San Diego, CA

What to watch for when Arizona baseball hosts San Diego for 3-game weekend series

Published

10 months ago

February 21, 2025

What to watch for when Arizona baseball hosts San Diego for 3-game weekend series

The college baseball season is only a week old and already Arizona has experienced a rollercoaster of results.

The Wildcats went to Arlington, Texas with their first preseason ranking in four years and promptly lose all three games, getting outscored 31-7 at the Shiners Children’s College Showdown at Globe Life Field. Then, two days later, they came home to run-rule New Mexico in an afternoon home opener at Hi Corbett Field for their first win of the season.

Playing that game at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday was a favor to New Mexico, which had spent the previous weekend playing a tournament in Phoenix and wanted to get back home. That means Friday will serve as the unofficial home opener as the UA opens a 3-game series with San Diego.

Arizona went 19-9 at Hi Corbett last season, a record that included two losses as NCAA Tournament regional hosts. The Wildcats are 15-4 all-time against the Toreros but dropped two of three to them in San Diego early last season.

Here’s what to watch for this weekend at Hi Corbett:

Rotation redux

Arizona is going with the same three starting pitchers as it did on opening weekend, sending out redshirt sophomore right-hander Collin McKinney on Friday night, sophomore righty Owen Kramkowski on Saturday afternoon and true freshman righty Smith Bailey for Sunday’s finale.

McKinney and Bailey looked great in their outings. McKinney, a transfer from Baylor, had the longest outing of the group by going 4.1 innings against Ole Miss and allowing a run on three hits with three walks and three strikeouts, while Bailey tossed four shutout innings against Louisville while striking out five and yielding three singles.

Kramkowski, on the other hand, had a first career start to forget. He failed to get out of the first inning against Clemson, allowing seven runs and eight hits while recording both of his outs via strikeout.

Bad luck contributed to the rough outing, as a potential inning-ending double play ball struck an umpire on its way through the infield, resulting in a dead ball single that put two on with one out. Kramkowski would then allow four straight hits before getting another out.

“You have to pitch through that,” UA coach Chip Hale said on Tuesday. “Kramkowski had a tough one, I’d like to see him back out there.”

Despite that performance, Kramkowski is still considered a pro prospect. D1Baseball ranks him as the No. 91 draft prospect in college for the 2026 MLB Draft.

Junior righty Casey Hintz was being considered for a starting spot, and threw the final 3.2 innings against Ole Miss, but Hale said his value may still be best suited for the bullpen. Another potential starter, Rutgers transfer Christian Coppola, could make his UA debut this weekend piggybacking off one of the other starters.

Hitting is contagious

Against New Mexico, Arizona had 11 hits including three in a row to open the bottom of the 4^th when it scored three times. There were two other occasions where the Wildcats had back-to-back hits.

In the three losses in Texas, that happened once.

Hitting was expected to be Arizona’s strength entering the season, based on the number of returning players and veterans on the roster, and Hale still feels that will be the case. He wasn’t upset with the overall approach his batters had at the plate in Texas, just the results.

“You always know, when you go play in those tournaments, like we will (next week) in Houston, there’s three really good teams that are that are coached really well, and they’re going to be at the same level,” Hale said. “Trust the process. Just do what you do, whether it’s pitching, hitting, defense, base running. Don’t try to do too much. Just be who you are.”

Against New Mexico Hale moved senior Garen Caulfield from the No. 2 spot to cleanup, and he responded with two hits and four RBI. That lengthens the overall lineup and also changes the approach for junior Mason White, who has batted third each game.

White had two hits on the opening weekend, both solo home runs, while against New Mexico he had two singles and a double. It was the ninth game of his career with 3-plus hits but only the fourth that didn’t include a homer.

“I thought his best at-bat … was the ground ball base hit that the shortstop backhanded and couldn’t come up with, those are the kind of at-bats he has to have, especially late in the count,” Hale said. “If he can do that, put the ball in play hard all the time, he’s going to have huge numbers.”

About San Diego

The Toreros went 41-15 last season, winning both the regular season and conference tournament titles for the West Coast Conference. They played in the Santa Barbara Regional, going 1-2, and then had five players taken in the 2024 MLB Draft including former UA pitcher Josh Randall, who struck out 10 Wildcats in five innings last February.

This season has been an even rougher start for San Diego than for Arizona, as USD went 0-4 at home albeit to Big 12 power TCU. Two of the games were 1-run losses including a 10-inning affair on Opening Day.

There are still a handful of returners from the 2024 team that gave Arizona problems a year ago. Outfielder/left-handed pitcher Austin Smith had three homers and seven RBI and also struck out four of five batters he faced, while infielder Jack Gurevitch had five hits.

