Cute person wins Ugly Sweater 5K

Redemption Song - Flor Duerr of Dover was rocking it Saturday morning at the Redemption City Ugly Sweater 5K. Runners gathered by the gazebo near the fishing pier at Cape Henlopen State Park. Blending ugly with cute, overridden with fast and happy, it’s a holiday gift that can’t be ordered on Amazon. Duerr, 34, was first woman overall in a time of 23:29. Later in the happy trails race, it was the hip hop hippity hopping Harrington teens who went spontaneously and simultaneously airborne without rupturing any tendons before landing on sand. Carli Welfley 16; Nona Wright, 18; and Megan Yoder, 18, all ran times of 47:53. Mike Gonzalez-Garcia, 22, of Georgetown (21:10) outdueled Peyton Collins, 15, of Milford (21:05) to win the overall title. Race Director Tim Bamforth explained to the assemblage of runners at the awards ceremony, “First place is always gun time and all other places are chip time.” The runners coming from different strokes of life looked at Tim like, “Whatchu talkin’ bout, Willis?” 

Girls grapple at Milford Invitational - Twenty-one girls’ teams competed Friday and Saturday at the 2025 Milford Girls’ Invitational, with host Milford winning the overall title with 160 points. The Bucs were followed by Caesar Rodney with 152. Sussex Tech placed sixth with 71 points, Cape Henlopen was 14th with 28 points, while Sussex Academy was 19th with 14 points. There are 12 weight classes for the girls, going from 100 to 235 pounds. Milford, coached by Don Parsley, had champions Autumn Littleton, 132; Ellie St. Jean, 138; Ilianny Feliz-Abad, 145; and Zippoah Lewis, 165. A complete listing of results can be found at trackwrestling.com. 

Oddly enough but not ironic - Many people confuse ironic with “man, that’s crazy” to explain unforeseen cosmic connections. Like Cape junior Amara Fruchtman hitting a buzzer-beater three-pointer for her only points of the game Saturday, sending Cape to a 39-37 win over the Haverford School in the She’s Got Game Classic at St. John’s College High School in Washington, D.C. Amara is a lacrosse player, not to be confused with her older sister Amalia, who scored 17 points in the game and joined the 1,000-points club Friday in a 59-30 home win over Sussex Central. And as a backdrop to all of this is Marc Fruchtman, the paternal grandfather of the “A Team” girls – there are five of them – who graduated from Haverford in 1975, a cool 50 years ago. That fact was first discovered by John Myers, former Cape soccer coach and guidance counselor who graduated from Haverford High in 1971. John can go deep with sports trivia retrieval with the best of them. “Randy Grossman of the Steelers’ Super Bowl teams was a classmate of mine who played at Temple,” Myers added.

Bump and run - Looking at high school wrestling matchups focusing on head-to-head dual meets, coaches and top eliminator grapplers usually confer before competitive team matches, deciding if they want to bump to or away from another top guy. Sometimes it's a run from, other times a run to, a big early-season matchup. I like the expression, “You have to risk it if you want to get the biscuit,” but if there’s a pattern in the early-season mentality, I think it’s more a, “See you later when the stakes are higher.” Cape will host Sussex Tech Wednesday, Dec. 17, while the girls’ team will grapple at Sussex Tech. The Sussex Tech boys have some hammers in the lineup and so does Cape. We all know the song lyric, “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail, yes I would, if I could.” – Simon and Garfunkel, 1970.

Whiz Kids - Last column I posted a headline, “I’m a writer not a reader except for T-shirts and tattoos.” Right on cue, Sandra Davies, lifelong Phillies fan and friend, dropped off the book “The Whiz Kids” in my Gazette mailbox. “The Whiz Kids” is a story of how the 1950 Phils won the National League pennant then lost the World Series to the Yankees. My toddler self grew up in a row house and on the street two blocks from Shibe Park-Connie Mack Stadium and knew the word Ashburn but thought it was a rash. Anyway, I read the book in a day, and afterward triumphantly closed the hardback cover and my wife Susan said, “You must have really liked that book.” “I did,” I said, “except in the end all the players are dead. And that is dark and stark and final. I think I’ll go back to reading T-shirts.” 

Snippets - Travel ball was a change during my sportswriting career, and also parents who speak for their travel kids while the kid is standing right next to them. Another change is kids who apply to 10 colleges then wait for acceptance letters. Another change is the kid who needs to focus on one sport. I often wonder, in the era of short attention spans and distractibility, how does a kid focus on one thing? Trey Johnson, Cape senior sprinter, ran 6.55 in the 55 meters at the Virginia Beach High School Opener to place second out of 300 runners. Will DiPaolo was second in the pole vault at 13-feet. Good athletes across all the sports make it hard to concentrate on one. Go on now, git!