Tag: basketball

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Tournament Time

By Christian Begeman

This column has been almost exclusively dedicated to outdoor and nature related photography. This month that changes. I have good reason to do this. First, I haven’t been able to get out into the great wide open much over the last month and second, I HAVE been able to get back into a couple of our premiere conference basketball championships held in Sioux Falls and fire off thousands of photos. Part of my job at Midco is to support the Midco Sports crew and one of my favorite aspects of this is to document the team pulling off their superb live coverage of both the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference Tournament and the Summit League Conference Tournament. The team pulls out all the stops for this coverage including upwards of 30 staff each session, a pre-game and post-game show, extra cameras (like the one attached to a 24-foot jib) and special graphics.

In addition to shooting time lapses of the venues to be used on air and behind the scenes photos and video of the hard-working crew, I also get to capture action photos to support player shot charts used on air and Midco Sports’ overall social media presence.

From my grade school days through college, basketball was first and foremost on my mind. As soon as I couldn’t play anymore, I started learning to take action photos. When I lived in Mitchell in the 2000s, I started a side hustle before side hustles were a thing, taking photos of high school athletics and providing images to parents who would rather enjoy the game than bother with pictures. From that gig, I learned all about wrestling, hockey, volleyball and soccer, all sports of which I had very little knowledge. But my first passion has always been, and likely always will be, basketball.

Over the years, I have learned a few pointers to get better action imagery. First, bench celebration shots usually make the best photos. They are fun, full of passion or angst and really tell a story, particularly the bigger the game gets. Generally, a photographer tends to think that the better action photo is getting as close to the action as possible. I fall into that rut as well. However, I’ve often had to relearn that shooting wider, particularly in the biggest games, tends to be the way to go. For example, late in the Summit League Championship game between North Dakota State University and South Dakota State University, Zeke Mayo, a true freshman for SDSU, drove baseline and floated a high arcing jumper over the defense. The Jacks were up by one and needed to score to stave off a hard-fought Bison run. When shooting this play, I stayed wide enough to see the bench about to react and the crowd watching intently to see if the bucket would go in. It did, by the way, but capturing that frozen moment of intense anticipation is something that helps cement why we love the drama of basketball around these parts come March. I’m already excited to do it again next year.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

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Return to the Summit

The Denny Sanford Premier Center in Sioux Falls hosted the Summit League Tournament March 3-6. College basketball fans from throughout the Upper Midwest gathered to see which team from the Summit League, which includes eight schools in seven states, advanced to the NCAA national tournament (South Dakota State University prevailed over the University of South Dakota on both the men’s and women’s side). The tournament has been a boon for Sioux Falls and the state since its arrival 10 years ago. Sioux Falls will host the event through 2022. Christian Begeman from Midco, whose sports network televised the quarterfinal and semifinal rounds, roamed the arena for four days and captured these images.

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The Spirit Behind a Tragedy

By Paul Higbee

Rapid City High School’s 1968 varsity basketball cheerleaders were (from left) Terry Blanton, Shirley Landstrom, Jan Glaze, Kay McNutt, Gail Flohr and Diana McCluskey. All died in a plane crash while returning from the boys State A basketball tournament in Sioux Falls.

If your school lost an entire cheerleading squad in an accident, what could you possibly say when reporters call for comments?

It might be tempting to keep the conversation broad and philosophical, focusing on that thin line between life and death, how tomorrow is promised to no one, and what might have been. Understandably, there was plenty of talk like that as Rapid City mourned six cheerleaders after a long-ago St. Patrick’s Day plane crash.

But the girls’ high school principal took a different tack and kept his remarks down to earth, emphasizing a particular skill the young women developed collectively.”They were the kind who would keep a crowd in line,” Donald Varcoe told the Rapid City Journal just hours after the crash,”the kind who would quiet down booing at a ball game.”