San Diego pitchers struck out a combined 44 Wildcats in the series, 19 apiece and the first and third games, but like Arizona it has a revamped staff.

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San Diego, CA

San Diego’s cost-of-living committee led big policy fights in 2025. The City Council is ending it.

Published

10 hours ago

December 20, 2025

Press Room

San Diego’s cost-of-living committee led big policy fights in 2025. The City Council is ending it.

District 9 Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera. (Photo by Ben Mendoza/Staff for Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera)

A year after creating a special committee on cost-of-living, the San Diego City Council is shutting it down.

Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, who chaired the committee, said he was content to let it die as the council had plenty of work to do completing policy initiatives that started there.

The committee took on some of the most high profile and divisive issues that the city considered last year, such as the successful effort to increase the minimum wage for tourism workers to $25 starting in July 2026.

But it also operated just as city officials passed new and increased fees that added to residents’ cost of living. The city’s new monthly trash fee, hikes to parking rates around town and increased charges for using city facilities all hit residents’ bottom lines this year.

Elo-Rivera stood by approving those fees with one hand while trying to combat costs with the other.

“The cuts on the table that those fee increases mitigated or avoided — library, recreation center and park hours services — were things the community said they didn’t want cut,” he said. “The fees we established were the most fiscally responsible way to avoid those cuts.”

Elo-Rivera is still pushing two other cost-of-living initiatives that could pass in 2026. One is a joint effort with the county to ban landlords from charging hidden fees tacked on to rent. The other is a potential June ballot measure to impose a $5,000 per-bedroom tax on vacation rentals or second homes.

“I completely understand why someone would say, ‘If you want to fix the cost of living, don’t raise these other costs,’” Elo-Rivera said. “We proposed a vacation home tax for the specific purpose of having the things that city residents want and deserve, without the cost of that resource falling on the backs of middle class and working class San Diegans.”

San Diego this year also became the first city in the country to ban grocery stores from offering digital-only deals, another initiative that started at the committee.

Elo-Rivera said the fees the city passed this year “only made it more important to have urgency to address cost-of-living increases driven by corporate greed, those that are disproportionately felt by everyday people.”

Councilmembers Henry Foster III and Marni von Wilpert also served on the select committee. Elo-Rivera credited them for stepping up.

“Everyone wants to talk about affordability, but nobody wants to own it,” he said. “There’s a tension there, but those two weren’t afraid to stand next to this issue and wrestle it.”

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San Diego, CA

Surveillance video shows thief stealing children’s Christmas gifts from home

Published

22 hours ago

December 20, 2025

Press Room

Surveillance video shows thief stealing children’s Christmas gifts from home

SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — A local mother is raising awareness about holiday theft after her children’s Christmas presents were stolen from their family home.

Meanwhile, San Diego police are warning people to be wary of scammers and thieves this time of year when the department sees a rise in these types of crimes.

“All the gifts that were hidden from my children were all gone,” said Kristin Lyons.

Plans for a Christmas surprise are now a loss for her two boys. Just before 3 a.m. Friday, a holiday grinch was caught on camera walking up the family’s University Heights driveway.

“It was a male. Jeans, gray sweatshirt, black backpack, a brown Padres hat and he came in on a bike,” said Lyons.

The alleged thief used a flashlight to search their carport before leaving with arms full.

“It was a big bin full of like 30 or 40 gifts wrapped,” according to Lyons. She explained the gifts included a scooter, shoes, clothes, and toys for her 3 and 4-year-old sons.

“They may not be very expensive items, they were very sentimental and personalized for the kids,” said Lyons.

Her neighborhood is located off Park Blvd. and Adams Ave. “We’ve had a lot of foot traffic, which has increased a lot of the crime as well.”

She said she and her neighbors rely on security cameras for safety, but hope police increase patrols after filing a report.

“There’s crimes of opportunity,” said SDPS Lt. Cesar Jimenez. He added that typically thieves look for easy targets.

“They’re looking for homes that are empty. They’re also looking into windows, and if people have all their presents, they have their Christmas tree by a window with all the presents underneath, then that’s a big temptation,” said Lt. Jimenez.

He advised residents to avoid placing their Christmas tree right by a window and to make sure packages are secured and out of sight.

Meanwhile, Lyons said she wants others to learn from her experience and isn’t letting this bring her and her family down.

She added that a neighbor found a partially wrapped gift dumped in the area and returned it to her after they saw her Nextdoor post. She’d like others who may stumble upon more gifts to also post about it on the Nextdoor app in the University Heights area, and she will keep an eye out.

