Tag Archives: sports

Drag Racing in Jamestown

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View at the Start of a Drag Race

View at the Start of a Drag Race. July 29, 2012, in Jamestown, North Dakota.

This is what it looks like to be part of a drag race.

Today, I got to experience a little bit of the adrenaline rush and speed of a real drag race when Bob Baumann of Jamestown took me for a ride-along in his 1933 Ford Victoria. This, by the way, is the most beautiful car ever, and I would have been thrilled to ride in it under any circumstances whatsoever, even just for a zip around the block.

Bob Baumann and 1933 Ford Victoria

Bob Baumann and 1933 Ford Victoria

As you can see, the interior is pretty small. There was a sort of double-seat-belt harness thingy in there for safety, and I had to wear a helmet as well. It felt pretty tight, but not uncomfortably so, considering I have a ginormous head. Seriously. I’m sort of surprised it hasn’t got satellites.

1933 Ford Victoria Interior

1933 Ford Victoria Interior

As you can see from the picture, it’s got crash bar thingies and so forth in there too, so it actually felt pretty safe. Or maybe I just have no sense of self-preservation. Could be that.

What was it like? Well, it was awesome. The car rumbled and roared like a lion chasing down a gazelle, and although we didn’t get up to positively ludicrous speeds, it was fast enough to feel quite a bit like being on a rollercoaster. I think I went “Eeee!” but not too loud, because I didn’t want Mr. Baumann to think I was insane or possibly a chipmunk.

And one more thing: drag racers may well be the nicest people ever. Everyone I talked to at the Jamestown Regional Airport today was super, super nice and helpful above and beyond the call of duty. Leon Westerhausen, president of the Jamestown Drag Racing Association, took time to answer all my newbie-questions about drag racing, even though he was pretty busy. Daine Flieth, a volunteer at the event, drove me from place to place in a golf cart for interviews, which sped up the process considerably.

And other people helped arrange my ride in the car, and of course, Mr. Baumann let me set foot in his lovely car, let alone took me for a race in it.

I’m totally nerding out over it, actually! Many thanks to the folks who helped me out with the article, from the interviewees, JDRA and drivers to the editor and writer who read the thing after it was done.

And now, since all of you already know I’m a. insane and b. possibly a chipmunk:

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Crowd, Drag Races, Jamestown Regional Airport, July 29, 2012

What I Learned from High School Sports

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I learned a lot from participating in extracurricular activities in high school, which is a good thing, because I spent an awful lot of time on them. I was in golf and tennis, sure, but I was also in concert band and choir, as well as the jazz band and the marching band. And I was in knowledge bowl, math league and three school plays a year.

Some of these activities are competitive, and some are not. I learned from all of them.

All the music had competitive contests, in which I did always did very badly as an individual. I worked hard, and I did my best, and I loved it, but I was horrible. When I was with a group I did better, perhaps bolstered by other people’s talent.

I was also awful at golf and moderately mediocre at tennis. I enjoyed golf practice, when a group of friends was playing with me, and dreaded golf meets, in which you had to play with a bunch of strangers. I liked tennis practice, and had a great time playing doubles (I wasn’t fast enough to be a good singles player) at meets.

I joined math league purely because my friends were in it, and I don’t think I scored a more than two points the whole time. (Incidentally 2 was also how many points I made in my 2 years playing junior high basketball.) That was okay, because my coach knew better than to put me on the team of people whose numbers counted, and I still got to go along with the group and hang out.

I loved knowledge bowl, and rattling off trivia answers as part of a team was awesome. And I was good at it, too. My team usually did well.

One of the three plays was competitive. We never did well, but we generally ran crowd-pleasing comedies, whereas to win at a contest you had to perform something artsy and depressing, preferably something where someone experiences a horrific loss or dies. If they do both, it’s pretty much an automatic win.

One of the plays was a musical. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, so I either had a bit part in the chorus or a small non-singing part.