Cheerleading was why the girls were aboard the plane in the first place. By telling the public that cheerleading was more than showy fun, and that these six knew it and lived up to their responsibility, Varcoe paid a beautiful tribute. Who knows? Maybe his remark was the first spark that eventually led to the Spirit of Six Award, honoring those girls and presented to one outstanding cheerleading squad at each of South Dakota’s state high school basketball championship tournaments.

The crash happened in 1968, a vastly different time in Rapid City and the nation. There was just one public high school in Rapid then, close to downtown (the building houses the Rapid City Performing Arts Center today). The crash site was Rapid City Municipal Airport, and it had no firefighting units of its own — a fact that provoked considerable community angst after the accident, although no one believed firefighters immediately at hand could have saved lives in this case.

In 1968 no American was basking in naÔve contentment, or believing that death spared the young. It was the terrible year of the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, violent race riots, and a steady stream of coffins from Vietnam. In fact for Lead High School, the other West River school along with Rapid City to qualify for the boys’ State A basketball tournament in Sioux Falls that year, the scheduling couldn’t have been worse. On the tournament’s second day Lead would pause for the funeral mass of 22-year-old James Lien, killed by enemy fire while on river patrol in Vietnam.

On Tuesday, March 12, Rapid City High School students were dismissed from afternoon classes to attend a noisy pre-tournament pep rally. Cobbler basketball players were introduced, drama students performed a Bonnie and Clyde skit, and the basketball cheerleaders took charge with lively yells and well-rehearsed choreography. There were three seniors and three juniors on the cheerleading squad.

Seniors included Shirley Landstrom, Kay McNutt, and squad captain Jan Glaze. Kay possessed a real talent for vocal music. Jan, eldest of five Glaze sisters, was reigning Cobbler homecoming queen and planned to attend the University of Wyoming in the fall. Shirley was active in vocal music, and her dad, Ivan Landstrom, was a Rapid City businessman whose ventures included aviation. He had offered to fly the girls to Sioux Falls and back.

Terry Blanton, Gail Flohr and Diana McCluskey were the juniors. Terry sang in All State Chorus and wore a seemingly perpetual smile. Diana was involved in student government, ski club and, away from school, Jobs Daughters. Gail, the only cheerleader not born in Rapid City, was a Florida native who moved to the Black Hills at age 13. With her warm personality, Gail made friends and fit in immediately.

Wednesday the cheerleaders boarded the twin-engine Beechcraft 18 plane that Ivan Landstrom would pilot. Other passengers were Shirley’s mom, Mary Landstrom, and cheerleader advisor and chaperone Dorothy Lloyd.

They arrived safely in Sioux Falls, and the next day the Cobblers played Miller in the tournament’s opening session, with a big crowd of 8,000 watching. The game was a rematch of sorts, because the same teams met to open the 1967 tournament. Rapid City won then, but in 1968 Miller’s hot-shooting Al Nissen quieted Cobbler fans by scoring 34 points en route to a 59-51 win. Just like that, Rapid City was knocked from the championship bracket.

The Cobblers bounced back the next day, defeating Vermillion 61-53. Saturday afternoon they won by the same score, this time over Aberdeen Roncalli to clinch fifth place. With Rapid City playing early instead of Saturday night, Jan Glaze was free to travel the short distance to Lennox, where her cousin Linda Steever was getting married.

At the wedding reception Jan’s aunt, Mavis Steever, invited Jan to spend Saturday night in Lennox. Then she could travel home by car with her parents Sunday.

“But she said no,” Mavis recalled recently.”She said with the basketball season over, this trip would be the last time the six girls would be together as cheerleaders.”

Meanwhile, back in Sioux Falls, Brookings upset favored Sioux Falls Lincoln in the title game, 69-57. Brookings juniors Jim Kortan and Tom Osterberg were hailed as the game’s heroes, with Kortan scoring 11 points in the last eight minutes and Osterberg sinking 10 free throws without a miss. For a few hours it seemed that Kortan, Osterberg, and Senator Robert Kennedy were the big South Dakota newsmakers that weekend; Kennedy announced his presidential bid that Saturday, and pundits wondered how he might fare in the state’s Democratic primary 11 weeks down the road.

