Share: 

Dawned on me late in the day – sports is irony in slow motion

Public schools winning state titles this fall
December 15, 2020

Senior citizens - The senior class of Cape field hockey players includes just six athletes: Julie Heffernan, Haley Craig, Riley Klopp, Emily Monigle, Riley Keen and Maggie Dawson. The state championship trophy first belongs to them, procured in the year 2020 for the class of 2021. You remember last spring there were no sports and no graduation ceremonies. Adults who graduated a generation or two ago were posting their own graduation photos as a sympatico gesture of upside-down empathy. But standing on the field at the end of a season hoisting the state championship trophy is just magical. Perhaps the seniors understand, “That was a great ride. Now it’s time for me to get up on outta here.”     

Audacity of dope - I’m not a dope, but I am pretty dope and mostly woke and that is no joke. I spoke to team captain Emily Monigle right after the championship field hockey game and led off my question with, “I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it seems to me being a Cape hockey player that...” Usually if I open that door in an interview, the athlete walks right in and pretty much reinforces my astute insight, except Emily is the valedictorian heading to Hopkins, hardly the person to blindly follow my dumb theory on championship hockey, global warming or playing behind a mask in a viral hot zone. Late in the day, it dawned on me, that’s irony – that through nine state championships since 2010, all those athletes, and all of us parents and grandparents and sportswriters have our theories on how this improbable run of state titles happened. But the voices we don’t hear are those of the athletes themselves. Now that is a book Mr. Field Hockey would like to write while I still have half my wits about me. 

Macaque attack - Whenever I see adults coagulated behind a chain-link fence to keep them away from my world, I think of a natural habitat exhibit at the Philly zoo with macaques and marmosets clinging to chain-link fences and talking big noise. They are of the order primates just like us. I congratulated Dover Athletic Director Kevin Turner and DIAA Executive Director Donna Polk for allowing four state championship games to be contested in two sports on two adjacent fields Saturday without turning the venue into a COVID hotspot police state. Senator Stadium, where field hockey was played, had fans without tickets and undigitized, temperature-monitored foreheads outside the fence cheering for their team. They were a serious upgrade to cardboard cutouts. The hockey game site managers kept moving them beyond the end zone sightline, but they continually seeped back like macaques to yakety-yak and woot-woot for their team. The Delmar squad sprinted to the fence after their victory to thank the fans for coming. It will be a favorite memory of theirs for a long time.  

Snippets - All local muppets know the crux of the Carrie Lingo story, a sophomore on the 1995 state championship field hockey team of coach Ruth Skoglund. Carrie went on to earn All-American status at North Carolina and to captain the 2008 U.S. field hockey team in Beijing. But what you don’t know is at the peak of her fitness training in the summer of 2006, Carrie jumped in the Jungle Jim’s 5K with only a sprint and powerlifting training history and won the women’s race in 18:29, which was faster than the winning times at the 2020 DIAA cross country state championships two weeks ago. Eagles rookie quarterback Jalen Hurts has played in more big games at Alabama and Oklahoma than Carson Wentz at North Dakota State. Picking Hurts off the draft board in the second round was brilliant. Hurts’ good fortune doesn’t have to come at the expense of Wentz’s mysteriously bad season of football. I like the term “yips” to explain those puzzling dips in performance and have found that most coaches do a lousy job retrieving talent suddenly gone south in a gifted athlete. Congrats and good luck to the Sussex Central football team, which is heading to another state championship game this Saturday versus Middletown. Public schools this fall have won state titles in boys’ Division I cross country (Cape), Division I soccer (Appoquinimink), Division II soccer (Indian River), Division I field hockey (Cape) and Division II field hockey (Delmar). Private school titles were Division I girls’ cross country (Padua), Division II girls’ cross country (Ursuline), Division II boys’ cross country (Tatnall) and volleyball (Saint Mark’s). Saturday’s Division I football championship will be won by either Sussex Central or Middletown, both public high schools. Archmere plays Howard in the Division II title game. The Cape unified flag football team, under the banner of Special Olympics Delaware, is scheduled to play a semifinal game at Caesar Rodney at 7 p.m., Tuesday, Dec. 15. The winner will play the winner of Dover and Smyrna at 7 p.m., Friday, Dec. 18, at the site of the higher seed. Go on now, git! 

 

Subscribe to the CapeGazette.com Daily Newsletter