All Bets Are On is back with an action-packed podcast that covers the gamut of local sports information.

Co-hosts Christopher Boan and Tyler Vondrak tackle Arizona softball's NCAA Tournament regional at Hillenbrand Stadium this weekend and whether Mike Candrea's squad can return to the Women's College World Series.

The duo then tackle this week's NBA Draft Lottery, which saw the Suns tumble to the sixth pick, defying the odds. The pair cover whether Phoenix is the most cursed pro sports market in America and what can be done to rebuild its standing nationally.

The pair finish Friday's show with a segment on Saturday's Preakness Stakes, with Vondrak donning his Picks of the Dragon hat to choose a few contenders in Baltimore.

Vondrak also discusses the controversy surrounding the conclusion of May 4's Kentucky Derby, which led to race winner Maximum Security's disqualification.

Tune in each Friday for a new segment of the Weekly's only sports podcast. 

The memorial service for longtime Arizona football coach Dick Tomey will be held at McKale Center on Friday, May 31.

The service, which is scheduled to start at 9:00 a.m. local time, will honor the winningest coach in Wildcats history.

Tomey, who passed away last Friday, May 10 from lung cancer, coached in Tucson from 1987-2000, posting a career win-loss record of 183-145-7 during his coaching career.

Tomey came to Tucson in 1987, after coaching at the University of Hawaii from 1977 to 1986. He finished his career at San Jose State, coaching the Spartans from 2005 to 2009.

Tomey's family asks that in lieu of flowers, that fans and supporters donate money to the Dick Tomey Legacy Fund.

The marine layer settled into UCLA’s Easton Stadium this weekend like a cold, damp blanket–forcing players and coaches alike to grab their heaviest jackets.

The damp, chilly weather off the field contrasted the red-hot action on it, as two of the nation’s hottest softball teams battled it out.

Both visiting Arizona and the mighty Bruins entered the weekend series ranked in the top-10 nationally, with the former ranked sixth and the latter third in the latest polls.

Both sides traded blows on the perfectly manicured playing surface in Westwood all weekend long, with the Wildcats coming away with two wins in three tries.

The series win was the team’s first over the Bruins since the 2011 season, representing another monumental achievement for a Wildcats team that’s strung wins together with ease this spring, entering the NCAA Tournament with a 42-12 record to their name.

The two west coast powers engaged in a weekend to remember, with the Wildcats storming back from multiple deficits to win game one on Thursday night, 5-3.

The coup de gras for the Wildcats in Thursday’s opener was a go-ahead, three-run home run off the bat of redshirt junior outfielder Alyssa Palomino-Cardoza in the top of the seventh inning.
The home run, which came off UCLA ace Rachel Garcia, gave the visitors a two-run lead they’d never relinquish.

A night later, the Bruins exacted a measure of revenge, scoring three runs in the bottom of the fourth inning to erase a one-run lead by the Wildcats.

Saturday’s series finale featured a home run by a spot-starter that has split time between the field and the pitcher’s circle, as Hanah Bowen smacked her first career homer to open the scoring.
Teammate Malia Martinez added on with a two-run home run of her own to give Arizona. 3-0 entering the fourth inning.

Pitcher Gina Snyder earned the win on Saturday, pitching five innings of one-run ball to improve her yearlong record to 5-0 for the Wildcats. 


The win propelled Arizona into a national seed in the NCAA Softball Tournament, meaning the Wildcats won’t have to leave Tucson until the Women’s College World Series, should they reach that point.

Mike Candrea’s team has not reached the WCWS in Oklahoma City since 2010, with their last title coming in 2007.

Candrea’s team will have their first chance to host a regional in the newly-renovated Rita Hillenbrand Stadium this weekend.

His team will host Auburn University, Colorado State and Harvard in the Tucson regional between Friday, May 17 and Sunday, May 19.

Candrea, who has coached at Arizona since 1986, talked about the meaning of hosting the regional in the team’s $15 million upgraded facility.

