It is quite a rare occurrence for a player to be hated by their own club for so long. The tale of Kai Havertz is certainly interesting, but it just makes sense. When you score a club defining goal, you become a club defining player, regardless of what happened before the moment. Havertz turned contenders into champions and anxious fans into content ones.
This past Saturday, Tufts’ campus was buzzing with the excitement of the NESCAC tournament. Both men’s and women’s soccer competed for conference titles on Bello field, volleyball kicked off its tournament run in Cousens Gymnasium and field hockey faced fourth-seeded Wesleyan.
The phrase ‘better late than never’ is often used and usually rings true. Still, those four words don’t account for the rollercoaster of emotions that completing a task before ‘never’ brings. The Tufts women’s soccer team experienced this rollercoaster twice this past weekend, as they scored a late goal to beat Colby and a late equalizer that yielded a penalty shootout win over Williams to claim the 2025 NESCAC crown.
As the Tufts men’s basketball team gears up to tip off its season on Friday at Babson, they are driven by experience, hunger and a shared commitment to accountability. Building off of last year’s success, the Jumbos have a great advantage with all five starters returning.
Officially a week into the college hoops season, the storylines are already rolling in. As usual, there weren’t many ranked matchups, but the ones we did have offered good insight into the year ahead. Let’s take a look at three early storylines.
There are a lot of dysfunctional, disastrous and downright depressing teams in the world of athletics. These are teams that always find themselves with high draft picks that become busts, miss the playoffs year after year and just as a wave of optimism appears, still seem to encounter the most unfortunate of events. The Colorado Rockies, Oakland Athletics, Charlotte Hornets and Cleveland Browns all sit among the pyramid of sports misery, but there is one unlucky team that lies above them all … the New York Jets.
Victor “Wemby” Wembanyama is changing the way I view basketball.
Coming off a steamrolling 41–20 win against Williams last week, Tufts football looked like it had settled into its groove against its fellow NESCAC opponents. However, Tufts came up short against Colby on Saturday.
Tufts field hockey faced off against Amherst on Saturday in their first game of the NESCAC tournament: the quarterfinal. The Jumbos had already defeated the Mammoths 3–1 in October, setting the stage for another tight battle between the two teams. Tufts entered the tournament as the No. 1 seed, with an impressive 10-game winning streak and a 13–2 record that topped the conference. Amherst was the No. 8 seed with an 8–7 record before last weekend’s matchup.
The Jumbos came out victorious after five close sets in their match against No. 14 Wesleyan on Friday. Tufts won 25–22, 25–21, 25–21, 25–22, 15–12 in its final regular season game. The Jumbos entered the match at No. 4 in the NESCAC rankings and No. 1 in the national top 25 poll. They handed Wesleyan, first in the NESCAC, its only conference loss of the season.
Baseball is a truly evil sport. I have chosen to open my column with this sentence for many reasons, which I will try to sum up here in terms of my horrific experience with the 2025 MLB season.
Antonio Brown. That guy? Oh, yeah, how’s he doing? The man who became a social media trend in 2021 for angrily throwing his jersey into the stands at MetLife Stadium in a game between the New York Jets and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and who is now under a bevy of legal trouble, has a reputation as one of the most controversial, yet talked about players in the NFL — for all the wrong reasons.
On Tuesday, the field hockey team hit the road for its final game of the regular season against Bowdoin College. Entering the matchup at No. 1, Tufts held an 8–1 conference record compared to Bowdoin’s 5–4 mark. Both teams were among the three NESCAC squads to defeat reigning Division III Champion Middlebury College.
The first day of the NCAA hoops season is less than a week away. We’ve already had our first taste of basketball, with a plethora of great NBA games kicking off the league’s opening week. Not only that, but the college preseason exhibition games have been highly competitive this year. This is almost entirely thanks to the rule change implemented in January, which allows these matchups to be streamed and officially scored for the first time.
When the Class of 2026 first took the field for the Tufts men’s soccer team, the world was a vastly different place. ChatGPT was not yet released, Queen Elizabeth II was still the monarch of the United Kingdom and Luka Dončić was still a Dallas Maverick. Despite all the turmoil, one constant has remained across the last four years — the Jumbos have continued to win soccer matches.
Finishing off Part 1 of Monday’s article, these are a few more players that could return to or join the Boston Red Sox next year.
Free agency is rapidly approaching in Major League Baseball, and after an impressive 2025 season, Boston Red Sox fans are eagerly waiting to see what additions will be made to Manager Alex Cora’s squad. The narrative surrounding the team has completely shifted — what was once uncertainty has turned into optimism about the franchise’s future, all within just six months.
Tufts field hockey faced Middlebury last Saturday in one of the most anticipated games of the season. Last year’s NCAA championship game saw the Jumbos fall 2–1 to the Panthers in a closely contested battle, though Tufts had beaten Middlebury during the regular season. Needless to say, the Jumbos entered this rematch with an extra chip on their shoulders against the defending champions.
No. 4 Tufts faced top NESCAC opponent No. 10 Middlebury in an away game on Saturday. The top 10 matchup proved to be a difficult test for the Jumbos, ending scoreless.
LaVar Ball deserves credit for painstakingly molding his three sons, Lonzo, LiAngelo and LaMelo, into elite basketball players and celebrities from their earliest years. The three brothers became a sensation in 2016 at Chino Hills High School, and now two of them are established NBA players. The middle child is a rapper. But what happens when the manufacturing of children into elite athletes fails?
