Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll take a look at why this season used to be a primary for girls’s faculty basketball in New York City. We’ll additionally learn the way LaGuardia Community College will spend a $116.2 million grant from a basis run via Alexandra Cohen, whose billionaire husband purchased the New York Mets in 2020.
This used to be the primary season that Columbia University’s girls’s basketball staff made it to the N.C.A.A. Division I match.
New York University’s girls’s staff, undefeated in 31 video games, additionally made it to the postseason, making this the primary 12 months that the 2 schools have executed so on the similar time — Columbia in Division I, with an at-large position within the Big Dance, and N.Y.U. in Division III. N.Y.U. received the nationwide identify in Division III via finishing Smith College’s 16-game successful streak, 51-41.
“We kind of pulled away in the end, and one of the officials congratulated me on winning,” mentioned Meg Barber, the trainer of the N.Y.U. staff. “This was probably with about 45 seconds left. I said, ‘Not yet.’ I was like, ‘It’s not over yet,’ and he was like, ‘Yes it is.’”
And subsequent season?
“I’ve barely processed that we won the national championship,” Barber advised me on Thursday, “so I haven’t really thought about next year.”
Columbia’s season ended on Wednesday with a 72-68 loss to Vanderbilt in a play-in sport previous the primary spherical of the N.C.A.A. Division I match.
When I requested Sabreena Merchant, who covers girls’s basketball, for an evaluate, she mentioned Columbia were outplayed. The sport used to be one of the crucial uncommon events this season when Abbey Hsu, Columbia’s celebrity senior guard, wasn’t the most productive participant at the courtroom.
“The first thing you think of with Abbey is shooting,” Merchant mentioned. “She uncharacteristically missed a few free throws. For her to go 2 of 11 on 3s and miss three free throws is surprising.” Hsu is the Ivy League’s most sensible occupation scorer on 3-pointers, with 375.
Columbia has had much less revel in taking part in groups like Vanderbilt that experience lengthy postseason histories — this used to be, in the end, Columbia’s first look within the match. “You could tell the athletic advantage that Vanderbilt had over Columbia,” Merchant advised me. “As well as Abbey Hsu has done in Ivy League games, there was a different level of defense that she was facing against Vanderbilt — and her game didn’t elevate as had been hoped, or as Princeton does when they get in these situations.” Princeton, which beat Columbia to win the Ivy League identify final week, will play West Virginia within the first spherical of the match on Saturday.
Even if Hsu had an off evening in opposition to Vanderbilt, she has had a outstanding occupation taking part in for Columbia. She holds Columbia’s occupation scoring document in basketball, males’s or girls’s, with 2,126 issues.
She additionally has a outstanding non-public tale. She tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her proper knee when she used to be a junior in highschool.
A few weeks later, when she heard popping noises from an adjoining development on the faculty and the trainer directed her category to depart, she used to be on crutches. She labored her manner down the steps and out of the varsity — Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the place the deadliest mass capturing at a highschool in American historical past used to be unfolding.
Her first season at Columbia used to be interrupted via the pandemic, and her father, a health care provider, died from headaches associated with Covid-19.
Still, Hsu has been Columbia’s defining participant in girls’s basketball beneath the trainer, Megan Griffith, who arrived in 2016. Before Hsu joined the staff, Columbia had received 31 % of its video games and 26 % of its Ivy League video games. Since then, the staff has received 80 % of its video games.
Weather
Enjoy a sunny day within the mid-40s. In the night, get ready for an opportunity of rain with temperatures within the higher 30s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In impact till Sunday (Purim).
The newest New York information
A $116 million grant to LaGuardia Community College
Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire who purchased the Mets 3 and a part years in the past, is placing more cash into Queens — a $116.2 million grant to LaGuardia Community College for a piece drive coaching middle.
But his spouse, Alexandra Cohen, will get the credit score for the imaginative and prescient at the back of the grant, for a 160,000-square-foot vocational coaching facility, mentioned Kenneth Adams, the president of LaGuardia.
“This is 100 percent Alex,” Adams mentioned. “It isn’t just that it increases our instructional space by 25 percent, which it does, it’s that it’s geared to Alex’s vision of career and technical education.”
LaGuardia officers mentioned the grant, from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, used to be the most important ever awarded to a neighborhood faculty. Adams mentioned it might pay for the development of 67 school rooms, sufficient so as to add 6,000 scholars to LaGuardia’s enrollment. LaGuardia will use the distance to coach scholars hoping to earn affiliate levels, trade certifications and different credentials.
“I wanted to create a place where students have access to high-quality programs and facilities and can learn the skills they need to succeed in a rapidly changing world,” Alexandra Cohen mentioned in a commentary. LaGuardia mentioned the middle, to be known as the Cohen Career Collective, will be the biggest occupation and technical facility of its sort within the New York area.
Adams mentioned the basis had given the varsity a much smaller grant throughout the pandemic for a coaching program known as Jobs Direct. It used to be supposed to supply non permanent vocational coaching for other people from Queens who had misplaced their jobs within the pandemic. After that, he mentioned, Alexandra Cohen “made it clear she wanted to do something else.”
“Alex was born in Harlem, she grew up in Washington Heights, and she really identifies with our students” — a lot of whom are foreign-born, working-class scholars and the primary of their households to visit faculty, Adams mentioned.
Félix Matos-Rodríguez, the chancellor of the City University of New York, mentioned the grant would multiply LaGuardia’s status “as an engine of upward mobility.”
The middle will be offering language categories for foreign-born scholars who want to fortify their English prior to taking vocational methods. It will even be offering highschool equivalency categories for college kids who need to earn a G.E.D.
Adams mentioned the brand new middle would occupy two flooring in a former bakery overlooking the Sunnyside Yards railroad depot.
“We’re getting more and more requests to train students for green jobs, in particular solar panel installation and maintenance,” Adams mentioned. “We don’t have, today, any classrooms equipped to teach that. We will.” He additionally mentioned the middle would let LaGuardia supply classes in power retrofitting — entry-level electric jobs with contractors. Some of the laboratories can be utilized to show classes involving cloud computing and synthetic intelligence.
He mentioned the “basically 1980s-level classrooms” used for LaGuardia’s nursing methods would even be upgraded. The middle too can supply area for categories to coach scholars for jobs within the hospitality trade.
“All of these programs are driven by labor dynamics and employer needs,” he mentioned.
The Cohens’ basis has equipped greater than $1.2 billion to nonprofit teams since 2001, together with greater than $185 million in Queens. Separately, Cohen is bidding with Hard Rock for a on line casino subsequent to Citi Field, the place the Mets play.
METROPOLITAN diary
(Queens, 3 a.m.)
Dear Diary:
I woke when
town
stopped
speaking
Stepped
from my mattress
Other un-
dressed males
in home windows
listened
relishing
not anything’s
one thing
Lightly I
lit
a cigarette
and listened
— Rolli Anderson
Illustrated via Agnes Lee. Send submissions right here and learn extra Metropolitan Diary right here.
