Former Kansas University basketball point guard Jeff Hawkins will play professional basketball in Germany next season.
The 5-foot-11 native of Kansas City, Kan., who will leave in two weeks, will be out of the country for nine months.
“It’s a great opportunity for Jeff,” KU coach Bill Self said. “They sent him a contract. He called today and is excited about getting the opportunity to go over there and play. I’m happy for him.”
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Exhibition tickets: Tickets for an NBA exhibition game between former Kansas University guard Kirk Hinrich’s Chicago Bulls and forward Nick Collison’s Seattle SuperSonics, Oct. 15 in Allen Fieldhouse, will go on sale at 9 a.m., Aug. 14.
The tickets will be available at the Allen Fieldhouse box office, on kuathletics.com and by calling 785-864-3141. Prices are $60, $50, $40 and $25.
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Wright to Jordan camp: KU sophomore Julian Wright will work as a counselor at the Michael Jordan Flight School Youth Camp today through Aug. 10 in Santa Barbara, Calif. During the night campers’ games, he’ll play pickup basketball with the likes of Colorado’s Richard Roby, Texas A&M’s Acie Law, Duke’s Josh McRoberts, Nevada’s Nick Fazekas and many others.
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Still talking: Big 12 and Pac-10 officials continue to discuss a possible challenge series in basketball.
“The dilemmas we face in building something like that with them,” Big 12 commissioner Kevin Weiberg said, “is obviously they have 10 members and we have 12. We have different television entities that are involved in telecasting of our regular season basketball.”
ESPN owns the rights to Big 12 home games; Fox has the rights to Pac-10 contests.
“Nonetheless, I think we’re making some progress on a possible format that might work,” Weiberg said. “And we’ll be talking more to our administrators about that here in the coming weeks.
“I think our coaches, for really the first time in Colorado Springs (at Big 12 meetings) expressed pretty much unanimous support for us to try to move forward with something like that. So we seem to have good support at this time from our coaches. Now when we get down to the final approval process of bringing something like that forward and everybody looks at the details, we’ll have to see if that support is still there.”
KU begins a home-and-home series with Pac-10 member Southern California this season at Allen Fieldhouse, with a return game to Los Angeles in the 2007-08 campaign. The Jayhawks also have played Pac-10 schools Arizona, California, Oregon, UCLA and Stanford in recent seasons.
Discussions about a challenge series between the Big 12 and Southeastern Conference went nowhere a couple of years ago.
“They were interested in a fairly limited structure of games,” Weiberg said. “They also were thinking about more neutral sites. Our people wanted all conference members to have a chance to participate, and they wanted the games to occur on campus. So we really couldn’t find a way to reach agreement there. And the SEC moved on and reached agreement with the Big East.
“We’ve been interested in this concept for a while, not because other conferences do it, but because we’ve been searching for ways to continue to improve nonconference schedules across our conference which is an important factor in strength of conference and RPI. The Pac-10 has expressed a lot of interest in the possibility of partnering with us on that.”