“Well anytime I go in that facility I love it, so it's been a blessing and it's been a lot of fun,” Candrea said. “I think it’ll be a great kick off for the new facility.”

The Wildcats enter the first weekend of the tournament with a full head of momentum, thanks to their gutsy performance in Westwood.

A trip to Oklahoma City is around the corner, with the Wildcats having their best chance in years to reach the sport’s biggest stage for the first time in close to a decade.

Candrea’s team is on the doorstep of history, seeming to emerge from the fog of recent postseason stumbles.

Here’s hoping the team’s breakthrough in the gloomy weather of Southern California can lead to sunny skies in the weeks ahead.

Ask anybody who ever experienced success as a football player to describe the coach who had the greatest impact on him and the response will almost always go something like, “Oh man, he was hard on me. He’d yell and scream, get in my face and cuss me out…I loved that dude.”

When you talk to guys who played for Dick Tomey, the former University of Arizona football coach who died Friday at the age of 80 from lung cancer, they generally skip over the preamble and go right to the “I loved that dude.”

This is not to say that Tomey didn’t have the fire and the fury, but he interacted with his players on a more-personal level. One of his best quotes was, “Football isn’t complicated. People are.”
Tomey went out of his way to get to know his players and to try to learn how best to motivate each one. Keith Smith, who shared the quarterbacking duties with Ortege Jenkins during Arizona’s best-ever season, remembered that Tomey somehow treated the two QBs “totally different(ly), but exactly the same.” He was known for his honestly, his compassion and his love of people.

Dick Tomey followed the usual circuitous coaching route, serving as an assistant here and a coordinator there before finally landing his first head coaching job, taking over a woefully bad Hawai’i Rainbow Warriors program. Through force of will and grit, he turned the Warriors into a winner, going 63-46-4 over a 10-year period. What’s funny is that his record on the island averages out to just a little bit better that 6-5, a season record that would follow him around.

While Tomey was building a winner in Honolulu, three time zones to the east, Larry Smith was working wonders in Tucson. Smith had taken over a program that was in the dregs of the Pac-10 AND was in the NCAA doghouse for a variety of violations committed during the previous coach’s tenure. Smith became a local hero when his underdog Cats knocked Arizona State out of a berth in the Rose Bowl in 1982. Smith then built Arizona into something of a power and twice nearly took the Cats to Pasadena on New Year’s Day. It seemed inevitable that Smith would leave for a bigger program. When he did, he did so rather inelegantly to in-conference rival USC.

Arizona then hired Dick Tomey, who was met with a collective “Who?” by Arizona fans. Smith’s last Wildcat team had gone 9-3 and finished the season ranked 11th in the country. Tomey’s first team was the absolute picture of mediocrity, finishing 4-4-3 (back in those days, college games could end in a tie). His next two teams went 7-4 and 8-4, respectively, and Cat fans began to warm to the coach with the folksy charm and preternatural calm.

There was nothing flashy about his teams. The offense scored when it could, special teams did their jobs, but the members of the defense played like their butts were on fire. Two members of the vaunted “Desert Swarm” defense—Tedy Bruschi and Rob Waldrop—are in the College Football Hall of Fame. That 1993 team started a six-year streak in which the Cats won 48 games. (In the 1990s, Tomey’s Wildcats would win more games than any other team in the Pac-10.) It culminated with the 1998 team that went 12-1, missed the Rose Bowl by the flukiest of flukes and ended the season ranked No. 4 in the country.

But when his next two teams went a combined 11-12, the fickle fans called for a change, something most have probably regretted to this day. What has followed is 18 years with a combined record of 103-119 for Arizona football under three coaches (John Mackovic, Mike Stoops and Rich Rodriguez) who won occasionally but mostly brought shame to Arizona with their sideline antics.

A lot of long-time Tucsonans remember Tomey for the way he was off the field. He played in a men’s baseball league, competing against people half his age. And he didn’t play first base or right field; he played catcher, a position that is brutal on an older guy’s knees.