Sunday morning in Sioux Falls Ivan Landstrom filed his flight plan, gathered his eight passengers, and soared west. The weather in Rapid City was unseasonably warm, 68 degrees. Predicted rain showers never materialized. A steady wind of 20 miles an hour blew at the airport, with occasional stronger gusts. A little before 11 a.m., Landstrom made routine radio contact with the airport tower. He was cleared for landing and approached the runway at 11:12. Short of the runway, the plane was slammed by a crosswind gust. Its right wing shot upward and luggage in the cargo hold shifted. With its weight suddenly unbalanced the aircraft didn’t recover from the gust. The left wing hit the ground. The plane cartwheeled and two onlookers dashed to help but saw no movement through the craft’s windows. Less than 10 seconds after impact the plane burst into flames, and intense heat drove the would-be rescuers back. A grass fire ignited. Whipped by the wind, the fire burned a mile-long strip.

Rapid City businessman Ivan Landstrom volunteered to fly the varsity cheerleaders to Sioux Falls. They gathered for a photo before leaving Rapid City. The nine passengers were (from left) Shirley Landstrom, Kay McNutt, Terry Blanton, Jan Glaze, Mary Landstrom, Gail Flohr, Dorothy Lloyd (squad advisor), Diana McCluskey and Ivan Landstrom.

Within a minute of receiving calls, Rapid City and Ellsworth Air Force Base firefighters were in motion. It took the Rapid City crew 14 minutes to arrive, and the Ellsworth crew 17 minutes.

Sketchy crash news spread quickly, mainly reported by Rapid City broadcasters. Many Black Hills basketball fans, driving home from the tournament, remembered hearing on their car radios that a plane was down, or being told by fellow travelers when they stopped for lunch or gas. Though no one knew who the victims were for a while, lots of people pieced together information and correctly surmised the plane had something to do with Rapid City High School and the tournament. A rumor circulated that members of the basketball team were aboard. Finally, in late afternoon, Pennington County Coroner George Behrens released the list of nine names.

The deaths of six of its young women left Rapid City reeling, and equally stunning was the loss of Ivan and Mary Landstrom, builders of one of South Dakota’s great business enterprises. Ivan, a native of Sweden, immigrated to Minnesota as a young boy. He met Mary there and the couple moved to Rapid City in 1943 to open Landstrom’s Jewelry and to manufacture Landstrom’s Black Hills Gold Jewelry. As an owner, additionally, of a Rapid City aviation service, Ivan had flown as a pilot for 22 years, logging more than 10,000 hours. He and Mary left behind two adult daughters.

If there’s a victim who’s been somewhat forgotten, it’s advisor Dorothy Lloyd. As Rapid Citians knew in 1968, Dorothy was a thoroughly professional and highly respected educator who had taught English at Rapid City High School for 21 years. Born Dorothy Goodhope in Viborg, she graduated from Yankton College and then continued her education at the University of California. She taught in that state and back in South Dakota at Parker, Piedmont and Spearfish before joining the Rapid City faculty. Friends remembered her as a dedicated bridge player. Dorothy had been widowed three years before the crash and was survived by an adult son and four grandsons.

As a 60-year-old cheerleading advisor, Dorothy was maybe a little old fashioned, recalled Dottie Crawford Olson, Cobbler cheerleader in 1967 with Jan Glaze and Shirley Landstrom.”I remember our skirts couldn’t be higher than an inch above our knees,” Dottie said.”But we got along well with her and she was always fair.” By 1968 Dottie was a freshman at South Dakota State, where she heard the news.

Well into Sunday night law enforcement officers asked young people to please keep moving as they caravanned, car after car, hoping to pay tribute at the accident site. The Rapid City Journal reported the only debris not charred black were pieces of fire-resistant pom-poms, Cobbler red and white.

