A trying season continued for the MACA girls basketball team on Saturday. Yes it was a Saturday affair in this winter that seems to be trying our souls. At least that's how I see it. The "beauty" of the Sunday frost sort of escaped me.
High school sports can lift our spirits as much as anything. But fans of the Tigers had to watch another disappointing performance Saturday. It was a 60-44 loss at the hands of Wheaton-Herman-Norcross.
On Sunday I put up a post on my "Morris of Course" companion blog that covers a lot of ground in recent Tiger/Storm athletics. You may click:
I'm happy to continue sharing about prep sports. My activities with this go back to 1972. Hey, our museum has an exhibit about the '70s in Morris. Imagine, nostalgia about the '70s. Disco music!
Wheaton-Herman-Norcross 60, Tigers 44
Well, it was close for a good portion of the first half. But the Tigers succumbed to a 9-0 run by the Warriors close to halftime. So WHN owned the lead halfway through, 35-28. They picked up where they left off in the second half. Brett Miller tells us their lead swelled to 18 points.
The Tigers had some fight left in them, as the margin later narrowed. But we were on the short end by 16 at the final horn.
Maddy Grove was productive like always, 20 points and nine boards. Maddie Fehr put in 14 points. Alas our loss skein grew to six. And our W/L plunged to 2-11. So it seems rather dispiriting but you should know that back in the '80s, Morris and Wheaton did not belong on the same court with each other. That's not exaggeration.
Wheaton had teams that could fill the UMM P.E. Center for tournament play, so many fans dressed in red. I called it a "sea of red" from my perch at the Morris newspaper. I then heard Janet Karvonen use the term in her broadcasting at state. No one in those days even spoke of Morris girls basketball as a contender for anything. We sleep-walked through seasons.
One year when the Hancock girls were in state, I wrote a little opinion piece that suggested Morris was a "sleeping giant" in girls basketball. Yes I dared do that - amazing - and amazing I wasn't hoisted out on my petard, not that there weren't a fair number of people who wanted to do that.
Of course I seemed like the positive one, n'est-ce pas? I mean, I was advocating for our programs in Morris. A young child could see there was something wrong. But we had community leaders, even - presumably people with a modicum of intelligence - who felt the most important thing for us all to do was to "look the other way."
Why? Well the top theory was about the bonds from personal friendships extending into the coaches. Teachers for some reason felt threatened by talk of how we should elevate true competitive standards. I mean, to really try to win more, because this really is the essence of sports.
A portion of academia would bristle at the things I wrote: the people who through some odd quirk of thinking seemed to suggest mediocrity in athletics was an indicator of "academic" quality. I put "academic" in quotes: I think the gravity of this term is fading in the Internet age, where people and kids can be self-starters for obtaining knowledge. And I'm speaking of the kind of knowledge that can really be useful for them, really truly. Not stale and dry stuff dispensed by stodgy educators who seemed to just have a racket going.
And they felt threatened by sports? By my writing about how we really ought to have legitimate volleyball and basketball programs for girls?
Volleyball did its turnaround in 1987 under a new coach. This should have spelled a whole new direction for girls athletics, but the progress proved to be halting. Not entirely futile, just halting. Morris really had to pull itself out of a staggering abyss where I think there were fundamental cultural issues. A lot of this was a holdover from the 1970s zeitgeist.
So long ago, we might forget a lot of that. One of my idiosyncrasies is that I do not forget.
OK I'll be positive: today I think the MACA athletic programs are quite sound. No athletic program is ever perfect. Some coaches are always better than others. The big triumph is with the eradication of the old cultural roadblocks. Those gave meaning to "albatross."
I'm sure a lot of parents and other fans knew of what I spoke, back when I wrote my contrarian stuff. But they were scared. There was little hope of their pushing for change. We saw a breakthrough in the late '80s but that episode sowed seeds of tremendous conflict in the community. Hoo boy, an element of our teachers pushed for boycotting certain businesses, with a fair amount of success. Makes me wince to this day. I felt for the parents who had businesses in town.
Boys basketball? Well, when I started at the newspaper, only juniors and seniors could be on varsity. No Jackson Loge or Riley Asmus until they were juniors. I could type several paragraphs on how that arrangement was bad from multiple angles. But why in hell did the community have to hear from me about this?
Amazingly I survived but with some slings and arrows obviously. My ability to be a positive force as a writer became curtailed. I have described myself as "the biggest wasted talent in the history of this community" and I do assert that. I'll be called names for doing so. There is residue, and that's what happens when you question a good old boy or good old girl system. Such is life.
"Ah Bartleby, ah humanity."
Thanks to Del Sarlette for sharing this frost photo from Sunday. My "Morris of Course" post has a photo taken by Del earlier in the morning when everything was hazy/gray.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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