Thanksgiving meals from November 23 have morphed – over this past week – into variations of combined leftovers for dinners, midnight snacks, and packed lunches for school and work.
I am pleased with the results of the annual transition of the holiday’s leftover mishmash in my home each year.
I’ve enjoyed turkey and noodles in a creamy sauce, turkey enchiladas in a green chili sauce, cold stuffing in a small bowl as a midnight snack. These items are just a few of the joyous leftover week.
Read on and enjoy some post-Thanksgiving nosh.
I strongly believe my time spent watching condensed games on my NFL+ app will be far better tonight than watching the conference championship games throughout the day.
Fortunately, I have work obligations, some PA announcing, and some NFL condensed replays to watch instead of games like Michigan vs. Iowa, or Florida State vs. Louisville.
I’m very excited for the Big Ten (B1G) expansion next year because football fans will see the two teams with the best records play for the conference title. The B1G West has offered nothing in the form of a watch-worthy opponent in the last 10 seasons.
I wonder if the College Football Playoff expansion might even render conference title games obsolete. I’m, hoping they do.
I used to lobby for the elimination of many meaningless bowl games, but those are sticking around because every bowel-eligible team gets at least four weeks of additional practice. No coach would turn down the opportunity to tweak for the final game of this year, and to see what next year’s hopefuls can do on the field as well.
I announced and ran the scoreboard for the Warsaw Tigers’ home opening dual meet versus the Goshen RedHawks. It was a fun night of high school wrestling, the crowd was the largest I’d seen for a dual meet in the Tiger Den since pre-COVID, and the crowd energy was great.
The best part, though, was the fact each team had lots of wrestlers participating in their respective programs. Enough, in fact, to field 19 exhibition matches for the junior varsity portion of the evening. The most exhibition matches Warsaw’s dual meets had at home since I started announcing in 2017 was seven.
Two mats were going non-stop, and a young lady who wrestles for Warsaw learned how to run a scoreboard on the fly with good comprehension speed. We used two mats to run the exhibition clashes, working from two scoreboards.
I always get nervous refreshing my memory to run the wrestling clock and scoreboard, and the revolving door action between the two mats made me feel rusty at first, but I was very pleased with the young lady’s ability to do her job with her Daktronics machine in tandem with mine.
The Tigers lost the varsity dual 45-27, but there were many pins for each side, and Warsaw picked up six team points from a pin landed at 5:59 into the match: one second to spare.
The Tigers tend to have only three or four home dual meets, so the wrestling season whisks by me too quickly before the conference tournament and the subsequent postseason action starting in mid-January.
The more time I spend watching college basketball with its 30-second shot clock, the more I move away from my long-standing belief shot clocks should not be used in high school. Instead, I’ve had a change of heart, and I’m hoping Indiana adopts the shot clock – maybe 35 seconds – in the very near future.
Warsaw Lady Tigers in their current form would be just fine with this. I believe the boys’ squad would adjust well too. Even when Coach Matt Moore runs a spread to slow down the pace, he has his guys on the floor maintaining a sense of urgency, and the Tigers have scored quick baskets from it.
There are cases about quality of shot selection among athletes still learning the game, and shooting percentages at prep level are data pointing toward the perils of a shot clock at high school level. At this point – in the same manner many middle-aged people evolve in work practices, politics, and how we should handle our progeny – I’m ready for the IHSAA give it a whirl.
Will the shooting percentages decline in accuracy? I’m speculating they won’t. We’ll just see more attempts, and most high schools will still hit 41% to 45% of their attempts.
I’d rather see more shots flying through the air than witnessing all the held balls typically seen in a high school girls’ game.
Shawna, my wife, and I provided play-by-play in another Warsaw Lady Tigers’ game last Tuesday (66-29 win over NorthWood). Each of us couldn’t say enough about the progress of Brooke Winchester’s inside game, and Shawna especially liked the way Winchester kept the ball high and used her superior size and improved physical strength to secure rebounds.
Many held balls I’ve seen are from kids bringing down the ball while rebounding into a scrum of girls grabbing it to end up in yet another - *yawn* - held ball. Winchester’s evolution was refreshing.
Hopefully we’ll see some contagion of that on-court evolution.
I’ll briefly tie up a loose end from last week’s column.
The IHSAA’s Tournament Success Factor (TSF) results are crystal clear since the football championships are in the books. Regardless of the enrollment changes we are certain of the following:
Fort Wayne Snider will move from Class 5A to Class 6A following its convincing win over a strong Decatur Central program. The title game determined whether the Panthers would stay in 5A or move up one class.
Fort Wayne Bishop Luers realized the same bump-up from Class 2A to Class 3A with the title game last Friday determining their enrollment class fate.
What’s still a mystery is where Warsaw will end up when enrollment classes are released in February.
I guess – if it wasn’t already fulsome for some of you – I’m letting this topically finally take a rest… until February when the numbers determine the Class designations. Then, I get to speculate how the larger two classes’ sectionals will be aligned it that takes place in April or May of 2024.
I’m invited to tomorrow’s Warsaw Tiger football banquet, a very well-organized event taking place on the first Sunday each December. I’m eager to taste the desserts senior families prepare, for they are judged in a competition to boot. The fun part is the variety of good stuff for my palette. The sad part? There can only be one winner.
Nosh to your heart’s delight.