The Southeastern Conference is proud to recognize two of its communications staff members, Jill Skotarczak and Tammy Wilson, who have been honored by College Sports Communicators (CSC) with the prestigious 25-Year Award. The award is presented to CSC members who have completed 25 years in the athletics communications profession and is vetted and voted on by the organization’s Special Awards Committee.

DANBURY, Conn. — ECAC Hockey unveiled its 2025-26 women’s league schedule, setting the stage for another thrilling season of collegiate hockey battles. The quest for the ECAC Hockey regular season title will take place over the league’s traditional 132-game slate, beginning on October 24 and concluding with the ECAC Hockey Women’s Championships from February 20 […]

Originally Published: June 11, 2025 at 7:32 PM EDT

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. – The Union College men’s hockey team unveiled its 2025-26 schedule on Wednesday afternoon, highlighted by 18 regular-season games and one exhibition contest at the brand-new M&T Bank Center as well as the program’s second trip across the pond for the annual Friendship Four in Belfast.

“We are incredibly excited for the 2025-26 season and cannot wait to be back in front of our fans at our new home,” said head coach Josh Hauge. “The M&T Bank Center is a huge step forward for the future of Union Hockey, and we look forward to getting into the building and taking to the ice for the first time. We also have an incredible opportunity to head to Northern Ireland for the Friendship Four, which will be a great experience for our student-athletes and staff as well as our fans.”  

 

The 2025-26 schedule comprises 34 regular-season games and two exhibitions, with the team’s 22 ECAC Hockey matchups complemented by 12 competitive non-conference contests – including seven of the 12 to be played in Schenectady.

The new season gets underway on October 3 with an exhibition at Colgate University, followed the next day by the first men’s game at M&T Bank Center against Army West Point on Saturday, October 4 at 5 p.m.

 

Following a weekend series at Mercyhurst University on October 10-11, Union will not leave the Capital Region for over a month thanks to seven home games and the back-end of a weekend home-and-home with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The home stretch starts with two games against Niagara University on October 17-18 before a home date with RPI to end October and an away matchup in Troy to start November. ECAC play continues the following weekend with North Country rivals Clarkson University and St. Lawrence University on November 7-8 before closing out the time at home with non-conference games against UMass Lowell (November 14) and the University of New Hampshire (November 15).

 

The Garnet Chargers will be away from home for the next two weekends, albeit with greatly varying distances from Schenectady. The team heads to Cornell University and Colgate University on November 21-22 before crossing the pond to take part in the annual Friendship Four event in Belfast, Northern Ireland on November 28-29. Union will battle with Sacred Heart University, Miami (Ohio) University and Rochester Institute of Technology for control of the Belpot Trophy, as Union looks to become the first team to win the event twice since its inception in 2015.

 

Union closes out 2025 with four more games on home ice, getting back into conference play on December 5-6 against Princeton University and Quinnipiac University before a pair of non-conference games against the University of Alaska Fairbanks on December 12-13.

 

After a bevy of home games in the opening half of the season, the Garnet Chargers will play only seven games in Schenectady over the season’s final two months. The second half kicks off with an exhibition against the Royal Military College of Canada on January 3, followed by a road weekend at Quinnipiac and Princeton on January 9-10.

 

The team plays its first games of the year with Brown University and Yale University at home on January 16-17, followed by a season-long stretch of five straight games away from home. A tentatively scheduled Monday night matchup at Harvard University on January 19 would finish a busy stretch of three games in four days, followed by the annual Mayors’ Cup game against RPI on January 24, as the Garnet Chargers look for a fifth-straight win in the annual matchup in Albany. A solo game at Dartmouth College comes up next to end the month of January, and February begins with a trip to the North Country to face St. Lawrence and Clarkson on February 6-7.

 

The team finally returns home for two against Colgate and Cornell on February 13-14. The squad then closes out the home portion of the regular season with games against Harvard (February 20) and Dartmouth (February 21), highlighted by Senior Day on Saturday against the Big Green. The regular season finishes up at Yale and Brown on February 27-28.

 

Season tickets for the 2025-26 season are available now by visiting UnionAthletics.com/tickets. Benefits of season tickets include the ability to renew the same seats on an annual basis; tickets to the Women’s Ice Breaker Tournament in October and the annual Mayors’ Cup games at MVP Arena; access to special events only for season ticket holders, including a preseason meet-and-greet with the men’s and women’s teams at M&T Bank Center; as well as other perks. Single-game tickets will be made available for purchase later in the summer.