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Nebraska Officially Adds San Diego State’s Roy Manning as Next Defensive Edge Coach

Published

1 day ago

December 19, 2025

Press Room

Nebraska Officially Adds San Diego State’s Roy Manning as Next Defensive Edge Coach

The Husker football program announced its second hire to the coaching staff on the morning of Dec. 19.

Though it was first reported on Dec. 11, the university took to social media Friday morning to make it official that former San Diego State edges coach Roy Manning would be following defensive coordinator Rob Aurich to Lincoln. Per his coaching bio on the Huskers.com website, Manning will be in the same assistant role at Nebraska for the 2026 season.

The news marks the first defensive assistant hire for Aurich as a Husker and comes roughly a week and a half after the dismissal of Terry Bradden as defensive line coach. While Manning is not a 1:1 replacement for Bradden, he is expected to oversee a smaller position group as the Huskers look to overhaul their defensive scheme under its new leader.

With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about Nebraska football’s newest defensive hire.

Manning arrives in Lincoln with a dozen years of defensive coaching experience at the Division I level, spanning multiple power conferences included the Big Ten and Big 12. He has coached at three of the 10 winningest programs in college football history, including Michigan, USC, and now, Nebraska. Most recently, Manning worked under Aurich at San Diego State, where the two were instrumental in engineering one of the nation’s most dramatic defensive turnarounds in 2025.

At San Diego State, Manning coached the Aztecs’ defensive edge players as SDSU produced one of the best defensive seasons in program history. The Aztecs led the nation with three shutouts and ranked fifth nationally in scoring defense, allowing just 12.6 points per game. San Diego State also finished seventh nationally in total defense and first in the country in red zone defense, something the Huskers finished 2025 second-to-last in. He helped oversee a unit that made a 17-point improvement in scoring defense from the previous season.

Prior to his time at San Diego State, Manning spent two seasons at USC as the Trojans’ assistant head coach for defense and outside linebackers coach. Before USC, Manning coached cornerbacks at Oklahoma from 2019 to 2021, helping the Sooners win two Big 12 titles and reach the College Football Playoff. His defensive backs were a major factor in Oklahoma’s ability to generate turnovers and limit explosive passing plays, with multiple All-Big 12 selections and an NFL Draft pick emerging from his position group.

Manning’s coaching career also includes stops at UCLA, Washington State, Michigan, and Cincinnati, giving him experience coaching nearly every defensive position group, along with special teams and even offensive roles early in his career. A former Michigan linebacker and NFL veteran, Manning has been part of championship programs as both a player and a coach, contributing to conference titles in the Big Ten and Big 12 and appearances in multiple conference championship games. His winning pedigree now carries over to Nebraska as he joins Rhule’s staff, tasked with returning the Huskers to a top defensive unit in the country.

Rhule emphasized that Manning’s addition to the staff is about adding a coach who understands defense holistically. “Roy has experience coaching defense from front to back,” Rhule said. The versatility was a key factor in the hire, allowing Nebraska to add a coach who can connect the front seven with the back end of the defense with more seamlessness as Aurich invokes his new scheme.

Continuity was another major theme in Rhule’s comments, as Manning joins Aurich after the two brough whole sale improvements to the Aztecs this fall. “Along with Coach Aurich, he was a key part of the defensive transformation at San Diego State this past season,” Rhule said. Nebraska’s head coach highlighted the trust built between the two coaches and the value of bringing in staff members who have already proven they can work together at a high level, particularly when installing a new system and expectations from day one.

For Manning, the move to Nebraska represents both an opportunity and a responsibility tied to the program’s history. “Nebraska Football is one of the most storied and respected programs in the entire country,” Manning said, expressing gratitude to Rhule and excitement about joining the Huskers staff. Manning added that he’s eager to begin building relationships within the program and help spark the same improvements the Aztecs did in 2025 in his new defensive room.

With Manning’s hire now official, Nebraska appears to be adding a coach with a proven track record of defensive success. In 2025 alone, the duo of Manning and Aurich helped San Diego State record 32 sacks in 12 regular-season games. For context, Nebraska finished the 2025 season with just 19 of its own.

No matter how it’s framed, Manning arrives in Lincoln with the pedigree and experience to match. With 15 of Nebraska’s 18 listed defensive linemen currently underclassmen, Manning will have the opportunity to develop a young corps with the same traits that defined his most recent defensive stops.

While Nebraska is still expected to continue its search for a true defensive line coach, Manning’s addition gives the Huskers another proven developer with lengthy Power Four experience. The reunion of former San Diego State coaches Aurich and Manning brings immediate credibility to Nebraska’s defensive rebuild. For Manning, it represents a return to Power Four football. For Nebraska, it’s a hire that appears positioned to accelerate the program’s defensive progress up front.

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