It's not been a quiet week or two in Lake Woebegon, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor.
This time of year is always busy for me. With district and state events for wrestling and basketball, my schedule fills and stays full for about four weeks. It starts with district wrestling, then moves to subdistrict girls' basketball, state wrestling, subdistrict boys' basketball, district girls' and boys' basketball and finishes with the two state basketball tournaments. When you're tracking five wrestling teams and seven basketball teams (each for boys and girls), a cloning machine would be really nice.
State wrestling is my favorite weekend of the year. For three days, mats are filled with the best high school wrestlers in the state. Everywhere you look you have the chance to see good matches and top-notch wrestlers. I was fortunate enough to cover a pair of state champions this year. Between the five teams I cover, I had 18 wrestlers. All but two won at least one match, and those two came really close.
Post-seasons in general are bittersweet times of year. At some point, the players I've been watching for the past four years will finish their final competitions. Some will continue to compete at the college level, but most will not. I know everyone hangs up the competitive shoes at some point. But it's a melancholy moment. I'm sure the kids are excited to move on to a new phase in their lives. It's the sense of finality that's sometimes hard to handle.
And then we're into spring sports - track, golf, baseball and soccer. We go back outside, even though March and early April aren't always home to the nicest days of the year. I've been at track meets and soccer games where it's so cold everyone is in long underwear, winter coats, stocking hats and gloves. If I can get away with shooting from a press box (which I can at Concordia anyway), I do.
So off we go.
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