MAY 24, 2010 -- Turning up roses.

What an accurate phrase when discussing the first half of 2010 for Oregon athletics.

Beginning in January with Oregon football’s first Rose Bowl appearance in 15 years, the majority of UO teams have earned postseason.

Oregon’s success roots from impressive coaching hires. Including bringing in Chip Kelly as offensive coordinator, the UO has been spot-on with its leadership decisions. Look at all the blooms in Oregon’s garden.

Sunday, Duck softball made its first Super Regional in school history. The accomplishment is impressive alone, but beating a top 10 seed twice – once by nine runs and the other after blowing a two-run 7th inning lead – makes it extraordinary.

Keep in mind, this is Mike White’s first year.

In the last seven days, Oregon’s women’s golf finished its first NCAA Championship appearance in ten years. Head Coach Ria Quiazon was hired last summer.

Casey Martin and his men’s golf team made good on its top-seed designation, beating the NCAA Southwest Regional field by 10 strokes. He earned Pac-10 Coach of the Year and had a Co-Player of the Year – Eugene Wong – for only the second time in school history.

Paul Westhead proved to be the right selection for women’s basketball, guiding Oregon to the postseason with its most wins in three years. The talent of Taylor Lilley and Micaela Cocks definitely helped the cause, but the team’s finish has helped Westhead pick up interest from a top in-state recruit.

Vin Lananna was hired in 2005. Men’s track and field has won four straight Pac-10 Championships. Need I say more?

Even Felicia Mulkey’s first year Stunts and Gymnastics team placed third at its final championship.

Then there’s baseball. By far the coaching hire with the most expectations, but Head Coach George Horton is meeting and with a possible NCAA Regional hosting nod Sunday, will excel significantly beyond the requirements.

Bill Moos built the facilities to attract not just athletes, but A-plus coaches as well. Pat Kilkenny deserves recognition for capitalizing on the infrastructure. Do the examples above give you faith in his hiring of Dana Altman?

A great garden stays beautiful throughout the year. The satisfaction of the crop doesn’t come from one season’s plants alone. But when the year starts with a rose bush that hasn’t bloomed since 1994, there’s plenty of optimism for a banner year.

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Get more of Ryan’s Goofing Around on the KUGN Morning News. Email him at ryan@kugn.com.

With each drop that’s been wiped from the Ducks’ administrative windshield, it has become more clear that the possible mistakes made in Ernie Kent’s firing (depending on his replacement – if one ever is found) and a $2.3 million payment made to help Bellotti move on, may not be as damaging as the fact that Bellotti was asked to move on in the first place.

I don’t know what Bellotti’s initial thoughts were when then-UO President Dave Frohnmayer announced the future succession plan, nor do I know what prompted Bellotti to execute the plan earlier than fans expected. I hope to have the right to that conversation someday. As a native Montanan, I missed the first third of Bellotti’s coaching career. If it delivered results, or even hope, like his 21st century results did, why was a succession plan necessary? Instead of looking forward, why wasn’t the university embracing the current?

Bellotti vacated his coaching position the winningest coach in Oregon history; the longest tenured coach in the Pac-10; being a knee injury to Dennis Dixon from ending Oregon’s Rose Bowl drought two years ahead of pace. Without the word voluntary, pen never finds its way to the succession plan paper. Given what has transpired since Coach took a “promotion” to athletic director, was the movement worth losing a historic coach?

The sunny side always seems to be the way I’m facing – which more often than not is in the same direction as tradition. I don’t see what was preventing Bellotti from becoming the Pacific Northwest Schembechler. As much as I hate to admit it – having begged Duck football to just make the Rose Bowl - but Oregon may have been in the BCS Championship in 2007. If Belloti coaches twenty years and even makes a title game, he deserves to be somewhere between Paterno and Bo.

If the alternative to Chip Kelly leaving is Bellotti still at the helm, Oregon fans wouldn’t loot Oakway, but instead head into each season confident. Kelly will have success at Oregon. We all can mutually agree on that. It just wasn’t worth the mutual loss of Coach Bellotti.

