A few last kickoffs: The end of a season

My brother said he didn't even know that Davidson played football.

"Well, they've had a team for more than 100 years," I said after explaining that I was covering the Wildcats' football game with Marist College for The Charlotte Observer today. (A look in the media guide revealed that 2009 was the 111th Davidson football season.)

"But they're more of a basketball school," said my brother, not one to let go of a point easily.

True enough, I said. Then we talked for a while about the Davidson basketball games we saw with our Dad at the old Charlotte Coliseum in the early 1960s, when Lefty Driesell coached the Wildcats to their first national prominence.

Even those who don't go back nearly that far probably still think that Davidson + sports = basketball. You know, that guy named Stephen Curry and that team that came a basket away from the Final Four in 2008.

But it's sometimes an uneasy co-existence when a college's football and basketball teams play on different-sized stages. A few years back, I read a book called "A Season in Purgatory" about Villanova football by a Philadelphia sportswriter named Tony Moss. It described how the school's football team took a back seat to its high-profile Big East basketball program.

I'm not saying that that's the way it is at Davidson. But at least this afternoon, as the Wildcats' struggling 3-6 football team took the field for its last game, the buzz seemed to be about basketball.

A TV in the press box at Richardson Stadium was tuned to the Wildcats' season-opening basketball game at Butler -- a big early-season clash of mid-majors -- when it started about an hour after the football game kicked off. It marked the beginning of the post-Stephen Curry era, the Wildcats' prolific scorer having gone on to the NBA after the end of his junior season last spring.

Compared to the nationwide exposure the basketball team gets, Davidson football labors in relative obscurity. The Wildcats play in what is now called the NCAA's Football Championship Series (the clunky name for the former Division I-AA), in a conference called the Pioneer Football League. It's an odd aggregation of 10 teams spread from coast (Marist hails from Poughkeepsie, N.Y.) to coast (the University of San Diego is the westernmost team).

A crowd of 4,011 -- smaller than some of the school's basketball throngs, I'm sure -- turned out for the Senior Day contest. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon with a sort of throwback feel to it. There were lots of well-turned out alumni -- fellows in jacket and tie and khakis and women sporting corsages.

And the game turned out to be a typical performance by the Wildcats in what has been a frustrasting season. In a 14-6 loss to the visiting Red Foxes, Davidson's defense grabbed three interceptions and blocked a field goal. But the Wildcats, as has been their problem most of this season, couldn't score points.

Afterwards, Davidson coach Tripp Merritt was understandably subdued -- his team had just lost a very winnable game. And he even sort of apologized to me for not being very talkative -- again, not a problem, coach.

"There just wasn't one thing you could put your finger on," he said. "We were always a day late and a dollar short."

I went back upstairs to write my story. Players and their families were mingling on the field and in the stands before the football gear was packed up for the season.

The basketball game was still on the TV. Davidson, which had led by 10 points in the first half, now trailed by two. (They ended up losing by 11.)

One season ends, another begins. In sports, it's the way of the world.

A few last kickoffs: Bucking the odds

In keeping with their nickname, the Mallard Creek Mavericks have had quite a wild ride in their short football history.

The school is three years old, one of many high schools that have been built over the last decade of growth in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. And like most first-year football programs, the Mavericks struggled in their inaugural season, going 1-10 with a team made up mostly of freshmen and sophomores.

Mallard Creek appeared headed for a dramatic turnaround last fall, winning nine of its first 10 games before having to forfeit all of those victories because of an ineligible player.

But this fall the Mavericks have picked up where they should have left off last year. They'll take a 10-1 record into Friday's second-round Class 4AA playoff game against Independence. It will be a rematch against the only team which has beaten them this season -- Mallard Creek lost a 42-41 overtime heartbreaker on Aug. 28.

Mallard Creek's wins have followed a familar script this year. A big, experienced defensive line line totally shuts down the other team's running game. The offensive line creates space for the team's most dangerous player to wreak havoc.

The loose Maverick is junior quarterback Marquise Williams. He has a strong, if sometimes erratic passing arm. But he is an absolutely electrifying runner. "When they need a big play, he'll make it," said Hopewell coach Chris Rust, whose team lost 28-7 to Mallard Creek on Friday night in a first-round playoff game. "Tonight he just took control of the game."

I've talked with Williams several times over his career and he's a confident young man, but not in an obnoxious way. He's simply aware of the truth -- you're not going to stop him for long. On Friday night, he broke the back of the Titans with several big runs on third or fourth down.

"That's what he does, and we don't expect him to stop now," said Coach Mike Palmieri, an outgoing Floridian who's been the coach since the beginning.

ACC and SEC programs are looking at Williams as a prospect. He says he wants to play quarterback and one wonders whether his helter-skelter game can be molded to fit a big-time offensive scheme.

But then I also wondered years ago whether an 18-year-old basketball player I'd just interviewed name Tracy McGrady would really skip college to go straight to the NBA.

So we'll just have to wait and see.

