Chip Shots: Mid-Week Break Sparks Foul Mood
I don’t enjoy the Christmas season when Christmas Eve and Christmas Day land in the middle of the week.
Chip Shots: At Least Their One Speed Is Fast
Tuesday night I was PA announcing the IU South Bend women’s basketball game versus IU Columbus. It was a blowout, and in the third quarter I statistician from on loan from another school in the conference asked me, “They’re up by 40 in the third quarter. When are they going to stop pressing?”
Chip Shots: Coaching College Football Gets Tougher
College football and college basketball are sports where a coach with reasonable success can hang around a while by winning consistently.
Chip Shots: A Look At Tiger Football With Parker’s Help
My daughter, Ellen, in early 2021, broke my Chip Shots writer’s block in what turned out to be a fun piece to prepare.
Chip Shots: A Month Of Reckoning?
The final four among each IHSAA football enrollment class battled for a trip to Lucas Oil Stadium. I finished my picks (only predicted one school in Class 5A) at a near-even won-loss record of 10 wins and 11 losses.
Chip Shots: Enjoy Those Lady Tigers
The Lady Tigers’ basketball squad scored prolifically in their 74-45 win over Fort Wayne Snider in Thursday’s home opener with an aggressive defense creating opportunities for Warsaw to score easily.
Chip Shots: Football Musings, Crow Up?
There is no secret this column isn’t “live” each Saturday morning. I am excited about the prospect of Warsaw’s ability to compete with and defeat the Concord Minutemen in their sectional title clash considering the Tigers had them on the ropes with a 17-0 halftime lead six weeks ago.
Chip Shots: My Favorite Final Four
Is it blasphemy in Indiana to be more excited about six sets of high school football final four fields than The NCAA Final Four for men’s and women’s college basketball? If so, I’ll have to watch for airborne stones as I move through the Lake City.
Tigers Take Care Of Business In 52-7 Sectional Opening Win
A kettle of hawks, RedHawks, Goshen RedHawks in fact, descended on Fisher Field at Warsaw’s Tiger Athletic Complex for the second time in eight weeks hoping to keep their 2024 football season alive.
Chip Shots: Football Fandom: My Taunt, My Fail
We’re faced with another week in fall sports where all the competition is slated for Friday (football sectionals) or Saturday (all other fall sports). Area athletes who were still practicing this week, good luck in your continued postseason runs.
Chip Shots: Billionaire Welfare Comes To Brook Park, Ohio
The Cleveland Browns ownership, Jimmy and Dee Haslem, is the latest billionaire welfare success story for Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Brook Park into an agreement to be the location for the Browns’ new stadium, another Northern U.S. city with a dome.
Dominant D + Explosive O = Tiger Boys’ Sectional Title
The Warsaw Tigers boys’ soccer side streaked to a convincing 4-nil victory over the Homestead Spartans for their third straight IHSAA Class 3A Sectional 5 title Saturday night on the synthetic turf at Huntington North High School.
Chip Shots: Wrong Side Of The Bed Sunday
I was a member of Toastmasters International, a speaking and communication club affording several opportunities to improve the aforementioned skills along with improving brevity.
Chip Shots: My Fall Break Comes Naturally
October is here. There are certainties as… certain… as… death and taxes for me.
Chip Shots: Get Back To Work
I feel a little different today. This column, in a rare instance, was prepared late last night. Many times, I am opining while referring to your Saturday morning in the present.
Chip Shots: Meatloaf… I Mean Football, Again?
Meatloaf – again?
Chip Shots: Football Rambling
Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, bought the team for approximately $140 million in 1989. He said, in an episode of the NFL Network’s A Football Life, that an entrepreneurial type of businessperson must be comfortable with ambiguity.
Chip Shots: The Goal: Chicken Salad
I returned from my company’s North American controller’s conference Thursday night with a takeaway I’ll share this morning.
Chip Shots: Team USA Missed Uncontested Open Shot
The 2024 Paris Olympics is behind us, but the television ratings were better than the 2021 (postponed from 2020 due to COVID) games in Tokyo. Women’s basketball, specifically Team USA’s games, average 7.8 million viewers, no noticeable change between the two sets televised games in 2021 and this summer.
Chip Shots: Not Feeling Stuck In The Middle
Stealer’s Wheel released a surprise hit, Stuck in the Middle With You” in 1972. It was a surprise because Gerry Rafferty and his bandmates used the song to parody Bob Dylan in vocals and lyrics on a lark.