One time I took my daughter to see Tucson legend Linda Ronstadt in concert with Aaron Neville. As the crowd waited for the Tucson Convention Center doors to open, I spotted Tomey and his wife, Nanci. Other coaches might have Big Timed it, huffing and puffing as to why he wasn’t being given special treatment. But Tomey was just part of the crowd. He made small talk with the people around him, always including his wife in the conversation.

I had seen him at press conferences, but I have no idea if he recognized my face. But he asked how I was doing. I introduced my daughter, Darlene. He got a big smile on his face and said, “Father-daughter concert date. That’s so nice.”

I turned to the couple standing behind us and said, “Dick Tomey approves. I’m Father of the Year!”

Tomey’s overall coaching record of 183-145-7 in 29 seasons averages out to 6.3-5. His Arizona record of 95-64 averages out to 6.8-4.8. But those are just numbers. Dick Tomey once won the Provost Award as the UA’s best teacher. I’m pretty sure that’s a record that will never be broken.

Alyssa Palomino-Cardoza stepped up to the plate inside Westwood's Easton Stadium in the top of the seventh with a chance to be the hero.

The redshirt junior outfielder was looking to do damage in a tie game with mighty UCLA, who had beat the Wildcats in five-straight games dating back to 2017.

Palomino-Cardoza was waiting for a single mistake from UCLA's world-class starting pitcher, Rachel Garcia, who entered the night with an unblemished 20-0 record in the pitcher's circle.

Garcia, while intimidating, was far from perfect on Thursday, throwing a belt-high changeup that Palomino-Cardoza crushed over the robin's egg blue center field wall, giving Arizona a 5-3 lead they'd never surrender.

The redshirt junior described her final at-bat against Garcia in her postgame comments, taking everyone through what she saw in her final plate appearance.

"I'm just in there keeping it simple. I felt my eyes were good all night, so just to see the ball down, and find a pitch to drive," Palomino-Cardoza said. "And, I saw the 0-2 changeup and I just took a stab at it and put everything I had into it. I knew off the bat it felt sweet."

The road to Palomino-Cardoza game-winning home run was long and twisty on a damp evening in northwest Los Angeles.

The Bruins (45-4, 19-3) struck first in the game's opening inning, when Garcia hit an RBI single to give the Bruins a 1-0 edge.

UCLA was able to load the bases in the first off Arizona pitcher Taylor McQuillin with one out when a routine fly ball turned into an inning-ending double play.

The lead Bruin on the basepaths was ruled to have left third base early on the fly-out, which led to her run being disallowed and the inning coming to an abrupt end.

That bit of fortune would serve the Wildcats well in the long-run, as McQuillin would settle down and the Wildcats bats would wake up.

The opening salvo for Mike Candrea's squad came in the top of the fourth, when senior Rylee Pierce laced a Garcia pitch over the right field wall to tie the game at 1.

The Bruins would regain the lead in their half of the fourth, after an RBI single by leadoff hitter Bubba Nickles and a solo homer by Briana Tautalafua to take a 3-1 lead.

The Wildcats struck back in a big way in the top of the fifth, however, when shortstop Jessie Harper crushed a pitch into the netting behind the left field fence for a game-tying, two-run home run.

Those episodes set the stage for Palomino-Cardoza's at-bat to remember, giving the Wildcats (41-11, 18-4) a fighting chance at tying the Bruins for a Pac-12 title.

"We come here to get the sweep, knowing that doing so would get us a share of the conference title, but we knew we could do it," Palomino-Cardoza said. "You know, we can sweep this team and we're strong enough and we're going to put up a fight. We won't go down easy."

Candrea's postgame remarks summed up the assortment of emotions that swirled through the ballpark on Thursday night.

For the longtime Arizona coach, his team's ability to finally thwart the Bruins, and to do so on UCLA's home field, shows what this team can do.

Candrea touched on how badly the Wildcats needed Thursday's win, given how they were swept in Tucson by the Washington Huskies a week ago.