It was the era before in-school grief counseling. Pam Schlimgen Roeber, a Rapid City junior then who knew the six girls, recalled coming to school after the crash and hearing barely a word spoken about it. A substitute teacher showed up in Dorothy Lloyd’s classroom, which had always been decorated with photos of cheerleading squads Dorothy advised over the years. Pam found it odd that all the photos had been immediately removed.

The Thursday after the crash, South Dakotans from all walks of life filed into the high school’s auditorium for a memorial service honoring all victims. In fact, there were two identical services so that all hoping to attend could do so. Included were delegations of students and teachers from several other schools. The nine who died had attended five different Rapid City churches, and pastors from each of those churches led a portion of the memorial service.

Earl Butz, First Methodist Church pastor, spoke directly to high school students present. He told them no one can lead another person’s life. But, he said,”Some of you will have the responsibility to fill the positions they have held, and undertake the tasks they were doing. Do it well. Bring fruition to the work they have begun.”

To memorialize the cheerleaders far beyond the 1960s, members of the state’s Sheriffs and Police Officers Association were soon discussing a cheerleading award (the organization today is the South Dakota Peace Officers Association). The award would honor one cheerleading squad who mirrored the Rapid City girls’ dedication and positive influence at future state basketball tournaments. The first Spirit of Six Award trophy was presented in 1970, but not on the tournament floor. A few years later the South Dakota High School Activities Association decided the award would be announced very publicly at state tournaments. Today the award remains a presentation of the South Dakota Peace Officers Association, and trophies go to cheerleaders at both boys’ and girls’ tournaments, classes AA, A and B.

Vyonne Glaze, Jan’s mother, said the award felt like a good way to honor the girls four decades ago, and that it continues to feel that way today.

Rapid City High School evolved into Central High School and moved to a new building. A stone memorial near the gym, created by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, pays tribute to the cheerleaders and their advisor, although that doesn’t mean all Central students understand what happened.”But I think most kids who are in activities know,” said Dottie Olson, the 1967 cheerleader captain who worked for several years as a secretary in the school. Central, she noted, won the Spirit of Six trophy in 2010 at both the boys’ and girls’ state tournament and that boosted awareness.

Every spring, all South Dakotans are reminded, however briefly, of the victims of that tragic crash 50 years ago. But their memories are never far away for those who knew and loved them.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Men in Black Stripes

By Roger Holtzmann

“When you make a call and the whole place goes nuts booing you, that’s when you know you got it right,” one longtime referee said.

Ah! The sounds of basketball season! Pep bands blaring out rock songs. Gyms exploding when the home team drains a clutch three-pointer. Whistles piercing the din, then deafening silence as the crowd draws its collective breath and awaits the referee’s call.

Followed inevitably by an enraged chorus of boos from half the crowd, while an aggrieved,”It’s about @#$&% time! He’s been doing that all game!” rings out on the gym’s opposite side.

In the span of years since James Naismith hung up a peach basket and invented the game of basketball, no one has ever left a gymnasium saying,”Those refs really did a good job tonight.” If it was a close game the losing team’s fans are convinced they were robbed, as a result of either malice or incompetence. Which doesn’t mean the winning side thinks the officials did them any favors. They think their team won in spite of the referees.

When I was a wee lad I’d sometimes go to the games of an adult men’s basketball league that met on Sunday afternoons in winter. It was a pretty relaxed operation, the sort of league where guys would sprawl on the bench and smoke cigarettes during timeouts. If a player got thirsty mid-action he would sometimes go to the water fountain while his teammates played four-on-five at the other end. No one ever complained because this occasionally worked out well, strategy-wise. When the opposing team made a basket or his compatriots got a rebound he was in the perfect position to grab a floor-length pass for an easy layup.

On one memorable occasion I was tasked with running the scoreboard and clock for a game. Things didn’t go well because the controller had a quirky feature: if you forgot to flip a certain switch the buzzer would sound whenever the seconds counter hit 00. This was no ordinary buzzer, either. If the sonic energy it generated hadn’t been contained by the gym walls it would have shattered windows and terrified livestock for miles around.

