After watching a mix of early-season girls and boys basketball games, seven or eight contests in all, I can file this report about the biggest change to the sport this season: Shot clocks are not making a huge difference.
For those of us who attend lots of games, tournaments and related events, the pep bands add so much to the experience. So let's pick the single best Minnesota high school pep band song.
Paul McDonald closed a 35-year career as a football official during the 2023 Prep Bowl, and the 2023-24 basketball season will be his last in that sport.
Chad Johnston has been the Minneota head football coach for 22 years, and this year, as has long been the custom, he will quickly transition to another sport.
When games are played, things can go exceptionally right or terribly wrong. Under the best of circumstances, lessons are learned, lessons that go way past sports and deep into life.
For any team in any sport that’s ever been down in the dumps with seemingly little reason to be hopeful, take a look at the 2023 Kingsland High School football team. The Knights are having a dream season and will take a perfect record of 13-0 into the Nine-Player Prep Bowl championship game.
“Knowing that we're in the championship and how we finished last year we were like, ‘OK, no messing around. ‘This is it. We want this, let's get it done. No more five-set matches. We know how it's going to end so let's just make it quick."
Russell-Tyler-Ruthton volleyball coach Daynica Brown, a 1998 graduate of the school, knows as well as anyone how much work has gone into the team’s success and what this week’s mission was.
“These are like all my best friends on the team. I knew a lot of the (soccer) returners who were coming back and just wanted to have fun with all my best friends. You can kind of see how big of a family it is.”
Grant Steine is a longtime club soccer coach who has known many of the Orono varsity players since they were 12 years old. He joined the high school coaching staff two years ago, when the Spartans won the state title.
When Wayzata meets Edina for the Class 3A girls state soccer championship, it will be the 702nd career game as a high school coach for Wayzata's Tony Peszneker.
Reading each other's minds can be helpful in tennis doubles. That's even easier when the partners are also siblings, like state champions Nana and Fatemeh Vang of Blake.
“We had a lot of people who worked hard for us to get to this point. It was a lot of people who bleed purple and made sure something like this got done for us and for our kids and for our future, too.”
