Arizona
Arizona’s Filip Jakubcik enters final round with Western Intercollegiate lead | Men’s golf
SANTA CRUZ — University of Arizona’s Filip Jakubcik, a sophomore out of Holesov, Czech Republic, turned in another 4-under-par 68 to jump into the lead at the 77th Western Intercollegiate on Tuesday.
Jakubcik carded five birdies, one bogey, and one double bogey at Pasatiempo Golf Club to give hi a 136 total. He has three top-10 finishes in eight events and is seeking his first win of the season.
Pepperdine sophomore Mahanth Chirravuri, a transfer from USC, climbed three spots in to second with his 69, which gave him a 137.
San Jose State’s Xuan Luo shot another 69 and is in a four-way tie for third at 138 with Stanford’s Karl Vilips, Tennessee Chattanooga’s Garrett Engle, and Texas’ Nathan Petronzio.
Vilips and Engle both climbed 28 spots after each fired a 66. Vilips closed with a birdie run. He was 5 under over his last 10 holes.
Luo, nicknamed XL, is attempting to become the first SJSU player to win the Intercollegiate since 1996, when Arron Oberholser bettered Stanford’s Tiger Woods and the rest of the field.
“I just need to play (one) shot at a time,” said Luo, when asked what he needs to do to get things done Wednesday. “Be committed to courage, slay a couple of demons out there, and trust myself. And just have fun out there with my teammates and coach.”
San Diego State’s Chanachon Chokprajakchat, BYU’s Zac Jones, and Washington’s Petr Hruby are tied for seventh at 139.
Seven players, including Stanford star Michael Thorbjornsen, SJSU’s Ivan Barahona and Cal’s Eric Lee, are tied for 10th at even-par 140.
The final round begins at 8:04 a.m. Wednesday. Jakubcik, Vilips, Hruby, and Chokprajakchat tee off in the final group at 1:04 p.m.
“We hit a rough patch in the middle of our round after a decent start, but I was proud of our guys’ composure as they righted the ship in the final holes,” said Wildcats coach Jim Anderson. “I want to shoutout Zach (Pollo) and Filip for their tremendous rounds to lead us today to put themselves in the top 10 of the leaderboards. We are right in the thick of things for team and individual titles going into the final round, which is where you want to be going into a final round.”
Stanford shot a 355 total in the second round to give it a 709 total, which puts the Cardinal in the driver’s seat to claim their 12th team title on Wednesday.
Arizona (711) is two strokes back after firing a 363 in the second round, 15 strokes worse than it did in the first round. Washington (712) is clinging to third with San Diego State (713), Oregon (715), BYU (715) and Texas (716) on its heels.
Cal (720) is eighth, and tournament host San Jose State (722) is tied for ninth in the 14-team event.
IF YOU GO
77th Western Intercollegiate
When: Wednesday tee times, 8:04 a.m.-1:04 p.m.
Where: Pasatiempo Golf Club, Santa Cruz
Admission: Free
TV: Golf Channel and Peacock, 4-7 p.m. (live)
Tyler Locklear back with the Arizona Diamondbacks major league squad
Tyler Locklear is back in the major leagues after working his way back from injuries. This will be his second MLB stint for the Arizona Diamondbacks.
The Arizona Diamondbacks remain in the playoff hunt after defeating the St. Louis Cardinals, 5-3, Saturday, July 18.
However, as Arizona claws its way back into the wild-card race, questions arise about its trade deadline strategy and whether the Diamondbacks will be buyers or sellers at the deadline.
Arizona is 1 1/2 games out of the final wild-card spot for the 2026 postseason, and is 4-1 in its past five games, including a recent road sweep of the two-time defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers.
Sweeping the Dodgers is no easy feat, in fact, that is the only time the Dodgers have been swept all year.
That’s enough to get people talking about what Arizona is going to do at the trade deadline — and shifting the conversation from selling to potentially buying.
But with the shift of tone comes difficult questions.
