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We’ll spend this morning with an assortment of thoughts before I lecture our youth.
If you had told me I would announce more tackles for Mishawaka senior quarterback/linebacker Jackson Snyder in last week’s football game, I would have made a bold wager, and I would have lost big money… or just have to buy someone’s lunch.
Last Friday’s football game called for lots of “me” over the mic. From 6:20 p.m. until kick-off we had so many special things taking place with no more than a two-minute break. It bolstered my game day energy.
We honored cheer and cross-country seniors. We took time to share the Indianapolis Colts’ cause, Kicking The Stigma, emphasizing there is no weakness asking for help, educating, and informing people on site with a mobile display and handouts, and assuring those in attendance knew it’s okay to tell someone you are not okay. We punctuated pregame by devoting time before our national anthem remembering 9-11 (a tragedy changing the country 25 years ago last Friday) with a special message.
I especially appreciated the precisely timed and well-worded script the athletic department furnished, and how proactively and organized all the non-football action game day participants executed their roles and tasks throughout the week,
Since Friday night’s 43-7 win over the Cavemen through early this past week, I’ve been hearing, “It looks like Northridge and Warsaw will be the Sports Michiana Game of The Week.”
Put the guns back in holsters, Tex!
Warsaw football’s last three regular season contests are comprised of clashes among Plymouth, who lamented their lowest roster numbers in memory, but seem to be a very tough out; Concord AT the Jake (even tougher than winning at NorthWood’s Andrews Stadium); and the aforementioned Northridge Raiders – in THEIR house - currently playing explosive offensive football.
Oh, there is this funny little thing called IHSAA Class 5A Sectional 11. It might mean a Warsaw-Snider rematch, and some other tough outs: improved South Side and Wayne squads.
The most important thing to consider before all those aforementioned opponents, actual and subject to the tourney draw, from October 2 forward, is THIS, for ALL Times-Union area student athletes.
You doggone kids gotta behave yourselves!
Your goal is not to be noted in a game article or in one of my columns as “ostensibly healthy, but unavailable” for one or all of your season’s remaining contests. I hope I do not need to use that quoted status ever again. I haven’t used it since one of my October 2022 columns. Let’s keep the streak going.
It will be easier to speculate the next biggest game, and what teams among all fall sports are rolling toward conference or postseason hardware if our Times-Union area student athletes make smart choices over the next handful of weeks.
A big enough “weekend bust” disrupts almost all processes in the continued operation of the academic and extracurricular periods of the Monday (at a minimum) following the nonsense.
Most of those adults on faculty or on staff are not getting paid for the overtime, nor for the ensuing phone calls they’ll take from parents on their personal time.
I’m 62-years old now, but I’ll pleasantly surprise you by not being one of those folks who will say how things were better in my day because they were actually worse.
This comes from a different state (Ohio) at a different time (the late 1970s/early 1980s).
A lower alcohol volume beer, known as “3.2 beer” was legal for 18-year-olds, and we could smoke legally (our vocational school had a smoking courtyard, in fact). The state still has those drive-thru “package” stores where (back then) – unless you were stupid enough to have any of your passengers in their high school letter jackets – your money was accepted in these places with a near silent, minimal eye-contact transaction.
Instead of enforcing code of conduct rules throughout the calendar year, these rules weren’t tracked as well in the offseason in most, but not all, school districts in Northeast Ohio.
Hearsay could get you in the athletic office or principal’s office, but you also had the “my word versus their word” defense, no on-site testing methods, and frankly, the only time kids seemed to get kicked off the team or suspended for at least one game or match was if the coach saw you doing something with his or her own two eyes or smelled illegal substances on your breath.
Each year in my high school there was a correlation between these younger legal alcohol purchase ages and the number of profoundly serious and/or fatal alcohol-related auto accidents. Even worse, the schedule changes due to an unscheduled morning assembly in the gym conveyed to us by our homeroom teachers shifted us toward dread, not a flippant, “what now?” response.
The “system” as it was really didn’t do us any favors. Many of us walking and talking to this day landed more on the lucky side than landing on what we thought was the cool side.
Before we part, the answer to my headline question?
Yes.
For what it’s worth, I delivered it without telling you things in my day were better than they are now.
So… behave, please.