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Get more of Ryan’s Goofing Around on the KUGN Morning News. Email him at ryan@kugn.com

Sports is what makes us interested in an afternoon burglary trial; makes us read blogs and call into radio shows. If two literature professors at the University of Oregon stole two microscopes and a Petri dish from Huestis Hall, there wouldn’t be as many ears tuned-in or breaths wasted. Sports is aggravating and the idea of your team, whom you feel represents you and vice versa, embarrassing you actually crawls under your skin. It isn’t fun to answer questions and absorb teases by rival fans – and sports is supposed to be fun.

Fun is definition of Oregon’s four-day high school basketball tournaments. I have been lucky enough to be involved on the frontend and the backend of all six versions – from Baker City to Eugene. For the smaller tournaments in the east, these championships are top two revenue generators for the hosts. Locals welcome the fans, coaches and players with homemade food, smiles, and genuine excitement. Your spending of an extended weekend, watching hoops on the Phoenix Suns’ old court in the Pendleton Convention Center absolutely thrills them. And the basketball games equal the citizens’ thankfulness. I watched the best girls basketball game I’ve ever seen at Baker City. Every game is all in and for two hours at a time, the only show in that portion of the state.

Prior to the larger classifications’ final sites shrinking from 16 teams to eight, I migrated to Oregon before the change and witnessed Jordan Kent’s Churchill Lancers in the 4A tournament at Memorial Coliseum. While the field was cut in half, the games’ quality was not. At Mac Court, after calling a game by each championship participant, I walked the Mac Court maze to the 300s and with my alumnus wife, watching her South Medford Panthers lose to Kevin Love’s Lake Oswego Lakers by two. The next year, we returned to the almost identical spot to see Kyle Singler and the Panthers get revenge – by four. The totality of the atmosphere wasn’t created just by dunks and lead changes, but with South Medford’s pep band and cheerleaders – which I normally prefer to stay out of the way – energize the capacity on hand with a wicked drum beat and the perfect crowd response in harmonic time. I was breathless.

So much is right about the first weeks of March. The OSAA basketball tournaments have highlights, anticipation, emptiness, heartbreak – but all of it is in the middle of fun. It gave me the escape I needed and supplied it to others who needed it too. If you could have used it, remember the greatness of prep sports. If you remember the magic from when you and/or your kid played, rekindle it soon. The first official day for high school baseball is today; the next basketball tournament is in only one year. By that time, Duck fans may not need it as a distraction and I hope your attendance is a supplement. If it isn’t (so help us all), then a high school tournament will be a necessity. Either way, four days at this event will get you back into fun.

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Get more of Ryan’s Goofing Around on the KUGN Morning News. Email him at ryan@kugn.com

Despite being the second year of operation, the presence of permanent seats and a roof have made 2010 the rebirth of PK Park. Thus, I’m allowed to judge its culinary appeal as an initial impression. Although a cheeseburger was my first inkling, I knew a hot dog was the go-to at the park. Fowl Territory has a green, half-barrel shaped awning covering tables with coned tents toward the reserved seats. Tempting spectators immediately through the gates are massive steel barbeques grilling the carne – and that was when I first noticed the dog. In my mind – “foot long”, “bun size” and the rest of the infomercial words that usually appear in jagged, pop-up boxes on a TV screen.

To save you time in your dog quest, you buy the bun at the larger cone tent and take it to the keeper of the dog. I acceptingly bought my eight dollar bun with potato chips and worked back toward the grill. Charred with spaced hash marks, the hot dog was centered into the bun. I had wanted to get to the press box before I enjoyed, but it teased me to start barely up the first set of stairs. I am not a stranger of food; this squeezable body wasn’t achieved by slowly chewing my bites to aid metabolism, but rather through the mastery of the-eat-and-walk.

It was in my jaunt that the dream of PK Park pork (et al) perfection died. It was cold. Not ice, but disguised. Working my way to the center, it wasn’t botched badly enough to make me stop – but try the other end. There probably shouldn’t be, but was, the contemplation of whether hot dogs start out raw or precooked. I wished for the latter. Nonetheless, I couldn’t scarf down the whole thing.

Oh sure – there were over 2,600 fans on day one. The Ducks turned around a 5-3 loss from last year’s first meeting between the two (in Seattle). But with all the positives, a ball park dog is the staple that demands perfection. Afterall, it wasn’t like they needed to spend extra time prepping the “grass.”

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Get more of Ryan’s Goofing Around on KUGN News at Five. Email him at ryan@kugn.com