State Sports Briefs: Badger State Winter Games to stay in Wausau

• Badger State Games

Badger State Games

Talk about it

The Badger State Winter Games won’t be going anywhere after all. The Wisconsin Sports Development Corporation said yesterday they’ll keep the annual Olympic-style festival in Wausau and the central Wisconsin region.

Organizers talked about moving next year’s games, after Wausau’s convention-and-visitors bureau withdrew its annual support of 76-thousand dollars as the Games’ main sponsor. But the group says it wants to return because of Wausau’s strong base of volunteers – and they’ll seek funding from local governments and businesses. The convention-and-visitors’ group said the Games did not attract enough overnight visitors to make it worth being the main sponsor. About 2,100 athletes took part in this year’s Winter Games – and organizers said about 39-percent of them were out-of-towners who stayed overnight in the region. The Badger State Summer Games moved to the Fox Valley last year, after a lack of financial support in its previous host area of Madison.

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East Texas Baptist won its first NCAA Division-Three softball title yesterday, beating Linfield of Oregon 5-4 in Eau Claire. Baptist scored two runs in the bottom of the seventh inning for its third comeback victory of the tournament. Meghan Fisher singled home the tying run. And Stacy Havner hit a grounder to second which hit Alex Hartmann high and skipped away while the deciding run scored from third. Ayrika Henderson got the win after pitching two innings of scoreless relief. She improved to 21-and-7. Linfield won the loser’s bracket earlier yesterday with a 10-to-1 pounding of Eastern Connecticut State in five innings.

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The Wisconsin women’s basketball team will host Duke in their annual Big Ten-ACC Challenge game on December second. The Badgers were 21-and-11 last year, while Duke was 30-and-6 and made the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament. This is the fourth year of the women’s challenge – which is similar to what the men have been doing for a decade. Lisa Stone’s Badgers are 2-1 in the challenge, after beating North Carolina State by five on the road last season. The Big Ten won only four of its 11 match-ups against ACC teams a year ago.

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Former Wisconsin distance runner Gwen Jorgenson has joined the USA Triathlon program. And she’s being groomed for possible Olympic bid in 2012-or-2016. The 24-year-old Jorgenson was a college All-American as a runner, and she was among the state’s best high school swimmers at Waukesha. Now, she says she’s getting help in mastering the bicycle portion of the triathlon. Jorgenson says she needs to develop the power needed to produce high speeds, and the steering skills needed to get around in heavy traffic on the course. After leaving the U-W last year, Jorgenson has been a certified public accountant in Milwaukee – and she says she still has a real drive to compete. Jorgenson won the women’s race in this spring’s Crazy Legs Classic race in Madison.

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The Madison Area Technical College (NATC) baseball team is going to the national Division-Two junior college World Series. The Wolf-Pack advanced by pounding Elgin of Illinois 20-to-7 yesterday in the finals of a regional in Kankakee Illinois. MATC took a 9-0 lead in the first inning and rolled from there. Shortstop Justin Scanlon with 4-for-6 with six RBI’s. Catcher Lukas Marwitz also drove in six for Madison Area Tech. The Wolf-Pack improved to 44-13. They’ll play Western Oklahoma in the first round of the national junior college finals on Sunday in Enid, Oklahoma. There are 10 teams in the double-elimination tournament, which begins Saturday and continues through the following Saturday.

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