"It was huge in a lot of ways. I mean, number one, we needed a victory. I mean, after last weekend," Candrea said. "But I think the big thing is how we played and how Taylor [McQuillin] pitched. I kind of saw a different gear in her the last couple innings, and going in the postseason, we have to play like that that."

Candrea's mention of McQuillin was apt, given the senior's strong showing in the series opener, with the southpaw taming a vicious Bruins lineup for much of the night.

McQuillin finished the night with eight hits, three earned runs, four walks and six strikeouts to her credit.

What the box score doesn't convey, according to Candrea, is how hard the senior worked to stay one step ahead of the Bruins in the opener.

"I think that it's been part of our process. I think we had a long discussion after last week, and the big thing is trying to embrace the pressure situations and being able to control yourself, and stay in the attack mode," Candrea said. "I think she did all those things."

McQuillin touched on the team's mindset against UCLA, with the Wildcats looking to do whatever they could to snap their three-game losing streak.

"I think there was a different energy and a different vibe with our team today and on and off the field, in the dugout, everybody was on cylinders ready to go," McQuillin said. "We just kind of kept chipping away, and we got the key hits at the right time and really shut the door down."

McQuillin, who upped her record to 20-7 for the season, heaped praise on her teammates for their ability to tame the mighty Bruins for the first time since May 7, 2017.

"We had some amazing plays in the outfield today. A couple key plays that really helped us out too, so it's a great feeling, but it's not done yet," McQuillin said. "We've got two more games left; we've got to come out and do it tomorrow and then finish off on Saturday."

The final two games of the series are at 5 p.m. on Friday and noon on Saturday, with the Pac-12 Network carrying both contests. 

The sixth-ranked Arizona Wildcats (40-11, 17-4) face their stiffest conference test this weekend, facing third-ranked UCLA for three games in Westwood, California.

The Wildcats enter the weekend series off a three-game sweep at the hands of the Washington Huskies, who beat Arizona by a combined score of 12-6.

Arizona goes into their final Pac-12 regular season series with a chance to take the regular season conference title, sitting two games behind the Bruins in the conference standings.

The Bruins (45-3, 19-2) took two of three from the Stanford Cardinal last weekend in their previous Pac-12 action.

UCLA is led by pitcher Rachel Garcia, who is 20-0 this season with an ERA of 0.71 in 23 appearances this season.

In 2018 the Wildcats were swept in three regular season games against the Bruins at home, and were swept by UCLA in the NCAA Tournament's Super Regional round.

Tonight's series opener is slated to start at 7 p.m. at UCLA's Easton Stadium, with the Pac-12 Network carrying all three games this weekend.

Who to Watch: Keep an eye on the aforementioned Garcia in the pitcher's circle for UCLA, as well as hitter Bubba Nickles, who is batting .403 this season, with a team-high 13 home runs and 55 RBIs for UCLA. Another hitter from UCLA to keep an eye on is Briana Perez, who is hitting .398 this year, with 10 doubles and 39 RBIs to her credit.

How to Watch: The three Arizona-UCLA softball games will be shown on the Pac-12 Network, with Thursday's game starting at 7 p.m., Friday's at 5 p.m. and Saturday's finale at noon. 

All Bets Are on is back, with co-hosts Christopher Boan and Tyler Vondrak covering the gamut of sports topics.

The duo breaks down the latest developments in the federal court hearing into former sports bookie Christian Dawkins, and the implication on tape that Sean Miller was paying Deandre Ayton $10,000 a month during his year in Tucson.

Then, the pair cover this weekend's Arizona-Washington softball series, which pits two of the top four teams in the latest RPI rankings. Both touch on the games themselves, as well as whether the Wildcats can make the Women's College World Series for the first time since 2010.

Finally, the duo discuss Saturday's Kentucky Derby, honing in on whether U of A alum Bob Baffert can win it all once again.

