The bond is unbroken between coaches Maull and Glenn

Relentlessness - Cape football coach JD Maull spent the week at Coastal Carolina with his Cape football coach George Glenn. Glenn is director of football operations at Coastal, and it’s worth the trip just to hear coach Glenn say “Chanticleer” with a straight face. "It's hot and I'm having a hard time keeping up,” Maull said. “You know how coach is.” JD has that same wolverine quality, crossed with a honey badger. As we know, honey badger don't care.

Lower case losses - There is always a new medical study to refute what you have believed for a long time. Last week on “CBS This Morning,” a new guru on the block claimed that all the fitness capital gained from years of working out and good nutrition can be lost in a matter of months if you revert back to a sedentary slug, the eating chocolate bonbons lifestyle, spending most days in a spring-loaded lounger watching political shows and televised sports radio, spiced up with reruns of “The Wire.” That fear of sudden slugdom feeds right into the mind-set of those who worry that their personal fitness obsession is more about longevity. And remember, even if your personal trainer is fat, that doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re talking about. 

Meritless charges - New York Congressman Chris Collins said the federal charges that he violated insider trading laws by tipping off his son that his company stock was about to tank were meritless, a word generally used to describe Boy Scout badges. It’s cool to be networked, but in the world of trading, you can’t use insider knowledge tip off your relatives that their portfolio is about to pancake, so better flip it on some moron outside the network. The NFL injury wire works the same way. If a star running back is about to go from “downgraded to doubtful” to “upgraded to probable,” that information is made available through the team’s media relations department at the same time to all concerned parties. Besides the defensive coordinator of that week’s opponent, other concerned parties include all gambling operations, from casinos to ships floating offshore. Do you ever think there’s an entire world out there we know nothing about? 

Waitlisted - Is there a more obnoxious word to lay on the dreams of a sparkling and smart college hopeful? Sure, rejected is worse, and denied but nice try is also tough to swallow. Harvard rejects 33,000 applicants each year – it has a 6 percent acceptance rate – which means at $100 an application, the admissions office clears $3.3 million a year shattering dreams of smart people. If you think that sounds like fun, you may have your own issues. Taking all that into account, Harvard fields good football and basketball teams, so, once again, perhaps sports matters more than it should, but it remains a major factor in the admissions office.

Beach to Broad Street - Annie Judge, who tore it up at Cape starting four years in field hockey and lacrosse, is nestled in at Temple University, keeping the road open from Kings Highway to North Broad Street. Annie Frederick, Taylor Gooch and Lizzie Frederick all landed at Temple to play lacrosse, while Annie Judge becomes the Owls’ first field hockey player from Cape. Kat Judge is just across town at Penn working on a master’s degree in social work. The Owls’ first two games are in California – Aug. 24 at UC Davis and Aug. 26 at Pacific. Temple also plays at Liberty, where Darby Brennan of Milford is a freshman, and Drexel, where junior Tess Bernheimer (Cape) is excelling on the field and in the classroom. Tess has started all 38 games since arriving at Drexel.   

Simply red - The newly resurfaced and relined Cape track is down, and it is first-class awesome, just like the high school building, which is about to get 16 classrooms bigger. Track was six lanes and black when it was built in 1975, later resurfaced blue and no red. There is no room to expand to eight lanes, and red is the most common color for tracks around the world and it just holds up the best, which is why there’s no blue dirt. The track upgrade costs $350K, and if you’re worried about your tax dollars, first you have to own real estate, then calculate the percentage of your tax payment toward this project, and it is chump change. A citizen from out of town asked me: “Did Cape Gazette customers balk when the price of the paper went from 50 cents to a dollar?” I told him, “I hope no one who reads my column makes a 50-cent decision on the worth of my writing.”

Snippets - I’m a newspaper guy. I’ve been hanging around them since I was 14. I have way-back relatives I’ve never met who wrote for The New York Times, while another owned a small-town newspaper. I always told my students, “I’m a newspaperman on loan to the education system. I’m just a different cat.” Flowing sports into politics or reversing it, politics into sports, is going to agitate the stay-in-your-lane crowd who get to criticize everyone. I like what Shannon Sharpe said speaking about political activism as it relates to Michael Jordan. “Mike wants to swim without getting wet,” Sharpe said, to which I reply, “Go on now, git!”