Dan Rube ’88 arrived at Amherst as a tennis player interested in math. Some thirty-odd years later, he is now the executive vice president and deputy general counsel at the National Basketball Association. Although he’s had quite a few stops along the way, the manner of thinking and engaging with the world that he absorbed at Amherst has never stopped guiding his choices.
Math and Tennis Early On
Last week, the Amherst volleyball team split a pair of road conference matches against Conn. College and Wesleyan before besting Stevens Institute of Technology in an out-of-conference affair. They have a current record of 11-4.
The Mammoths entered last Friday’s tilt with the Camels boasting a six-game win streak, but the hosts quickly halted any momentum Amherst carried into the match, winning the first set 25-20.
Boasting a three-game winning streak and buoyed by an exhilarating upset of Bowdoin, the Amherst women’s field hockey team entered last weekend’s matchup with Middlebury on a high. However, the Panthers proved too much for the upstart Mammoths, as Amherst suffered its first setback of the season in a 2-1 loss.
After suffering a pair of hard-fought 3-2 losses early last week to Endicott and Middlebury, the Amherst volleyball team managed to string together three consecutive wins against out-of-conference foes, gathering momentum for the weeks ahead.
After an up and down 2016 season, the Amherst women’s volleyball team hopes that this campaign will mark a return to the form of two years ago that saw the Firedogs make it to the second round of the NCAA tournament.
With an impressive stable of upperclassmen talent and a wealth of postseason experience, Amherst has the necessary ingredients to make a return to NCAAs.
Leading the way for the Firedogs is the four-woman strong senior class of Annika Reczek, Asha Walker, Marialexa Natsis and Kate Antion.
Last season, Amherst men’s tennis was frustratingly inconsistent. A roster with talent up and down the lineup played breathtaking tennis at times, nearly knocking off top-ranked Emory and posting both 10- and 11-game win streaks. However, the Mammoths also fell twice to their archrival Williams, with the latter loss ending Amherst’s season in the third round of NCAAs.
The Amherst women’s tennis team enters the fall portion of their season on the back of a somewhat disappointing 2016-17 campaign that saw the team eliminated in the first round of the NESCAC tournament and the second round of nationals, a far cry from the team’s recent stretch of dominance.
However, the Mammoths lost few players to graduation and, with the expected jumps in performance by many of the team’s talented sophomores and juniors, there is plenty of excitement around the upcoming campaign.