What would the Diamondbacks have to give up to bring the players they want to Phoenix?
It’s a question veteran closer Paul Sewald doesn’t even want to broach.
“You know what, with all due respect, I would rather talk about anything else,” Sewald said. “It’s enough stress to keep you up at night. I would prefer not to even talk about it.”
A cautious tone taken by the 10-year pro, who has been traded twice in-season during his career: once in 2023, from Seattle to Arizona, and then again in 2025 when he went from Detroit to Cleveland.
That was a similar tone fellow relief pitchers Juan Morillo and Jonathan Loaisiga took as well.
“You know with it being about things up in the air, I’d rather not speak on it,” Morillo said. “I can tell you, despite whatever could happen, these players are focused on winning.”
Loaisiga echoed that sentiment.
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“To be honest that’s not something even being talked about,” Loaisiga said. “I’m not really paying much attention to all that trade talk. My mind is on coming in, doing the job, trying to help the team win as much as we can.
“I think that’s something the front office has to handle, that whole conversation.”
Loaisiga has done his job; he has delivered a 2.17 ERA out of the pen and has been one of Arizona’s more reliable arms.
If anyone can relate to the pressures of trade deadline performance, it’s Loaisiga, who spent eight of his nine years in the majors pitching for the New York Yankees and being involved in many trade-deadline discussions throughout his time there.
But it’s in between the wincing glances when the trade deadline is brought up that the nature of the subject reveals itself to be more delicate than fans, players and maybe even front office personnel can imagine.
The fact is the Diamondbacks are in the playoff hunt, and getting traded is a huge logistical undertaking for a player to deal with, so one must wonder if everybody would like to stay, at least for now?
Arizona shortstop Geraldo Perdomo had encouraging words for all his teammates, while playing with a looming trade deadline.
“Do the little things,” Perdomo said. “Play good baseball, let’s go out there to just win games, that’s all that matters right now.”
The Diamondbacks finish their three-game series against the St. Louis Cardinals Sunday, July 19. They will host the Athletics for another three-game series starting Monday, July 20.
We will preview every player on the Cardinals roster leading up to training camp. This is about LB Mack Wilson.
The Arizona Cardinals report to training camp on July 22 and begin the process of preparing for the regular season, forming the roster and determining starting jobs and roles on the team.
Leading up to the start of camp, we will take a look at every player on the offseason roster, their background, their contract, their play in 2025, questions they face and their roster outlook.
Here is linebacker Mack Wilson.
Mack Wilson background, 2025 season
Wilson enters his eighth NFL season and third with the Cardinals. He entered the league in 2019 as a fifth-round draft pick by the Cleveland Browns out of Alabama. He played three seasons for the Browns and two for the New England Patriots before signing a three-year contract in free agency in 2024.
Last season, he replaced Kyzir White as the starting “Mike” linebacker and played in eight games before a rib injury at the end of the Cardinals’ Week 8 win over the Dallas Cowboys caused him to miss the final nine games of the season.
In eight games, he had 60 total tackles, three tackles for loss, a quarterback hit, an interception, six pass breakups and a forced fumble.
Mack Wilson contract details, salary cap hit
Wilson enters the final year of his three-year, $12.75 million contract. He will make nearly $3.4 million in salary in 2026 and count more than $4.7 million against the salary cap.
Roster outlook, questions he faces
Wilson is a lock to make the team and is going to be the team’s starting “Mike” linebacker. He is a leader in the locker room and trusted by defensive coordinator Nick Rallis.
Will he be able to lead a better defense? Will he get a contract extension before he becomes a free agent next year?
Get more Cardinals and NFL coverage from Cards Wire’s Jess Root and others by listening to the latest on the Rise Up, See Red podcast. Subscribe on Spotify, YouTube or Apple Podcasts.
Arizona biologists relocate beavers to help restore wetlands
Arizona Game and Fish biologists are moving beavers from locations where they can be a nuisance to areas where they can contribute to conservation.