 

The rivalry between Memphis football and UTSA has stretched into 2025.

Ahead of the Memphis-UTSA football game in 2024, UTSA coach Jeff Traylor said Memphis had six times more NIL money than UTSA and that the Roadrunners needed to invest more money in their program. The Tigers set their pregame hype video to “Got Money” by Lil Wayne.

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Then the Tigers lost 44-36. It was a damaging loss that knocked Memphis out of contention for the AAC title game.

Memphis football coach Ryan Silverfield appeared on Grind City Media’s “Chris Vernon Show” on June 11 and addressed the situation.

“That head coach signed a $27 million contract,” Silverfield said of Traylor. “He should probably give some of that money back to the school, right? But hey, they beat us so I can’t say much. He’s a good coach, he’s done a good job with that program.”

UTSA went 7-6 in 2024, while Memphis went 11-2.

The two teams don’t play each other in 2025. But both will be expected to compete at the top of the conference.

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UTSA brought back starting quarterback Owen McCown and is positioned to have one of the top offenses in the AAC. Memphis has had significant roster turnover, but the Tigers brought in a strong transfer class and should be competitive on both sides of the ball.

Reach sports writer Jonah Dylan at jonah.dylan@commercialappeal.com or on X @thejonahdylan.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Ryan Silverfield fires back at Jeff Traylor after NIL comparison

The House settlement, a landmark agreement that allows universities to directly pay athletes, was approved by a California judge Friday night.

Within hours, at 9:58 p.m., San Diego State had announced the launch of the Student-Athlete Recruitment and Retention Fund that athletic director John David Wicker said “is a vital step in ensuring we continue to compete for championships while also aligning SDSU Athletics with the future of college sports.”

It was met with a mix of frustration and confusion from many athletic boosters.

Frustration, because of “donor fatigue” or as one fan put it bluntly on a chat board: “How many things do I have to contribute to?”

Confusion, because the SARRF sounds an awful lot like the MESA Foundation, the NIL collective that amassed close to $3 million this season for, well, student-athlete recruitment and retention of the men’s basketball team.

At some universities, outside collectives are already being folded into the athletic department, now that the House settlement shatters the last illusion of amateurism and permits up to $20.5 million per school per year in revenue sharing with players starting July 1. At SDSU, for the time being at least, the MESA Foundation and football’s Aztec Link will remain in place, and donations to them will accumulate Aztec Club “points” that determine ticketing priority.

“It’s a recognition by the university,” MESA founder Jeff Smith said, “that our dollars can do the exact same thing as their dollars through the athlete retention fund that doesn’t really have the ability to be up and running and be impactful just yet.

“If people make the mistake of believing that now that the school has the ability to participate in athlete compensation because of the House settlement, they no longer have to support through MESA, then all the work that’s been done with the program for the last three years will be for naught and all the concerns we’ve had about losing players in the offseason will become reality.”

The athletic department’s response about which to support is: All of the above.

SDSU needed to create an in-house donation mechanism to compensate athletes because most sports don’t have outside NIL collectives, and even football’s Aztec Link started later than MESA and has struggled to generate the kind of war chest needed to be competitive in the brave, new world of college athletics.

A FAQ section accompanying the announcement of SARRF offered this answer to whether MESA and Aztec Link will now go away:

“Not at all. Both collectives will continue their important work and complement the efforts of the new fund. Together, they ensure SDSU has a robust and multifaceted support system for student-athletes.”

The SARRF allows donations to be designated for specific teams (but not specific athletes), so in theory the money from the SARRF and MESA ends up in the same place. There are subtle differences between them, though.

SARRF is administered by the Campanile Foundation, the university’s nonprofit fundraising organization. That typically means a percentage of any donations is siphoned off for overhead costs.

MESA, which also offers tax-deductible contributions, is an outside entity with only one full-time employee – president Caroline Ripley – and a few student interns. Smith and his wife, who in three years tirelessly grew MESA from nothing to raising enough money to help retain the bulk of last season’s roster in an era of unlimited player movement, serve as volunteers.

That allows MESA, Smith says, to distribute about 93% of donations to players. (SARRF’s FAQs do not indicate what percentage of the fund will be diverted to the Campanile Foundation or other administrative costs.)

Another difference: MESA’s meet-and-greet events with men’s basketball players aren’t subject to Title IX equity because it’s an outside organization that, unlike the university, does not receive federal funding.

MESA pays players in monthly installments in exchange for their participation in about a half-dozen community service events per year as well as social media posts. Because SDSU is opting in to the House settlement, any NIL compensation beyond school-distributed revenue sharing comes under the scrutiny of a new NIL clearinghouse that will prohibit individual deals above “market value.”

There’s a simple workaround, however. Because SDSU will not come close to distributing the allotted $20.5 million in revenue sharing (think more like $1 million or $2 million), MESA can simply transfer what it collects to the school, which forwards it to the athletes.

For the 2025-26 season, SDSU is not expected to provide revenue sharing with basketball players. All of their money will still come from MESA. And since the players’ current NIL deals were signed before the House settlement was finalized, they aren’t subject to the clearinghouse’s scrutiny.

So why not put everything under one roof?

“At some point in the future, will there be a scenario where funds go to San Diego State’s athlete retention fund, or will they go to MESA and then to the athlete retention fund specific to basketball?” Smith said. “Those are definitely possibilities. But for right now, what we’ve built is working and what we’ve built can’t change.

“Once it’s very, very clear that’s the environment we’re playing in – and we are in regular conversations with the university – we’ll be more than prepared to do it. Because there’s so much unknown, for the time being MESA can’t change and the fan support of Aztecs basketball can’t change. We need to continue as we are.”

One fear is losing a unique class of MESA donor that identifies more with the program and its players – “the city’s NBA team,” coach Brian Dutcher likes to say – than the university. Despite pleas from the athletic department to include football in the MESA Foundation, Smith resisted.

“There are people who are not just supporters of the university and blindly write a check and hope the money goes to a good cause,” Smith said. “They’re individual sports fans and supporters. That’s something that definitely came out through our efforts. We are always very focused on being singular with basketball. We didn’t want to confuse the audience and have multiple sports.

“If those fans who were less inclined to contribute to San Diego State now believe that San Diego State is involved and they potentially reverse course, it’s a terrible thing for the program.”

The other piece of messaging is to dispel more general misconceptions about the House settlement, which means schools merely have the option of paying their athletes up to $20.5 million per year. It also means, at the overwhelming majority of universities, they have to first find that funding.

“The biggest concern I have,” Smith said, “is that the audience doesn’t understand that this new, in-house version of being able to compensate athletes does not mean there is any new money. It’s quite the opposite. Opting into the House agreement takes a budget that is already challenged and makes it even more financially challenging.”

Originally Published: June 11, 2025 at 3:09 PM PDT

OLIVIA DUNNE is working on getting people smiling as she prepares for life after gymnastics.

The former LSU national champion gymnast left the sport behind in April.

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Dunne, 22, spent five years with the Louisiana State Tigers.

The program lost in the NCAA semifinals earlier this year as they attempted to defend their national crown.

Livvy officially hung up her leotard after the loss and has now embarked on a host of new career ventures.

The 22-year-old became one of college sport’s most lucrative athletes during her time at LSU.

Dunne boasts over 13 million online fans and is a Sports Illustrated model away from the gym.

She is now getting her teeth into a new partnership with brace company Invisalign.

The company fixes crooked smiles through the use of invisible braces.

Livvy has teamed up with the orthodontist giants as a brand ambassador.

“Face card never declines with an @invisalign smile,” Dunne wrote in an Instagram reveal.

“And we’re just getting started.”

Dunne is currently dating MLB star Paul Skenes.

The pair have been in a relationship for almost two years after meeting at LSU.

Skenes, 23, is a star pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates and was named NL Rookie of the Year in his debut season.

Dunne left the Tigers in April after five years as a college gymnast.

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” she wrote in a tearful social media farewell.

‘An awesome person’

Travis Kelce has teamed up with Olivia Dunne for a new career venture.

“Something said when you’re enjoying yourself to the point time seems to slip away from you.

“And that’s exactly how the past 20 years in this sport have felt.

“Gymnastics, you have filled my heart. Tou’ve shaped me into the person I am today, creating memories and sisterhoods that will last a life support.

“You are my first love.”

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