At the opening tip-off, naturally, the clock read 8:00. Up went the ball, on went the clock and BRAAAAAPPP! went the buzzer, causing consternation and heart palpitations all around. When it happened at the beginning of the second quarter there were rumbles of discontent; on the third occurrence I was universally denounced and relieved of my duties. I remember the last buzzer distinctly for it was the first time I ever used the grandaddy of all curse words.

Anyway … referees for these contests were sometimes recruited by a player standing in front of the bleachers with a whistle and a striped shirt in hand. “Wanna ref?” he’d call plaintively to some poor shlub. As game time approached the standard on what constituted an acceptable candidate went down.

If Jerome Bear was around he always got the job. He wore the striped shirt so often it had stretched to fit his heroic midsection, and so was comically large on almost anybody else. Beyond that, Jerome was simply an institution. After watching him in action, an objective observer might conclude that he was less than conscientious. He could work a game with fewer steps than almost any referee in history, I would guess. Sometimes he’d lean against the wall at midcourt, or sit on the stage at one end and call the game from there. He was mostly fair, but it was understood by both teams that, in a toss-up situation, calls would go to the home team. Even so, I never heard any player get mad at or even argue with Jerome. He was just there. One might as logically have argued with the tide for coming in or the wind for blowing.

I think about that Sunday afternoon league whenever I see an ad for sports drinks, especially those which feature a guy drenched in sweat, droplets hanging off his nose, etc. First of all, are these appealing images? Do they actually make people want to buy such products? I don’t get it.

Anyway … most of the guys in that league were working stiffs. They didn’t make a big production out of the fact that they were sweating; most of them, in fact, would have recoiled at the idea of exercise for exercise’s sake. They played for love of the game, and if they took time off to get a drink, well, it was only logical to expend as little energy as possible. I’d love to see a commercial with sensible guys like them chugging Ultra Fantastic Power Zoom Ade between drags on a Marlboro.

As for Jerome, nobody would be handing him a whistle these days. Games at every level are a serious, no-pain-no-gain proposition.

Marvin ‘Pal’ Christensen of Yankton, was an unappreciated referee for nearly 50 years.”I’ve been called everything in the book,” he once told me. He worked his first basketball game (at Scotland) in 1947, and wore stripes for the last time at a football game (at Scotland) in 1996. Between those two contests he worked roughly 6,000 games, everything from middle school to a couple games in the Big 12.

If you ever feel like booing the referee, think about this.”A guy told me a long time ago, when you referee you’re only going to be half right. No matter what you call one side isn’t going to like it,” Christensen said.”But when you make a call and the whole place goes nuts, booing you … that’s a referee’s applause. That’s when you know you got it right!”

Editor’s Note: This column is revised from the March/April 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Farmhouse Refuge

By Bob Glanzer

The 1966 blizzard that froze eastern South Dakota is still ranked as one of the top 100 storms of the century. This storm that took place on March 2-5, 1966 took the lives of at least 18 people, and over 100,000 sheep, cattle and hogs. Winds blew with gusts up to 70 mph, causing zero visibility for 11 hours and less than a quarter mile visibility for another 19 hours.

Playing in the Region 4 basketball tournament on Thursday, March 3, 1966, Doland lost their playoff chance to Bryant 57-54. After the game, about 250 Doland fans, players and students left the Huron Arena determined to make it back to Doland. As the buses and cars drove north on Highway 37, they faced worsening blizzard conditions. Three bus loads and several cars made it to Pheasant City, a country gas station at the intersection of highways 28 and 37 about 18 miles north of Huron. Eighty-five people jammed themselves into the small grocery store inside the gas station. Twenty-one people made it 6 miles east of Pheasant City and waited out the storm at Bloomfield.

Linda (Hofer) Loewen was a high school junior at the time. She and her family lived on the highway 2 miles north of Pheasant City. Loewen remembers her father saying,”This looks like a bad storm. I’ll turn the yard light on. It might save someone’s life. Someone might see it and we can help them out.”