A few last kickoffs: A most unusual soccer match

NOTE: I’m rolling out three short pieces tonight. As the titles indicate, some fall sports seasons I've been covering are are wrapping up. At the same time, I've been catching up on my reading in one of my favorite magazines, The New Yorker, and if there’s a resemblance to that style in any of these pieces, it’s purely intentional. If there isn’t, well, I tried.

It may not seem a big deal to you to buy a ticket to a sports event and go sit in the seats or the stands to watch it. But I don’t do either very much – I write about most sports events that I go see in person -- and I have a lot of respect for folks who are willing to submit themselves to the sports fan experience. It was never so great as on Wednesday night.

I attended an NCAA Division II men’s soccer regional tournament game Wednesday between Wingate and Flagler College of St. Augustine, Fla., played due to unusual circumstances at Mallard Creek High School, less than a mile from my house.

As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I teach at Wingate, about an hour’s drive from my home. I enjoy watching my students play for our athletic teams, but it generally requires either staying over after work or a special trip back in order to do so. So I determined that I would take advantage of this opportunity and brave the rainy and windy weather conditions that were causing the game to be moved in the first place.

Wingate athletic officials explained that despite the bad weather, the game had to be played on Wednesday or the winning team would not be able to have a day off before playing a second-round game against a higher-seeded, and rested, team which had received a first-round bye. Mallard Creek’s football stadium was chosen over other, closer venues, because it had an artificial playing surface and was available – a tough combination to achieve on such short notice.
So I and about 30 other hardy souls – I counted umbrellas – made the trip over to watch the match. As my former students Ryan Brown and Hugh Patton said, calling the game for the WU Internet broadcast, "It's not a bad crowd for a freezing cold night in a hurricane."

(In the interest of full disclosure, I ended up in the warm, dry press box. I brought a notebook and collected some post-game quotes for the student newspaper, The Weekly Triangle, to justify my place in that safe haven.)

Wingate took an impressive 4-1 victory in a game playing in a driving, sideways rain until early in the second half. Weather reports had the game time temperature at about 47 degrees and winds gusting at times from 30-35 mph.

After the game, I talked briefly with Wingate coach Gary Hamill, a fiery Irishman (Belfast, Northern Ireland to be exact) who's actually a former student of mine from my days teaching an MBA class. I also spoke with the Bulldogs' top goal-scorer, Luke Mulholland, a junior midfielder from Preston, England. As I interviewed him, I couldn't help but think, "Mick Jagger, circa 1964." Well, maybe it's a stretch.

And I also couldn't help but think that a year ago Jayne and I were getting ready to take a quick trip from London to Belfast. We miss hearing those accents on a daily basis.

A Texas legend turns 90

These days, I'm usually just sad when I read the Dallas Morning News, which is now a shell of the wonderful paper it was in the mid- to late 1980s when Jayne and I couldn't wait to pick it up out of our driveway in Commerce. (We haven't felt the same way about any paper since then....)

But I couldn't resist sharing this link to a column by one of their good sports columnists who's still around, writing about another columnist that many Texans grew up on.

A Texas legend turns 90 Kevin Sherrington Columns Sports News News for Dallas, Texas Dallas Morning News

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Of Texas, Tar Heels, Tigers and other things

I'm not sure you see these quite as much any more, but I always loved the random notes columns that old-school sports writers used to turn out near the end of a week to make use of those odds and ends which didn't fit anywhere else.

Blackie Sherrod of the Dallas Morning News had his "Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to....." pieces and New York's legendary Jimmy Cannon would preface his with "Nobody asked me, but....."

So here are a few things that I haven't had the inclination even to turn into full-fledged blog posts, but which I should use before they get too old:

I recently enjoyed a trip to Austin, Texas, where I took a couple of members of the staff of The Weekly Triangle, our student newspaper, to the annual fall convention of the Associated Collegiate Press and College Media Advisers. It was quite a nostalgia trip, as Jayne and I used to make Austin an occasional weekend destination when we were newlyweds and I was a graduate student at rival Texas A&M. It's still a beautiful city with great music, Mexican food and barbecue and a great college atmosphere around the University of Texas.

One thing Texas doesn't have any more that I still miss is the old Southwest Conference, gone since 1995, but not forgotten by Lone Star State football fans. A columnist in the Austin American-Statesman bemoaned that fact in a piece I read while we were there. He noted that if the SWC were still intact, we would have seen a game this football season between Texas, ranked No. 2 in the nation this week, and TCU, which moved up to No. 4 -- for at least the mythical Texas college football championship and probably a game with BCS implications. Instead, Texas played Central Florida last weekend. Too bad.

I've made this point before and the previous item underscores it -- "big-time" college football programs should use that 12th game that's been added in recent years to renew natural rivalries that have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another. In addition to Texas and TCU, fans would also embrace games like Clemson-Georgia (last played in 2003) and Florida-Miami (met five times this decade, but didn't play at all between 1987 and 2001). Unfortunately that extra date has more often become a home game against a beatable opponent -- pay a lower-tier Division I or a Division I-AA foe a modest guarantee, pocket the rest and add a "W" to the record. Good deal for the athletic budget, too bad for the fans.