But when I go back and think about all the extracurriculars, I realize they taught me a lot about myself and how I interact with others, and what I like and don’t like:

  1. I liked working cooperatively in groups. If those groups competed with other groups, great! If they didn’t, also great! But I enjoyed teams best.
  2. I wasn’t very athletic or musical, but with a lot of work I did see improvements. It’s not just talent, it’s hard work, too.
  3. Some of it is talent. I sing every day and I’m still awful. It can’t be helped.
  4. Winning is a lot more fun than losing. Losing feels worse when you’re on a team, because you let down the team.
  5. I hate math. But if taking short math tests is what I have to do to hang around with my friends, I’m gonna do it, because people are more important than specific activities.
  6. I’m not too good at math.
  7. A driver to the back of the head really, really hurts, especially if the golfer has lots of muscles.

Probably the most valuable points here are the first three, with an option on 6 and 7.

#1 is why I love working in a newsroom. We’re a motivated group working to beat the clock, and sometimes, to beat other news organizations. Sometimes there’s some friction but we’re all on the same side working together, and it’s so much fun!

#2 is important, because the things you’re horrible at in life will greatly outnumber the things you’re good at. With work and a bit of cleverness you can compensate.

For example, I am horrible at remembering where I have left objects, so I leave my keys on the floor in front of my door every night so I can’t lock myself out. Another example: My thoughts tend to jump around from topic to topic, so my writing sometimes lacks transitions. I’ve been working on that in my newspaper articles–I hope you’re able to tell.

#3 is a sad fact of life. I will never be a ballerina or a professional basketball player or a musician. I can still enjoy singing, particularly if it’s in a soundproof room as far from human habitation as possible. Making people’s ears bleed isn’t nice.

Sports and extracurriculars can teach you all sorts of other things too.

You can learn how you function on a team, what parts you play well (leader, encourager, creative or steady worker, problem-solver, observer) and how other people think. You can learn how to form strategies and implement them, whether it’s a football play or determining who answers the question in knowledge bowl. You can learn how to compete against yourself as an individual in a sport like golf or math league, where you have separate results. You can learn how to win graciously and how to lose gracefully.

Through failure, you learn how to adjust the plans you’ve made, and compensate for past mistakes. Through success, you learn what works and what accomplishing goals means: new goals, new challenges, new expectations and new competition.

You can learn a lot, in other words.

Why Sports Are Important to Schools

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When I was a young geekette, I did not understand why sports can be so important to a school.

I bitterly resented how much time and attention athletics got at my school. They took up several pages of the tiny weekly newspaper every single week, and they got an awful lot of glory and attention for being able to throw a ball, run fast, or hit something really hard.

Meanwhile, here I was, slaving every day in school to get good grades. Here were all the art students, creating gorgeous sculptures, wacky airbrushed portraits and ceramic bowls day after day. Here were all the math league kids, who had frightening trigonometric formulas completely memorized, and seemed to be some sort of math ninjas. Here were the theater geeks, who memorized lines and blocking and could make you laugh until you cried, or cry until you laughed. Here were all the writers, who could crank out poetry or prose with equal facility. Here were the band and choir kids, who loved music and constantly made hilariously irreverent jokes.

There were so many other students who deserved recognition in the newspaper.

And this is still true. Many students do go unrecognized. Newspapers only have so much space and time.

However, times were changing even when I was still in school. They started giving out academic letters, and you could letter in music. The local newspaper did cover us whenever it could.

And now I realize that many students who play sports also go quietly unrecognized. And then there are the kids who love sports and serve as managers, keep stats or just go to the game every week to cheer.

What I didn’t understand when I was still in school is how much of an impact sports can have on the lives of the kids who are in it.

And mind you, I was in sports myself until the middle of 10th grade. I loved tennis and although I never really learned to love golf, I had fun when I was in it. Tennis was the best, because my friends were in it, and we played all sorts of games and drills during the practices. I really liked tennis.

At the same time, I never needed tennis.

I was always going to stay in school. It would no more have occurred to me to drop out of school than it would have occurred to me to fly into space by flapping my arms to talk to the Martians about spearfishing and pink polka-dotted umbrellas.

