It's been 248 days since Pete Hughes pulled off his Kansas State uniform for the last time after a 2025 baseball season that ended with a second consecutive appearance in an NCAA Regional. Hughes now sits on a folding chair in the team meeting room at Tointon Family Stadium for the team's media day event, flanked by four players, and for the next 30 minutes discusses the Wildcats — and how far they could go in 2026.
There is a young boy. His name is Tah Chikomba. He lives in Zimbabwe with his mother, Vonai Siwela, and his siblings on the countryside. Friends have been shot, others killed for illegal acts such as stealing. Young boys, they don't have much, they join gangs, and this becomes the game they play. They play with their lives.
The Country of Curacao is a constituent island country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located in the southern Caribbean Sea. Curacao has a population of about 150,000, and you can drive around the island in less than two hours. Curacao joins Aruba and other Dutch islands of the Caribbean to form the Dutch Caribbean.
During his first full weekend in Manhattan, Mekhi Mason fought through windchills of 16 degrees below zero. One day, he struggled to navigate his car through snow on the way to practice. Another day, he took a brisk walk with teammates to the indoor practice facility wearing only his gray t-shirt and purple shorts. Each morning, there were two-hour workouts, conditioning exercises, and school.
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