, really, tomorrow I’m going to wake up, I’m going to button up my shirt, and I’m going to go back to my day job. So what pressure is there for me?

“You just keep grinding away in men’s league, and eventually you’ll get your shot,” he deadpanned.

His men’s league, by the way, was very proud.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

There’s no crying in baseball. But for Kay Johnston, there’s crying when you can’t play.

In the spring of 1950, in upstate New York, 13-year-old Kay Johnston wanted nothing more than to play Little League baseball. But in those days, that was out of the question. Girls weren’t encouraged to swing bats and throw balls.

Kay Johnston Massar, 81, sat down with her husband Cy Massar, 84, at StoryCorps to tell him about the time she, quite literally, changed the rules of the game.

“One day, my mother was braiding my hair,” Kay says. “We were sitting at the kitchen table, and my brother walked out the door with his baseball bat. He was going to practice.”

“I started crying,” she tells Cy. “And I said to my mother, ‘I’m just as good as him. I wish I could play.’ “

Her mother’s response, she says, was “Why don’t you just go and try out?“

“And I said, ‘Okay, well cut off my braids.’ And she did.”

Kay ran to her brother’s room, got a pair of his slacks, put on a baseball cap and signed up as Tubby Johnston.

The alias was from a character in one of her favorite childhood comics, Little Lulu.

Tubby made the team. “Were you surprised that they called you?” Cy asks.

“No, I wasn’t surprised at all,” she says. “I knew I was good, and I had fooled them so far.”

Still, Kay was scared that her cover would be blown, and she’d get pulled off the team. So after several practices, she went to the coach — and came clean.

“His reaction was, ‘You’re such a good player and we’re going to use you at first base.’ I played the entire season. It was an absolutely thrilling time.”

Kay says the kids on her own team treated her well, even after they found out their fellow King’s Dairy player was a girl.

“It was the other players that would push me down or call me names, and the parents initially booed when I went out to play,” recalls Kay. “They could see that I was a better player than some of their sons.”

After the season ended, Kay’s father went to a meeting with some Little League officials. He came home that day with disappointing news.

“He said, ‘Well, no girls, under any circumstances, will be playing Little League baseball.’ “

That year, Little League officials penned a new rule. “And it’s known as ‘The Tubby Rule,’ because I was the reason why they put that rule in.”

Kay remembers telling her father, “‘You know Dad, someday I’m going to play first base on the New York Yankees.’ And he just gave me a big hug and he said, ‘I know you will, Kit Kat.’ “

“What gave you the courage to do what you did?” Cy asks.

“You know, I have to tell you, when I went out pretending to be a boy, I had no idea I was setting some sort of a record,” she says. “That was the furthest thing from my mind. I just wanted to play the game. I played Little League just that one year, but I will probably love baseball until the day I die.”

The Tubby Rule, which officially banned girls from Little League, was abolished in 1974 — almost 25 years after Kay played as a boy.

On September 27, 2006, at the age of 70, Massar very nearly made good on the prediction she shared with her father more than half a century earlier. She walked out onto the field at Yankee Stadium — the House That Ruth Built — and threw out the ceremonial first pitch. The ball bounced. But she had a blast.

She’s also thrown a first pitch for the Oakland A’s.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., honors Massar in a permanent exhibit, “Diamond Dreams,” celebrating the history of women in the sport.

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Mia Warren and Jud Esty-Kendall.

StoryCorps is a national nonprofit that gives people the chance to interview friends and loved ones about their lives. These conversations are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, allowing participants to leave a legacy for future generations. Learn more, including how to interview someone in your life, at StoryCorps.org.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Winter is over, and it’s finally baseball season.

The fields are green and the lines are freshly drawn. Yep, it’s time to head over to your local ballfield.

All 30 teams were scheduled to start their regular season today – it would have been the first time they all started together in 50 years, according to ESPN. Two of the games were rained out – Nationals-Reds and Pirates-Tigers – but it’s safe to say that the vast majority of fans are getting the first glimpse of their teams’ new seasons today.

We didn’t have to wait long for the league’s first home run.

That came on the first pitch of the very first game of the regular season, with the Chicago Cubs facing the Miami Marlins. Cubs center fielder Ian Happ rocketed a drive into the right field stands off of Marlins pitcher José Ureña.

The defending World Series champion Houston Astros are facing the Texas Rangers this afternoon, and they seem pretty excited about it.

The game is going to look slightly different than last year, though, as Major League Baseball tries to speed up the pace of play with a few rule changes for this coming season.

The average nine-inning game took 3 hours and 8 minutes last season, as NPR’s Doreen McCallister has reported, compared to 2 hours 46 minutes in 2005.

MLB Commissioner Manfred has been pushing significant changes, arguing that they could take out “dead time” from the game while doing little to change its competitive character.

In this new season, the league will impose more limits on visits to the mound – teams will get six per team per nine innings, with some exceptions and additional visits allowed for extra innings.

There’s also going to be stricter limits on the time allowed for between-inning breaks and pitcher changes. The club video review rooms are all going to be equipped with “direct slow-motion camera angles” to make calls quicker to review.

It’s worth noting that there will not be a pitch clock – a change that Manfred has been pushing for that would limit the time between pitches. The player’s association strongly opposed the move. Manfred has conceded defeat on that idea for this season, as CBS Sports reported, but has said “I remain a believer of the pitch clock.”

He did seem to dismiss a particularly controversial idea, however. Minor League Baseball recently announced that extra innings would start with a runner already on second base, as NPR’s Colin Dwyer reported.

Speaking to ESPN, Manfred said: “I don’t see this as a rule that we’re gonna bring to Major League Baseball.” He later described it as an experiment “that probably is not Major League worthy,” causing purists to breathe a sigh of relief.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)