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www.insideHALTON.com | OAKVILLE BEAVER | Thursday, May 8, 2014 | 24 HALTON TRANSMISSION 559 SPEERS RD., #UNIT 3 905-842-0725 www.haltontransmission.com Jon Kuiperij Sports Editor sports@oakvillebeaver.com Sports E N D C A N C E R "Connected to your Community" F I G H T I N G T O Former Loyola student to play NCAA basketball at Tulsa Oakville's Petar Rusic has signed a national letter of intent to join the University of Tulsa men's basketball team next year. "We're excited about Petar being a part of the Tulsa family," said Golden Hurricanes coach Frank Haith. "He is an experienced player, a very talented shooter and a very bright young man. He is a tough kid. We're excited to have him join our program, and we look forward to seeing him on the court for us next season." Rusic, a 6-foot-3 shooting guard who was a member of the Loyola Hawks' silver-medal winning team at the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations championships, attended Findlay Prep in 2011-12 but missed the season due to a knee injury. He went on to attend 22 Feet Academy in Jackson, Ky., in 2012-13, where he averaged 19.3 points per game while shooting 44 per cent from three-point range. "I loved coaching Petar, because he was obviously a very good shooter," said Ryan Schmidt, Rusic's coach at 22 Feet Academy. "The second-best attribute I loved was his toughness. He's tough as nails. I think from a fan standpoint, they're going to love watching him play." Rusic, who sat out last season, is the first signing by Haith, Tulsa's first-year coach. Locals win lacrosse title with RIT Oakville's Brad Gillies and Braden Wallace helped the Rochester Institute of Technology Tigers win their third straight Liberty League field lacrosse title. RIT built an 11-6 lead through three quarters and then held off a fourth-quarter rally by Union to win 13-11. Gillies has three goals and 10 assists in 18 games for the Tigers and ranks third on the team with 45 ground balls. Wallace has 12 goals and nine assists in 18 games. Wallace had a pair of goals and Gillies scored once in a 19-9 win over St. Lawrence in the semifinals. Wallace also set up RIT's first goal in the final. RIT is undefeated this season Sports Briefs with an 18-0 mark and its league title earned a first-round bye in the NCAA Division III championship tournament. RIT will face the winner of Ithaca and Montclair State's first-round game. Burloak paddler medals at World Cup A day after earning a bronze medal in the C1 (canoe singles) 1,000-metre, Burloak Canoe Club's Mark Oldershaw upgraded to a silver in the C1 500m Sunday at the season-opening ICF Canoe Sprint World Cup in Milan, Italy. Oldershaw turned in a time of one minute, 50.312 seconds to finish less than a second behind Brazil's Isaqu Queiroz Dos Santos. The Burlington resident posted the fastest time over the final 250m but couldn't overcome the margin Queiroz Dos Santos had built in the first half of the race. Saturday in the 1,000m, in a departure from his past race strategy, Oldershaw charged to the front of the field and led at the midway point. He slipped to third over the final 500m and held off Hungary's Henrik Vasbanyai to claim the bronze. The Olympic bronze medallist finished in a time of 3:54.876, beating Vasbanyai by 0.15 of a second. Olympic gold medallist Sebastian Brendel of Germany took first in 3:51.756 while Queiroz Dos Santos was second. Oldershaw also turned in a ninth-place finish in the 200m. Burloak teammate Adam van Koeverden missed out on a medal after finishing fourth in the K1 (kayak singles) 1,000m. It was van Koeverden's first international 1,000m race since the Olympics in 2012 after competing in K2 with Brady Reardon last year. Van Koeverden also finished sixth in the 500m and eighth in the 5,000m. The next World Cup race is in two weeks in Racice, Czech Republic. Oakville residents Derek VanDoorn (left) and Simon Miller will make their competitive boxing debuts later this month at the Fight to End Cancer event, a fundraiser for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation. Van Doorn, a lawyer, and Miller, a sales consultant for Oracle, got their first taste of boxing at Just Train It Oakville, an organization that utilizes the sport of boxing to get people in shape through one-on-one personal training and small group boxing classes. FIght to End Cancer will take place May 31 at Kingsway Boxing Club in Toronto. For more information on the event or to sponsor either fighter, log onto www.fighttoendcancer.com. | photo by Graham Paine -- Oakville Beaver -- @Halton_Photog Oakville teen beats out X Games veterans at freeskiing worlds by Herb Garbutt Oakville Beaver Staff The podium included an X Games slopestyle gold medallist and a two-time X Games silver medallist. The field of 67 competitors at the Association of Freeskiing Professionals (AFP) world championships in Whistler also featured the Olympic silver medallist and two other X Games medallists. And standing atop the podium was Oakville's Evan McEachran, who had finished 29th at last year's event. Just a month ago, he sat 20th in the AFP world rankings and had yet to earn a medal at a platinum-level AFP event. Did McEachran feel like he was crashing a party? "Maybe a little bit," he said. "I'm alright with that." His rivals have no one to blame but themselves if they didn't see the 17-year-old coming. McEachran announced his arrival three weeks earlier with a fourth-place finish at the Dumont Cup, against perhaps an even tougher field in another AFP platinum-level event. But his late-season surge had its beginnings back in January. While Canada's winter athletes were preparing for the Olympics, many of whom McEachran had trained alongside as a member of Canada's development team, he was just trying to establish a name for himself on the slopestyle circuit. At the North Face Park and Pipe Open Series, he earned his first victory in a gold-level Association of Freeskiing Professionsee Snowboarder on p.25 Oakville's Evan McEachran holds up an oversized cheque for $6,000 after winning gold at the Association of Freeskiing Professionals world championships recently in Whistler. | photo submitted