Tonight was opening night for regular season college basketball, and I read with interest this piece on the Sports Illustrated website making an argument for an official opening night for college hoops. I'm thinking that this would be as out of place as tailgating in the culture of college basketball, but it's an interesting idea.

One of tonight's opening games was North Carolina vs. Florida International in the Coaches vs. Cancer Tournament. I've told several people that I hoped that defending national champion North Carolina would soundly beat FIU tonight at Chapel Hill. That's a departure from my usual position about the Tar Heels, generally my least favorite team in any game in which they play.

But I've felt the Golden Panthers deserved a whipping (which they got tonight, 88-72) since the FIU athletic administration whined and threatened to back out of this game when tournament organizers matched them up against UNC instead of original opponent Ohio State. This after school officials crowed about how they were going big time with the hiring of new coach and former NBA great Isiah Thomas over the summer.

As the saying goes, "To be the man, you've got to beat the man." Seems FIU's powers that be wanted to skip the middle step -- to beat the man, you first have to play the man.

And speaking of the Tar Heels, one story I won't miss hearing as this season progresses is the one where my alma mater, Clemson, has never won a basketball game at Chapel Hill. That NCAA record 54-game losing streak will neither be extended nor broken this season. The Tigers and Tar Heels play just once in 2009-2010, on Jan. 13 at Clemson, where solid orange hope springs eternal.

Telling Monique's story: an interview with Kris Holloway

Author Kris Holloway came to Wingate University recently to talk about her experiences in a part of the world that's about as foreign to most of our students as a place can be. But her message is one that people of all ages should embrace.

"People in other countries are much more similar to us than they are different, " Holloway, a former Peace Corps volunteer in the west African nation of Mali, told me when I asked what she hoped an audience of college students would get out of her presentation.

Holloway, who now works for a company which arranges international study experiences for college students, is the author of "Monique and the Mango Rains," which recounts her two years in the early 1990s spent assisting a midwife (the title character) in a clinic under the most daunting of conditions.

Incoming freshman students at our university were required to read the book over the summer and discussions of it were part of their orientation at the beginning of the school year.

"I wanted to know how the rest of the world lives," said Holloway, explaining why she went to Mali, located largely in the southern Sahara Desert and nearly twice the size of Texas. "I'd spent my life in a tiny, privileged part of it. I come from a line of teachers and social workers, so (joining the Peace Corps) wasn't just out of the blue."

The Ohio native had studied environmental science in college and was interested in working in natural resource management. Being fluent in French (Mali was part of colonial French West Africa) and having studied in the Ivory Coast, Holloway said she was comfortable with her assignment.

But, as customary for beginning Peace Corps volunteers, Holloway was required to spend some time with a host before starting her assignment. ("Wouldn't it be great if we did that for everyone who came to this country?" she said.) She spent a week with Monique Dembele, a midwife and the only health care worker in the village of Nampossela, and decided to stay on helping her in the village's "birthing house.'

"I thought the impact I could make would be so much greater," Holloway said. "It was an easy choice."

Holloway's book is a wonderful read. It captures how it feels for an American to adjust to a place where theirs is the foreign language and culture. And it vividly describes Monique's one-woman battle again disease and unsafe practices (genital cutting is still a cultural practice among women there) -- as well as other cultural norms that make life difficult for women -- to help bring more children successfully into the world and care for the health of mothers. The graphic descriptions of deliveries made a definite impression on some of my students, and Holloway said what she saw also left an impression on her.

"I think I was unprepared for the deaths I saw, especially a child's death," she said. "I wasn't prepared for a place where women and children didn't have access to basic human rights. When you hold a child that's dying in your arms, the amount of care you take of, say, your cat is put into some perspective."

But there were rewards, too. "I wasn't prepared for how much I'd be loved there," she said. Holloway and Monique became close friends as well as colleagues. But in one of life's cruel ironies, Monique, who had battled adverse conditions to bring so many babies into the world, died in childbirth several years after Holloway left Mali.

But Monique's legacy lives on in her village in the Clinique Monique, a solar-powered women's health center started by Monique's cousin in 2004 and which is almost finished, Holloway said. Monique's sister is now a midwife there. The clinic has been built with the help of royalties from Holloway's book and individual donations. She is still in contact with Monique's three children, the youngest named Kristini in honor of her. Her foundation supports their education in a country where the average salary is $350 a year.

"We were so close as friends," Holloway said. "She was my connection to the country, and that connection may actually be deeper because she's gone. Her entire family is trying to carry on her work."

Holloway tells the story of her book to a variety of groups, from book club and libraries to civic and school groups. Her next presentation after her Wingate visit was a conference call with Harvard Medical School students the following day.


In this video clip, Holloway shares some thoughts on the basic message of her book and her talks about it: