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Prospectus - January 3, 2018: Monmouth’s 2018 Preview; Father & Son Create Lacrosse Virtual Reality Training For Goalies.

All the lacrosse news you can handle and plenty more!!

Winter weather Dec 8th 2017 Photo by Danny Lawson/PA Images via Getty Images

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING, College Crosse Nation!! Thanks for making us a part of your day! Here are your links for January 3, 2018.

College Crosse News.

Monmouth had a historic year in 2017. Can they do it again in 2018? Chris took a look at their schedule for next season to find out.

The Monmouth Hawks are the 43rd team in our 2018 schedule preview series and the second team from the MAAC. The Hawks won their first ever MAAC championship in their fourth year as a program before falling to Bryant in the NCAA Play-In game. Monmouth adds Princeton for the first time in their short history, but loses Villanova and VMI on the schedule.

This father & son created a virtual reality program to help train lacrosse goalies.

Cody Nelson is a 14-year-old lacrosse player who recently switched from attack to goalie. The transition has been smooth, except Cody struggled on bounce shots, or “bouncers,” as he calls them.

Some young athletes would just make a note of that and focus on it in practice. Cody had a different idea. He used his background in creating games with the Unity software to build a program that allows lacrosse goalies to train in virtual reality. With help from his dad Doug, a lacrosse coach for 17 years, Cody created the Virtual Goalie.

“After one of Cody’s lessons with a local coach, I asked him if he could make a field for the Oculus,” Doug said. “Within 48 hours, Cody had a ball on the field. The shooter wasn’t there yet, but it was a start.”

This is what you have to do to get that perfect shot.

Here’s my New Year’s resolution.

Michigan has one goal this year.

#ShootingRoom18

A post shared by Michigan Lacrosse (@umichlacrosse) on

There’s a new recruiting app (FieldLevel) that’s a lot like Linked-In and it’s beginning to get pretty popular.

Brenton Sullivan wants to help high-school athletes find the right college, and he’s taking a page out of online social networking’s playbook to do it. A former walk-on baseball player at USC, Sullivan co-founded FieldLevel nearly a decade ago. Now located in Solana Beach, the company has developed an online social networking platform for young athletes, high school/club coaches and college coaches.

What LinkedIn does for professional and employment networking, FieldLevel aims to do for college athletic recruiting. “The purpose of the FieldLevel platform is to be a place where coaches can support their athletes in recruiting,” said Sullivan, FieldLevel‘s chief executive. “What it has created is this really tight knit community of coaches, which we feel is the future of recruiting.”

Lacrosse Magazine named its preseason finalists for Warrior Division I Men’s Preseason Player of the Year: Trevor Baptiste (Denver), Connor Fields (Albany), Connor Kelly (Maryland) and Ben Reeves (Yale).

The magazine’s staff will select a winner to be published in its February NCAA preview edition. Fans are encouraged to vote on Twitter, but the results will not determine the preseason player of the year.

Certainly you could make the case for Pat Spencer (Loyola) and/or Justin Guterding (Duke) in this mix. Throw in some dark horses on the defensive side of the field like Ben Randall (Ohio State) and a host of sophomore sensations like Michael Sowers (Princeton), Tre LeClaire (Ohio State), Jeff Teat (Cornell), Ethan Walker (Denver) and Jared Bernhardt (Maryland), and you soon get a sense of how the player of the year race will widen.

What’s Up, PhilaJersey?

NJ & PA are preparing for what could be a very ugly winter storm hitting the area tonight.

The ingredients are coming together again for the area’s next winter storm inches closer. But the question is: Where exactly where will the storm hit? And who is going to see the most snowfall? “Right now we’re in the monitoring stage,” Gene Blaum of PennDOT said. “We’re monitoring the track this Nor’easter is going to take; how far west it is going to track.” Blaum says crews are on standby, and if this Nor’easter decides to track westward, managers monitoring the different counties will be able to quickly shift trucks, salt and plows. At this point in time, those types of decisions aren’t being made. Each county maintenance manager will make the decision on how much equipment they’re going to use.

World/National News.

James Andrew Miller with a pretty explosive story in the Hollywood Reporter about a possible alternative reason for former ESPN President John Skipper’s recent resignation: Disney may have pushed him out.

Yet since the bombshell announcement, not a single story has materialized that offers a more plausible explanation that goes beyond the original, mercurial Skipper statement (and that’s with just a few million investigative reporters trying to track one down). Now, some Skipper supporters are beginning to believe his departure was only about a drug problem. Maybe in this case, a cigar really is just a cigar.

Well, as much as I’d like to join them in believing that, I’m sorry, but I just can’t. What if instead of jumping, John Skipper was pushed — and not because of any sordid story desperately being kept secret? What if the critical word in his statement wasn’t “addiction,” but rather that his departure was “mutual"? What if this was, in a manner of speaking, a Mickey Mouse operation?

In the absence of a smoking gun, proceeding down such a path could easily be compared to suggesting the moon landing had been staged in a studio somewhere in the Valley. Nevertheless, we can all agree that if his resignation were fueled solely by his drug problem, that would be a conclusion Skipper would have come to after long and deliberate thought. So consider:

First, I simply don’t believe Skipper is a good enough actor to stand in front of hundreds of ESPN employees Dec. 13 and lay out an infectious and enthusiastic blueprint for the future of the company — and tell them, according to sources who were there, “We’re all in this together” — if he knew he’d be leaving in a mere five days. No. Freakin'. Way. Skipper can be as crafty and cunning as the best of them, but lying like that has an amoral dimension to it that is certainly not Skipperesque. (If anything, he’s gotten himself into trouble by being too transparent).

Second, I don’t buy the idea that after being basically prevented from doing press interviews and major public speeches for more than a year by highly protective and cautious investor-relations gurus in Burbank, Skipper would suddenly raise his profile while knowing he was about to fold his tent. That makes no sense at all. In addition to the highly visible presentation before ESPN troops Dec. 13, Skipper did a “Keynote Conversation” at the Sports Video Group Summit in New York 24 hours earlier, again approaching the future not in a “This will be my legacy” manner, but rather a “We have great days ahead, just watch us” perspective.

Your GIF/Video for January 3, 2017.

This video is pretty funny.

That’s it for today!! I’ll see you out there!! Make sure you follow us on social media!

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Managing Editors: Safe Fekadu, Chris Jastrzembski, Ryan McDonnell.