Not every kid is like that. Some kids stay in school specifically so that they can play sports. Some kids keep their grades up–enabling them to at least get a high school diploma and maybe even go to college–specifically so that they can be in sports.

Sports can serve as a worm on a hook to get kids to stay in school or work on their grades.

Then there are the financials. Some sports directly make money, through ticket sales. Others do not.

However, the state government distributes money to schools based on the number of students. If one student stays in school who would have otherwise dropped out, that’s something like $8,000-$9,000 in a school’s pocket. (Those are the Minnesota numbers, and they are a little old, mind you.) While one student obviously doesn’t pay for a sports program, if there are several of those kids on a team it could make sense from a financial standpoint to spend money on sports.

Clearly that does go for the arts and all the other extracurriculars, such as speech and knowledge bowl, too, but most of the students I remember struggling hard to stay eligible were studying hard so they could be in sports.

I don’t think there are any easy answers to how much funding and attention athletics should get in a school, but I do think they keep kids in school–and that’s a goal held dear by educational institutions and geeks too.

High School Sports in a Small Town

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Jamestown’s football coach has retired, after a painful 0-9 season and a bit of controversy.

I’m not going to comment on that, but I did have an interesting conversation about the role of athletics in schools this morning with two other people. There are so many topics of discussion here, I might end up breaking them down into several posts, even though I myself rarely if ever watch high school sports anymore.

My parents watch them all the time. My mom and dad live in Jackson, so they go to quite a few Jackson games, and my dad works in Spirit Lake, Iowa, so they also go to quite a few Spirit Lake games.

They do it to be involved in kids’ lives, but they also do it because they have a genuine appreciation for the sports they watch. Mom can discuss volleyball tactics and the strengths and weaknesses of the players she sees on a regular basis just like the sports guys at the Sun can discuss players in the NFL. Dad knows all the kids by name, even the ones who aren’t in his church, and he knows their parents too. Between them both, they could tell you what positions kids play in all the sports they’re in.

Nothing brings a small town together like high school sports in good times.

Unfortunately, when high school sports hit bad times, nothing can really divide a town that much either.

Though I have absolutely no data to support this, parents seem to be more heavily involved in their children’s extracurricular activities than ever before, and while this is a good thing in some ways, it can be a very bad thing in other ways. There’s nothing wrong with second-guessing a coach, and most coaches are reasonably happy to sit down with a parent and discuss why certain decisions are made.

It can be tempting, however, to go too far. I don’t know where that line is, and clearly, coaches who are genuinely abusive should never get a pass. However, I’ve heard some criticism of various coaches over the years that really crossed the line. Some parents seem determined to micromanage.

Mine never did. They might have thought my brother or I should have been handled differently from time to time, but I don’t remember them ever saying anything horrible about our coaches, even though we had a controversial one or two over the years.

Coaching is a difficult job. I do believe coaching makes a difference and can make a good team great or a bad team worse. However, it’s only one of many factors that go into building a team.

By all means, communicate with the coach. If you think he or she is doing something wrong, tell them so, but do it in a respectful way in a one-on-one setting. For one thing, it’s politeness pure and simple. For another thing, it’s a lot more likely to be persuasive than shouting and invidious name-calling.

Babes Go Bowling

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I was invited to a five-year-old’s birthday party Saturday, and ended up spending about two hours watching tiny children bowl.

It was a little like watching an episode of the Three Stooges, but without all the violence, because the siblings were shockingly nice to each other and even the owliest child there didn’t poke anybody’s eyes. She cried a lot, but then somebody gave her some green grapes and suddenly all was right with the world.

Her grandfather ended up with a handful of green grape skins and toddler spit, but he seemed all right with it.

I miss the days when green grapes were a sure-fire cure for crankiness.

The fun started with the other, less cranky 2-year-old, who did manage to get her bowling shoes to stay on, despite the fact that they were probably twice the size of her tiny feet. They reminded her of her tap shoes, so she kept dancing in them, or at least, jumping up and down, and she kept trying to walk out into the ultra-slippery bowling lanes, which in all fairness were extremely shiny. Her mother and other random adults at the party had to work hard to keep her corralled.