Vondrak gives his picks for the race, going against the prodigal son of Nogales, Arizona (for now, at least).

Tune in each Friday for a new segment of the Weekly's sports podcast. 

Arizona basketball coach Sean Miller's name has come up frequently during the federal court case against Christian Dawkins and co-defendant Merl Code.

Wednesday's proceedings included a wiretap that proports to show former Arizona assistant coach Emanuel 'Book' Richardson discussing an ongoing payment scheme to former Wildcat Deandre Ayton.

Ayton, who was selected number one overall in the 2018 NBA Draft, was mentioned by Richardson during a wiretapped conversation with Dawkins.

Among the damning evidence entered into record on Wednesday was this transcript, from Dan Wetzel and Pete Thamel's Yahoo Sports story. 

Amid the seven wiretaps played in court during the college basketball bribery trial, there were multiple inferences of Miller himself personally paying Ayton.

On one call between Dawkins and Richardson, the two discussed Ayton and the possibility of Dawkins’ management company eventually signing Ayton. That’s when Miller came up.

“You know what he bought per month,” Richardson said on the call concerning what Richardson believed was Miller’s agreement with Ayton.

“What he do?” Dawkins asked.

“I told you, 10,” Richardson said.

Later, Dawkins said, “Hey, he’s putting up some real money for them [racial slur].”

Also on the calls, the two discussed that Richardson did not need to use any of the $20,000 that Dawkins’ company was going to give him to pay Wildcat player Rawle Alkins because Miller was allegedly handling him.

“You already know, Sean’s taking care of Rawle and them,” Dawkins said. “So it ain’t no expense to Rawle. So that’s easy.”

Richardson has already pleaded guilty to accepting a $20,000 bribe as part of the FBI's investigation, and will be sentenced for his charge on May 30.

Co-hosts Christopher Boan and Tyler Vondrak return to touch on the latest sports information in the Tucson Weekly's only sports podcast.

This week's show covers the gamut, from the federal court hearing looking into former agent Christian Dawkins' ties to college basketball to Arizona softball's meteoric rise and Kyler Murray's arrival in Phoenix.

Vondrak puts on his Picks of the Dragon hat to select this weekend's winners in the NBA playoffs to close out the show.

Tune in each Friday to hear a new show on TucsonWeekly.com, as Boan and Vondrak break down the latest sports tidbits. 

The University of Arizona softball team is in the midst of a historic winning streak, with the Stanford Cardinal serving as its latest victim.

The Wildcats (38-7, 15-0) have won 20 games in a row after sweeping the Cardinal over the weekend. The Wildcats’ latest victories came in convincing fashion, beating the Cardinal by 7-0, 9-1 and 13-2 scores.

Arizona belted three home runs in Thursday night’s 7-0 opener, with Reyna Carranco, Dejah Mulipola and Hillary Edior all going deep. Senior southpaw Taylor McQuillin tossed a three-hit shutout in the pitcher’s circle on Thursday, striking out five hitters in seven innings of work. Friday’s game saw the home side use a five-run fifth inning to ensure a run-rule win, with Mulipola adding two more home runs and five RBIs, while Edior added a double and two RBIs of her own.

Junior pitcher Alyssa Denham threw four innings of one-run ball for the Wildcats on Friday, giving up three hits, while striking out four Cardinal.

Perhaps the brightest moment from Friday’s one-sided victory was the postgame celebration of coach Mike Candrea’s 1,600th win with the program.

Candrea, who started coaching at Arizona in 1986, became the first Division I coach to reach the 1,600-win plateau, taking the feat in-stride. 


“It means I'm older,” Candrea said. “I mean, I always go back to the coaches that have coached here and the players have played here, and to be able to sustain a level for this long, it takes a lot of different people. And so, it's really a tribute to all that have ever been in this program.”

Saturday’s matinee saw Arizona score 12 runs in the game’s third inning, with senior outfielder Alyssa Palomino-Cardoza and Malia Martinez smacking homers for the Wildcats.