View from the cheap seats
A weekly perspective on sports
Casey Krautkramer Reporter The Record-Review I unfortunately witnessed two straight bad football games for a pair of The Record- Review teams I cover, Athens and Edgar, on Thursday and Friday. Sometimes the ball just doesn’t go my teams’ way, and that was certainly the case with Athens at Owen-Withee on Thursday and Edgar versus Colby on Friday.
My story headlines might not seem positive for the Athens and Edgar football games, but I tried to put a positive spin on things in my stories. For example, I wrote that Athens head football coach Todd Diethelm can use Thursday’s defeat as a valuable learning lesson for his players.
He can motivate them to overcome the present adversity they are facing by rallying together to beat Alma Center Lincoln in this Friday’s homecoming contest.
The same can be said about Edgar’s football squad. Although the Wildcats have won several big games during head coach Jerry Sinz’s long tenure at the school, this certainly isn’t the first time one of his teams has lost a big game like Edgar did against Colby on Friday.
After Friday’s defeat to Colby, Edgar’s football team likely needs the Hornets to lose two conference games to Auburndale and Marathon, which isn’t completely out of the realm of possibilities, in order to have a shot at winning the Marawood Conference championship this season. Of course Edgar will also need to win the remainder of its conference games this season.
The Record-Review sports fans have probably noticed I’ve only had stories on football games in the past few weeks of the newspaper, due to having a limited amount of space to use in my sports section due to a decrease in advertising sales.
High school cross country and volleyball fans can rejoice because next week I’m going to focus more on covering these sports rather than football like I’ve been doing in recent newspaper issues. Don’t worry football fans, I’ll still have summaries of Friday’s game results but I’m going to attend cross country races and volleyball matches in person.
I am really looking forward to covering the Athens’ homecoming volleyball match at 7 p.m. this Thursday against Wabeno/Laona. The Bluejays currently have a 25-3 match record this season and are ranked No. 1 again this week in the Wisconsin Volleyball Coaches Association’s Division 4 poll. The Rebels have a 14-8 match record and are honorable mention in Division 4.
Athens is currently the lone undefeated volleyball squad in the Marawood North Conference. Athens beat conference foe Prentice already this season, but it was in the season-opening tournament and thus doesn’t count toward the Marawood North Conference standings. Prentice, 18-3, is ranked No. 6 in Division 4. Athens defeated Edgar, 2-1, in the Merrill tournament this season. Edgar has a 9-4 match record and is honorable mention in Division 3 this week.