Neither of the littlest two cared much for the actual bowling process, though their mothers helped them push bowling balls out into the lane a few times. These rolled at approximately .002 miles per hour and occasionally stopped or started rolling backwards, so that somebody had to edge carefully along the lane and help the bowling balls reach the pins with a firm push.

The older boys, including the 5-year-old birthday boy, both adored the bowling process almost as much as they liked the machine that spat the bowling balls back up. I’m still surprised nobody ended up getting a hand pinched between the heavy objects, but there were three or four adults for every small child.

To me, that seems like about the right ratio.

The boys loved flinging the bowling ball down the lane (usually with a shockingly loud WHOMP as it hit the floor), where it ricocheted off the bumpers at least three or four times before it made it to the pins, by which point the bowler was usually not even watching anymore. They weren’t keeping score. I’m not sure they knew that bowling has scores, actually.

And when the bowling ball finally made its way to the end of the lane, they were happy when it hit a pin at all. Every pin was a victory, and every bowler got cheers and clapping from the little ones any time they hit anything and sometimes even when they didn’t.

Which is good, because I was the semi-official Queen of Gutterballs Saturday, and there’s nothing that makes you feel good about your horrible bowling like the adulation of cute, happy, and fortunately, inattentive 5-year-olds.

Time Wasters: The Cost of Blood, the Phantom Barber and Homicidal Jellyfish

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A few links on sports, nuclear waste, the Babysitters Club and other random ephemera, all designed to help you while away your time.

  • A geoscientist discusses how, exactly, the U.S. government intends to isolate nuclear waste for a million years. Yes, he is building a structure that is supposed to last a million years. Ozymandias will look like a pathetic dweeb compared to this guy.
  • A funny comic from The Oatmeal about how web designs go terribly, terribly wrong. It’s a big profane, so if that bothers you, please don’t clickyclick. But it’s vaguely amusing.
  •  Next time you take a swim in the ocean, you won’t be worried about Jaws snapping your legs off. You’ll worry about a peanut-sized jellyfish that’s just as deadly, and because it’s so small, you wouldn’t even have time to scream if you saw it before it stung you. It’s teeny, tiny.
  • You’ve heard of Sweeney Todd. Maybe you’ve even heard of the Barber of Seville. But you probably haven’t heard of… the Phantom Barber of Pascagoula! … yeah, me either. It happened in 1942, when a town was victimized by some guy who would sneak into girls’ homes and commit the dastardly, wicked deed… cutting off a piece of their hair. Weird, weird, weird.
  • Testosterone makes people more selfish… but only if they believe it does, oddly. Good news for men, and bad news for people who malign men. I suppose it just goes to show that you can convince yourself of just about anything, and that the placebo effect is extremely powerful.
  • A columnist for Slate magazine stopped being a sports fan. I noticed this article because it reminded me of when I stopped playing World of Warcraft. I learned something very important from doing that: if your hobby isn’t fun anymore, stop doing it. This is less obvious than you might think.
  • Here’s a fascinating post about the mysteries of rabies from BoingBoing, which makes you think twice about how science treats illnesses differently after vaccines have been found: The rabies vaccine works so well that we don’t really know how rabies works.
  • Kim Peek, who inspired the movie "Rain Man," died in December. His brain was a mystery and the way it worked fascinated and inspired many. Do you know someone with an autism-spectrum disorder? I know several, and I’m constantly amazed at the hard work they put in every day just to have "normal" reactions to stimuli that other people respond to naturally.
  • A gallery of lethal-looking standpipes in New York, which you are definitely not permitted to sit upon, and with the modifications given to them (sharp, and pointy modifications) you probably wouldn’t want to sit upon anyway.
  • And finally, confirmation of a fact we all already knew: Printer ink is worth more than your own blood. Think twice before you hit the print button!