Laura Roche understands the imperative of curbing carbon emissions to prevent climate change from supercharging wildfires to “megafire” status. But she’s also aware that such steps won’t solve the problem right away, even if the entire world got their act together on addressing climate change this instant.
“People get tired” just talking about reducing emissions, she said. Even as smoke lingers in the air from the Pocket Megafire that was burning less than 10 miles away, she knows it won’t be a helpful conversation. “But there are other things that can definitely improve the situation,” she added.
Roche, a Cottonwood resident who works in Sedona, has one suggestion in mind: reintroducing beavers.
Beavers are North America’s largest rodents, with a flair for dam building. Their structures create strings of ponds and vital belts of lush vegetation, which can help prevent and mitigate fires in the region, simply because beavers help wetlands stay wet.
Community interest in beavers is stirring among Sedona residents and workers, who have watched warily in recent weeks as the Pocket Fire raged. They’re circulating YouTube videos about the power of these humble animals to terraform landscapes and reduce fire risk in a fire-prone region.
As of July 15, the Pocket Fire has burned 27,400 acres and is 83% contained.
Roche herself has been sharing the science of beavers with government officials in forest planning meetings, customers, customers and friends across the political spectrum.
“I’ve had nothing but positive support for the idea,” she said.
The science seems to check out. Emily Fairfax is a beaver scientist at the University of Minnesota, and also a beaver evangelist.
“You cannot restore streams that were originally made by beavers and shaped by beavers —without also bringing back the beavers,” she said.
How beavers help mitigate wildfires
Beavers are slow creatures that sorely lack in the physical department — but make up for it with their brilliant minds. They build dams to create deep pools, and there they build island dens to deter land predators. They also construct a network of canals along rivers to facilitate forage without leaving the safety of the water. A single beaver family can service a mile-long strip of wetland.
“It’s incredible how large scale their engineering is,” Fairfax said. There’s a joke among her peers about these crafty animals: “If you have a problem, there’s a beaver for that.”
With a dam in the way, surface water, such as storm runoff, has time to seep into the ground, recharging groundwater in the process. The retained moisture encourages plant growth, especially crucial in times of drought. Studies have shown that beaver-managed streams have more abundant vegetation than a landscape without.
Beavers can thrive in all kinds of riparian ecosystems, including drylands. There, the rodents seek out groundwater springs and excavate their ponds to expand storage capacity.
Beaver families have been observed to frolic in the concrete hearts of California’s San Jose, Portland, Denver and even in metro Phoenix. As long as reeds and trees are present as a food source, beavers can make it work, using rocks, trash and whatever they can find as construction material.
Fairfax has found that beaver wetlands are more fire- and drought-resilient than any other kind of riparian zone bereft of beavers. That’s because beavers work incessantly to maintain their dams and ponds.
“It’s life or death for the beaver to have that wetland,” she said. “So every moment of the beaver’s day, it’s like, how do I make sure this place stays wet?”
During a wildfire, the footprint of beavers makes a difference. It’s harder for lightning struck fires to spread on beaver-managed wetlands, as green vegetation is much less fire-prone. The network of rivers and beaver-made canals can act as a fire break to slow the progression of wildfire.
The wet pockets of beaver habitat also provide refuge for animals fleeing from fires. In 2021, the Beckwourth megafire scorched more than 105,000 acres north of California’s Lake Tahoe but spared a web of lush riparian corridors on the floodplain — sites where beavers had dammed and dug and developed before the blaze hit.
Will beaver reintroduction work?
Beavers ruled North America for 7.5 million years, in numbers up to 200 million strong. Up to a billion beaver dams peppered the landscape. Pretty much every river on the continent had resident beavers, except for predator-plied places such as the Everglades, where there are alligators.
Fur trapping in the 1820s nearly caused beavers to go extinct. Today, only 10% of their historic population are found in waterways.