Claypool’s Kennedy Krull Makes Leap From 1A To D1
Kennedy Krull, a Claypool resident, a Whitko basketball and softball alum, a Huntington University (NAIA) infielder, and most recently Triton Junior-Senior High School’s head varsity girls’ basketball and softball coach is taking another big leap into a Division I (D1) college softball assistant coaching position with Georgia Southern University.
Chip Shots: Are You Ready For Some (Option) Football?
Can you hear Hank Williams Jr.’s voice from the ABC Monday Night Football musical intros?
Chip Shots: NBA Action In The Ivory Towers
Free agency is winding up, and most of the action remains in the Association’s ivory towers.
Chip Shots: Loyalty
I follow teams more these days based on how they operate as a business rather than any regional loyalty I had similar to my days growing up in Northeast Ohio.
Chip Shots: The Slowest Week Of Sports
I comment about this July week in sports each year: Major League Baseball All-Star break, Home Run Derby, the All-Star game itself, the ESPY awards (ESPN’s sports-related award show with huge names on the red carpet, pre-show) … and nothing else really happening.
Beam, Pohl Represent Tigers As IFCA All-Stars Tonight
Isaac Beam and Eric Pohl, Warsaw Tiger football defensive standouts and recent graduates in the Class of 2024, will represent the North in tonight’s Indiana Football Coaches Association (IFCA) North-South All-Star Game at Decatur Central High School.
Chip Shots: Asking For A Friend
Does a baseball movie watched from start to finish count as watching baseball from beginning to end? Asking for a friend.
Chip Shots: Middle Schoolers Must Clear The Redshirt Hurdle
Let’s talk about football redshirts.
Chip Shots: Is It Too Soon?
Seven more Fridays until the high school football scrimmages and jamborees will launch the 2024 season.
Chip Shots: Look What I Found
Two Saturdays ago, something said to me in passing triggered a memory of some wisdom passed on to me during the football preseason of 2018 resulting in an “a-ha!” moment.
Chip Shots: Here Comes Apathy Season
Sportswriters and Sports section opinion columnists who love all sports are rarer than you think. They’re handy because they can maintain an enthusiastic level of opinions as their readers navigate the seasons, and almost everyone is happy.
Chip Shots: Two-Headed Thoughts
My weekend thoughts take the form of a two-headed life form:
Chip Shots: Manage Your Expectations
Caitlin Clark, professional women’s basketball’s arguably most heralded rookie, has two completed basketball games in the books after The Indiana Fever’s 102-66 loss to the New York Liberty.
Chip Shots: Hats Off Works Best For Me
My only interest in The Kentucky Derby (took place last Saturday) is to see some shots in the audience to see how many people have wealth but lack good taste. As departed comedian Joan Rivers once said, “Every woman needs a gay friend… to tell her no!”
Chip Shots: Diamond Days
Recently, at a softball game, I noticed just about every athlete has her own bat worth at least 300 dollars and I did math in public to figure out how much that would be between the teams’ tow dugouts.
Chip Shots: Psyching Myself Up In Mid-Column
“Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we’re dead.” – Sinclair Lewis
Chip Shots: Spring Break Potpourri
Enjoy the tail end of your spring break and enjoy some Final Four action tonight.
Chip Shots: Competitors Who Lose Vs. Losers
There are athletes and teams who rarely win in numerous individual and team competitions, and fans and sportswriters will call them losers.
Chip Shots: Watching, Listening To March Madness
My body was under repair this week with two minor procedures Monday, and a major surgery on Tuesday. It dawned on me before the week that this unusually slow-paced week for me coincided with the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the Round of 64 specifically.
Chip Shots: Schmegegge
This is one of those weekends where my focus on a single topic has been hard to execute. Therefore, I have multiple topics to freely discuss.
Tigers Run Out Of Gas In Regional Overtime Loss
A game of streaks between two championship caliber basketball teams usually ends when one team’s late run wears out the opponent to pull away with a victory whose margin of victory makes the win look far more convincing than it was.
Chip Shots: This One’s For The Girls
January and February afforded high school girl’s and college women’s basketball fans to enjoy their local talents and see Caitlin Clark eclipse not only the women’s scoring record, but the overall college basketball scoring record.