Football Fever and the Baseball Bug

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Minnesota Twins catcher Joe Mauer acknowledges the crowd as he's recognized as a member of the All Metrodome Team during ceremonies after the last regular season game to be played in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome against the Kansas City Royals Sunday, Oct. 4, 2009 in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Tom Olmscheid )People are speaking in tongues in the newsroom this week, and I haven’t the foggiest what they’re actually saying because I do not speak baseball and am not fluent in football.

That’s not to say I’m not a Twins fan or a Vikings fan. As an almost life-long Minnesotan, I like my teams to win.

I still vaguely remember the excitement of 1987 and 1991, when the Twins took the World Series and we all waved homer hankies. At that point, my family had season tickets and occasionally, I got to go see the Twins, which for most people would have been a huge privilege.

To be honest, though… I often tried to sneak books into the games, because I didn’t care much for baseball. Same thing with Vikings games. Dad did his best to prevent me, but I’d just conceal a little paperback in a purse.

If I went to see the Twinks or Vikes now, though, things would be different. I’m not a real fan, but I can muster up plenty of enthusiasm for our local teams and I’d be happy to cheer, though I don’t know anybody’s names, stats or positions. It helps to sit with a real fan who can explain the detailed ins and outs of the games.

I wouldn’t bring a book anymore.

Sorry, dad.

Knee-Deep in the Brett Favre Hoopla

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So, Brett Favre has apparently, finally, really, actually, seriously and truly unretired (again) and will be playing with the Minnesota Vikings.

I’m not a football fan, and in fact, when I was a kid I got in trouble multiple times for trying to sneak books into Vikings games. I couldn’t help it. I like to play tennis and badminton and I can get into a basketball, volleyball or hockey game, but there’s just something about football that leaves me completely cold.

Unless my brother was playing, I could never really get into it.

Maybe it’s all the protective gear, which dehumanizes the players enough that if you don’t already know what they’re like, it’s tough to tell. Maybe it’s just that the players seem about ten miles away during a live football game, making it a little tougher to care. Maybe it’s just that I was in pep band long enough to learn to hate the outdoor sport that forced me to sit outdoors in October, numb hands glued to my xylophone mallets.

But this Favre business, this is a big deal to football fans and even gets the attention of people like me, who’d rather not watch a football game but enjoy hearing the good-parts (highlight reels) about the games.

Brett Favre reminds me of something my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Donner, told me in my Minnesota history class when I was a kid. She said that with wild rice, people love it or hate it, and there’s not usually a lot in between. I’m one of the haters.

I’ve noticed that with Brett Favre, too, people either love the idea of him coming to play for the Vikes, or they hate it. Sometimes they also hate the Packers, Packers fans, Wisconsin, anyone who’s ever said the word "Wisconsin" and cheese.

But with Favre, I’m just ignorant enough of football to not know quite what to think, other than "at least he stopped waffling back and forth."

To me, Favre is like the countless other celebrities who "retire" and then come back the next year, often more than once and often, past their expiration dates.

To sum it all up, then:

Meh.

Holy Carp and Other Fish Tails

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This story about bowhunting for carp had one of our commenters asking whether bowhunting for fish in Whiskey Ditch was legal.

Well, it depends, as you can see from this DNR release found by Beth Rickers in response to the question.

Licensed anglers and children under 16 may take rough fish by spearing, harpooning, archery and hand-held dip nets on all inland waters, except where taking fish is prohibited. All rough fish, except cisco (tullibee), may be bought and sold.

Arrows do need to be attached to the bow with a tethered line. Broadheads must have barbs for night bowfishing.

The season for spearing rough fish is from May 1 to the last Sunday in February, with night bowfishing June 1-Aug. 31 on selected water bodies.

And you can’t put dead fish back into the water or leave them on the ice or banks.

There are also possession limits on bullheads (100), suckers (50), and redhorse (50), but none on other species. Rough fish are: Carp, buffalo, sucker, redhorse, sheepshead, bowfin, burbot (eelpout), cisco (tullibee), gar, mooneye and bullhead.

Again, for specifics, please check with the DNR. The information above comes from them, but I have paraphrased some (not much) of it.