In Arizona, beavers are still widely distributed across the state, but in scant numbers. Reintroduction programs have helped sustain their populations, though their abundance is still far from their heyday.
Along the San Pedro River, also historically called Beaver River, reside an estimated 38 beavers. Arizona Game and Fish Department experts have been relocating beavers here since 1999. But the San Pedro’s beaver count is still declining, likely due to drought that has strained water levels, drying up their moated homes and suppressing cottonwood regeneration.
In the age of drought and megafires, Fairfax thinks beavers should be part of government agencies’ tools for managing fires. One rainy season is all it takes for reintroduced beavers to bring fire suppression and mitigation effects into their new home.
Can beavers make a dent on Arizona’s fire-prone landscape? Potentially, said Northern Arizona University community ecologist Stefan Sommer, especially along the riparian corridors where they den. But these strips make up just 0.5% of Arizona’s diverse landscapes. Moreover, 90% of the state’s surface waters have been wrangled into pipes and concrete canals, which are far from the ideal habitat of beavers.
But Sommer says beavers have the greatest promise for reducing flood risk in burn scars. Beaver dams and the riparian vegetation around them can act as sponges to hold back runoff after heavy rains.
Post-fire or no, other flood-frequent areas have already benefited from beavers. The Greenford Tube station in West London used to flood after every storm. But since beavers built a dam upstream three years ago, flooding no longer occurs.
Beavers’ dam-building bent isn’t broadly beloved. The industrious architects often plug up culverts, which can flood human infrastructure nearby.
As nature’s engineers, beavers bend rivers to their will, not unlike humans. For this reason, beavers are still considered nuisance animals. Beaver presence can interfere with the well-laid plans and long-term goals of human engineers who too want to work rivers to their own vision.
For all the benefits of bringing back beavers, reintroduction isn’t straightforward either. Beavers need to be moved with their entire family, as estranged individuals can die from depression.
The antics of beavers have garnered them fans — they’re known to be playful and prone to getting the zoomies. But their personalities need to be managed to prevent human habituation, Fairfax said. Beavers easily form bonds with humans, which complicates reintroduction success.
Ideally, work must be done in advance to make sure reintroduced beavers have all the resources they need to thrive. The process of planting willow and cottonwoods, the favorite snacks of beavers, can take years before denuded rivers become conducive enough for beavers to move in. Constructing analog dams helps beavers settle in, too, as it tricks them into thinking that other beavers have been there before.
Arizona’s translocation programs are geared toward removal from areas of human-animal conflict. According to the Arizona Game and Fish Department, none of these projects and any future ones are specifically intended for fire mitigation, which the agency considers a secondary benefit.
“We do not utilize beavers … as our federal and state foresters have more effective tools in their toolbelt for management of the forested woodlands of Arizona,” wrote Shawn Lowery, the agency’s supervisor of habitat restoration and mitigation, in an email.
With the double whammy of wildfires and drought around the West, the movement to reinstate the beaver onto rivers is growing. In the southern Sierras in California, the Tule River Tribe has been leading the efforts of returning beavers to their reservation to help retain water. In Nevada and Utah, restored beavers have fashioned lush oases in the middle of the desert.
Beavers aren’t a silver bullet to the West’s fire and water woes, and it’s possible their vast impact of the landscape might not be enough to turn the tide against climate-change-fueled disasters, Sommer said.
Nevertheless, beaver reintroduction is pretty low-risk compared to the destructive scale of natural hazards that humans contend with.
“Let (beavers) do their thing, and if it works, great,” Fairfax said. “If it doesn’t, oh well, now you have biodiversity, carbon sequestration and all the other benefits.”
Back in Sedona, Rowe has been a long-time advocate for repopulating beavers in the watershed, though it still hasn’t translated into concrete action from government officials. Rowe hopes that the recent Pocket Fire will finally persuade land managers to reconsider, before the next wildfire arrives.
Shi En Kim covers environmental issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send tips or questions to shien.kim@arizonarepublic.com.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook and Instagram.
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