Varsity Kansas - The Blog

by joanna

This will be a busy week, but I’m ready. Especially glad to be here this morning considering I heard three ambulances and two police cars while bringing my kids to school and daycare and coming to work. Not good.

All right, I want to chat about this weekend and this week and make a comment about a two-time poster.

First the comment — Just to let you guys know that there are seven sports in the spring and we try to cover as much as we can. This is my first time since 2001 covering spring sports and I had forgotten how difficult it is to hit every sport and everyone consistently.  There are games and events that we don’t cover, not because we don’t want to, but because there are limited people and limited space and frankly there are so many events. This poster pointed out that we didn’t cover Maize-Northwest softball or baseball. Nope, you are right. We didn’t. As I stated, I wish we could be there for everything, but we can’t. Doesn’t mean we don’t like Maize. Any question on that, see my Maize-Carroll softball story and subsequent posts. How much love can I give one team?

Anyway, as for the weekend, let’s start with track. I see the Conway Springs girls team edged Cheney — by 3 points — to win the team title and the Southeast boys narrowly beat Heights by four. How about that 400 relay at the CL meet where Heights won in 42.31, Southeast finishes in 42.32. Now that would have been a race to watch. Those are the state’s top two times this year.

Audacia Moore from Heights pr’ed in the 100 and 200 at the league meet, as did the Southeast girls 400 relay. Goddard won the AV-CTL Division I league meet by 11 over Hutch, winning the 100, 300 hurdles, 3200 relay, high jump and long jump.

Also over the weekend, Maize softball swept Northwest, but they’ll likely play again — on Thursday in the regional finals. North plays Northwest and East plays Maize. Yeah, they’ll meet in the one-game final. I would imagine Goddard would play Derby in its regional final — Goddard run-ruled Derby earlier and won 1-0 in a doubleheader.

In baseball, it could be Heights vs. Goddard on Thursday and Maize vs. Northwest, too. North and Campus will likely meet on Tuesday. Soccer regionals are this week, as well, and we could see a Heights-Goddard matchup on Thursday and Maize and East on Thursday. There’s  an awfully good softball regional at Douglass on Tuesday (I’ll be checking that out — who will be in that final? Andover Central? Augusta? Rose Hill? Mulvane? Clearwater? It will be interesting) There’s also a baseball regional at El Dorado, where Andover Central (the one loss Jags) will be playing.

I guess that was a look ahead there for a few paragraphs, so let me go back to state tennis (one sport finished, six to go with state swimming this weekend).

One year after seeing Southeast’s Nate Kirk (the first Wichita area kid since 1993) win the Class 6A singles title, 6A  returned to a Kansas City-area dominated tournament. One Wichita area team (Goddard) finished in the top 10. Class 5A had little area representation, as well. Winfield finished 6th, Hutch 4th, Carroll 10th. Is the City League this weak (Carroll cruised through the CL) or are the other teams that much better? I do not have an answer for that.

In Class 4A, Chase Dippel from Smoky Valley cruised to the singles title and Hesston’s  Brett Liechty-Alex Roth beat Andover Central’s Tucker Noyes and Neal Rasmussen for the doubles title.

In Class 3-2-1A I was in heaven because I entered the day with two area kids in singles (Independent’s Ryan Norman and Conway Springs’ Mitchell Kibbe) and all four doubles teams were from the area (two from Collegiate, two from Conway Springs), which meant I would be writing about a champion. Let me tell you, in my time here I have written a lot of third-place stories, whether at state basketball or tennis or volleyball. It’s much more fun to write that state championship story — even if they lose in the title match. But there weren’t many losers at 3-2-1A from the area. Norman won for the second straight year and Kibbe finished third, for the second straight year. Collegiate went 1, 2 in doubles and Conway Springs, 3, 4. Collegiate won another title, Conway Springs finished second.

Covering 3-2-1A was excellent for a variety of reasons — I loved the emotion that Collegiate coaches Dave Hawley and Jeff Nordgren showed about how tough this season was and how satisfying the win was. I loved how Collegiate’s doubles teams were having fun out there. Hey, I’ve seen matches where teammates play each other and it can be quite contentious. That’s just not fun to watch. The most hilarious thing I saw was how quiet the Collegiate crowd was in the championship. Hawley said between sets that they needed to cheer. It was OK, don’t worry about offending anyone. Too funny.

Now this final point you probably won’t care about. But I do. Very much so. Independent ran the tournament and it was wonderful. They had a concession stand — I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that happen. And they ran the tournament quickly. Usually I’ll see tournaments start their title games around 1 or 2, which gives the kids time to eat. Pu-shaw! No need for that! They can eat later. Let’s play! And that’s what Independent did. That tournament started its finals a little after 11 a.m. For me, who wanted to write my story and be done for the day, it was wonderful. I know it’s selfish, but I guess that’s what I am. I’m sure everyone else appreciated being able to get on the road, though.

I’m finally done rambling.  Now you tell me, what struck you about this weekend? Or about the regional pairings that you saw? And what do you just have to check out this week? Man, I forgot to mention track regionals on Friday night. We’ll run a complete listing of all track regional results in Sunday’s paper. So check it out.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 9:26 a.m. and is filed under Baseball, Soccer, Softball, Tennis, Track. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.