Bad weather slackens for game at Big Cat

Breaking news as of Oct. 22 from WCCO, CBS Minnesota: "The head coach of the Kimball High School football team is off the job. WCCO has learned Johnny Benson was put on paid administrative leave from his coaching and teaching duties."
Wow, coaching and teaching.
Here's another "wow": "Benson is the grandson of former St. John's University coach John Gagliardi." 
Benson is on leave due to a complaint made against him. WCCO says "the Stearns County Sheriff's Office tells us Benson is part of an open investigation, but will not provide any more details."
WCCO says this is "a developing story" and to check back. (Ken Hamrum once corrected me on my pronunciation of "Gagliardi." It's gah-LAR-dee.)
Well, can't say I'm surprised we have this kind of drama in connection to football. It's a testosterone-fueled sport which is being dragged kicking and screaming out of a less-enlightened time into contemporary sensibilities. But can this be done without wiping out the sport itself? Perhaps we'd be thankful for that. Bring on soccer! How about volleyball for boys?
   

Big Cat Stadium was the focus for football excitement Tuesday evening: the playoffs!
Post-season playoffs did not exist when yours truly was in high school. It's hard to imagine that now. I remember interviewing Stan Kent at the time he retired from teaching, and the former MHS football coach said he really didn't like the idea. He said it's better for teams to just try to win their conference. Otherwise, he said, every team except the state champ is forced by necessity to end the season with a loss. That's rather downbeat, he felt.
Yours truly can offer another negative: as the season gets stretched out with the playoffs, the weather can become most uncooperative. What if our game against Kimball had been played on Monday instead of Tuesday? There was a vicious gale-force wind Monday.

I did not stop by Big Cat Stadium Tuesday to check the fan turnout. The weather had not completely cleared up on Tuesday, in my assessment. But the fans who were there enjoyed lots of highlights from the home team. The Tigers beat Kimball 47-12. It was a re-match of our Homecoming game in which we also won convincingly.
Rumors indicate that Kimball has faced some special adversity. Reportedly it has to do with some raw conduct or verbiage that is not directly related to players on the field. Some of this has been brought to my attention and it is troubling. Instructions to "take out" a certain Morris player? That's out of the movies. Like, maybe "Karate Kid." I cannot affirm the absolute truth of any of this. The fact such reports are circulating is troubling enough.
Maybe this is one reason I didn't stop by the game.
The Tigers own the No. 3 seed in Section 5AA. So on the strength of our resounding Wednesday success, it's on to the next round, the semi-finals. We can cross our fingers for decent weather. Our won-lost record now is 6-3.
A rare afternoon game is next for the orange and black. A neutral field will be the site on Saturday. We'll clash with Eden Valley-Watkins, the No. 2 seed, at the New London-Spicer field. Eden Valley-Watkins enters Saturday with a 5-3 mark. There's a reason for the neutral field: a sad state of affairs with the EV-W facility. Game-time is 2 p.m.
In my background of covering sports for the Morris newspaper, I learned that the scheduling of post-season football games is subject to change on short notice. I drove all the way to Minnewaska Area once in error because such a situation happened. You might want to confirm details before making the trip.
Kimball has had a sour season, apparently in more ways than one, and closes the books with the record at 1-8. Intense emotions in sports are often simply not worth it. When sports people get too excited about some issue, in most cases it's best to just push them aside.
 
Void in game reporting
Sorry I cannot report more details of the Morris-Kimball game. The Wednesday West Central Tribune of Willmar has no meaningful details of the game action. Don't know what's up with that.
The new Morris newspaper came out on Tuesday. It's interesting how this "meme" instantly was felt about how the new ownership is going to make such a difference. What are the most realistic expectations? What kind of content are you now really expecting, that wasn't in the paper before?
I talked with a table of four friends at DeToy's last night, and they quite bluntly said there's no difference. I would say there's no real discernible difference unless you think the new publisher's page 4 column is worth buying the paper for.
My goodness, I genuinely wish the new owners well. But maybe we're all just trying to grasp for something out of our past, from when local businesses were truly local and the owners were in the church pews with us on Sunday. I'm typing this Wednesday morning after having stopped at Casey's, where I saw a huge pile of Morris papers for sale. I have to wonder what the prospects really are, for selling a large number of them. We pay lip service to the new owners as if we're fully behind them now.
Wonder why I'm cynical? I actually wanted to have faith in Forum Communications when they took over from the classic local owners, the Morrisons. Yes, I could sense an element of detached non-local ownership, for sure, but I wanted to think that fundamentally the intentions were good. Yes, I was striving to be a glass-half-full person. Instead we seem to have gotten an empty glass, most evident at the end when the Forum was set to just close and move out, according to accounts from well-placed sources.
I see where the editor is leaving at present. She wrote a reflective farewell column. We wish her well as she reportedly re-locates to Sioux Falls. The new editor is going to have a tough job, based on how the community expects such an upward line on the graph. Outside of noticing a slightly larger page size with the "new" Morris paper, I'm sorry, I don't see a marked improvement. The problem perhaps is that the print media are being left behind in our digital-powered world whether we like it or not.
So we go online, and BTW where might we find details of the Tuesday Morris football game? Those details should be somewhere, period. The Willmar paper did not collect those details and the Morris paper website appears all but dead. I'm told the website was not part of the sale arrangement to the Anfinsons. Upon learning that, I communicated to a contact of mine in their organization that the lack of a real website is going to be a real liability, and it had better get addressed soon.
Oh well. I'm sure the Anfinsons know their interests more than I do. I'll wager that several people have called the paper asking what's up with their website, which appears to still be in the clutches of Forum Communications, that evil empire. I'm told that an obstacle was that the Forum has "proprietary material" on the site. Even if that's true, so what? Because people simply are not going to visit a dead site. It would have no value for anyone.
I have suggested that the Morris paper establish a temporary home on the web. Maybe just a blog. Such things can be set up for as little as zero expense. But again, I guess they don't need my suggestions. Tiger football fans should be able to go somewhere online and observe details for the Tiger game such as basic stats. It's elementary. So it's up to the coaching staff to see this gets done. It is essential public relations IMHO.
I did not notice a farewell column by Sue Dieter in the paper. She was the quite self-important, know-it-all manager of the paper over a pretty long tenure. She told the staff after I left in 2006 that "things will be better" with me gone.
I do know this: A lot of things didn't get done, that I had been doing before. The paper went into severe retrenchment, ending its Hancock product, going to once a week with the Morris paper and ending the free shopper. The latter was a nice little extra service to advertisers. I suspect the Ad-Viser was increasingly seen as paper pollution in various places where it was distributed. That's just a societal trend, away from paper and toward electronic.
A sentiment seems to be afoot now that the paper will be better without Sue Dieter. Dieter is now associated with Congressman Collin Peterson, logical when you consider her husband used to be county DFL chair. So she's "communications director." But doesn't Peterson already have a "press secretary?" Not sure how to interpret this. Peterson is running against a total Donald Trump sycophant, this Fischbach person, so the election will be a good test to see if Trump is really on his way to being considered deity in America.
Sue bent over backwards for Forum Communications. I wonder if she got any severance from them, if they returned the favor as it were. Corporate America can be pretty heartless today.
 
Addendum: MACA kicker Eli Grove was allegedly the target for being "taken out" by the Kimball side, a source tells me.
  
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com