College Basketball
UConn a unanimous No. 1 in preseason AP Top 25
Geno Auriemma and his Connecticut Huskies will begin the season the same way they ended the last one – atop The Associated Press women’s basketball poll.
UConn received all 35 votes Thursday, marking the 10th time the Huskies are the top team in the preseason. Six of those years UConn went on to win the national championship.
UConn has won its last 46 games, including going 40-0 en route to a ninth national championship last April.
South Carolina was second in the poll, its best ranking since Jan. 3, 1982. Notre Dame is third. Tennessee is fourth, and Texas A&M fifth. Stanford, Duke, Baylor, Texas and Maryland rounded out the top 10, respectively.
Cycling
Matthias Brandle sets the historic hour record
AIGLE, Switzerland – Austrian rider Matthias Brandle broke cycling’s historic hour record Thursday after covering a distance of 32.2181 miles at the UCI Velodrome.
The 24-year-old Brandle, the Austrian time trial champion, eclipsed Jens Voigt’s mark of 31.7521 miles.
The fastest time previously was held by cycling greats Jacques Anquetil, Fausto Coppi and Eddy Merckx.
NBA
NBA hires Malcolm Turner as D-League president
NEW YORK – The NBA hired former Wasserman Media Group executive Malcolm Turner to be the president of its Development League.
The NBA announced the hiring Thursday. Turner interned for the NBA while he was in school at Harvard and most recently worked as managing director of Wasserman’s golf division.
Seventeen teams currently have direct, one-to-one affiliations with a D-League team, and more teams are pushing to do the same.
Soccer
Owners have a grand plan for new MLS club in L.A.
LOS ANGELES – Peter Guber and Henry Nguyen envision their new Major League Soccer team taking the field somewhere in the Los Angeles area in early 2017 in a sparkling new stadium filled with roaring fans.
All they need now is a team name, colors, logo, offices, an entire business infrastructure, coaches, executives and players for those fans to support. And they need to find a place to build the entire stadium, preferably in the next two years.
Guber, Nguyen and their partners in the tentatively named Los Angeles Football Club are confident they have the passion – and the deep pockets – necessary to realize all of these dreams before they take the field.
The LAFC ownership group and MLS Commissioner Don Garber held their first public event Thursday at a Hollywood studio on Sunset Boulevard, revealing a diverse lineup of businesspeople and sports luminaries eager to capitalize on soccer’s ever-growing North American profile with a second MLS club in the nation’s second-largest city.
LAFC is an expansion franchise with no ties to Chivas USA, which was folded by MLS this week after a mostly miserable 10-year run in the shadow of the L.A. Galaxy, an original MLS franchise with four championships.
France and South Korea bid for ’19 World Cup
ZURICH – Football delegates from France and South Korea handed over their bid documents to FIFA for the 2019 women’s World Cup.
France and South Korea also are bidding for the 2018 under-20 women’s World Cup, with FIFA’s executive committee to decide on one winner for both competitions in March.
Next year’s women’s World Cup will be held in Canada.
Associated Press