Little did her father know that a few hours later, after driving several miles with a fan watching the side of the road from the open front door of the school bus, that two bus loads of students and five car loads of Doland fans would drive into their farm yard.”It was very late, and I was ready for bed,” Loewen recalls.”People just kept coming through the front door. I thought the line would never stop.” In all, 88 people packed into that country farmhouse, destined to spend the next 2 1/2 days waiting for the blizzard to blow over. Every room was full of people. There were not enough beds, not enough seats and only one bathroom.

Loewen says they did everything possible to make everyone comfortable.”We spent the days and nights watching the clocks. They were copying Mom’s recipes, and on Friday afternoon, Mom showed the ladies how to make homemade noodles.” The Hofers had several milk cows, several hundred chickens and a deep freeze full of baked goods and meat.”They would tie a string of twine around Dad and he would go to the barn to milk the cows and gather the eggs,” Loewen recalls.”Mom boiled dozens of eggs and they drank gallons and gallons of milk.” To celebrate a couple of birthdays during those two days, the ladies baked a birthday cake.

About noon on Saturday, March 5, the wind let up and the snow stopped. There were 8 to 10 foot drifts everywhere, but slowly the stranded guests and school buses left those warm homes and continued on to Doland.

The deep freeze was empty, the house was a mess and over 30 dozen eggs were gone.”As the people left they were leaving money on the kitchen table for Mom,” Loewen recalls.”Mom said, ‘They sure didn’t have to do that. I’m so glad we could save some lives.'”

About the Author: Bob Glanzer is a retired educator and banker and spent 26 years helping organize the South Dakota State Fair. He lives in Huron.

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March Madness is Here

By John Andrews

Today the women’s basketball teams from the University of South Dakota and South Dakota State University and the SDSU men will play for the Summit League conference title and an automatic bid into their respective NCAA national tournaments. The championship games will cap a festive extended weekend at the new Denny Sanford Premier Center in Sioux Falls, where city leaders hope the revenue and excitement generated over the four days of the conference tournament will elevate South Dakota into consideration for future, larger college basketball events.

Crowds hovering around 10,000 have proven that South Dakotans love their basketball. That’s always been true. A story on the Gann Valley Buffaloes and the 1955 State B Tournament that appears in our current issue says that as many as 4,000 people showed up to watch the consolation round. Crowd numbers for those high school tournaments may not be what they once were, but all the games are now broadcast on public television and streamed over the Internet. You could find all of the Summit League conference games on the Midcontinent Sports Network and online through ESPN, but the tournament remained a hot ticket. Many believed the crowd at Monday’s State-U semifinal men’s game would be the largest to ever watch a basketball game in South Dakota history. It came close — the 10,153 fans that attended fell just short of the estimated 11,500 people who saw Armour beat Beresford in the 1979 State B championship game at the Rapid City Civic Arena, according to Stu Whitney of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.

NCAA executives who visited Sioux Falls for the tournament gushed about the Premier Center, the 12,000-seat facility that opened last fall. They were similarly impressed with the nearby Sanford Pentagon, a 3,200-seat arena that recently hosted the Northern Sun conference tournament and is”perfectly built for Division II basketball,” NCAA rep Mark Davis told the Argus. Augustana College, which just finished an all-time best 30-2 season, won that tournament and the right to host a regional there this weekend. Aberdeen’s Northern State University (23-8) will be that tournament’s sixth seed.

I attended Saturday night’s session at the Premier Center, and the possibilities are exciting for college basketball fans. Sioux Falls has already placed a bid to host an opening round of the NCAA tournament but it was denied. Those sites are set through 2018. The Premier Center will host a women’s regional in 2016, so perhaps a men’s regional won’t be far behind. The sticking point seems to be available hotel space, something the city will surely look to remedy before sites are selected for 2019 and beyond.

Basketball on this stage was hard for a lot of South Dakotans to imagine when South Dakota State announced its intent to move from Division II to Division I in 2003. Petitions circulated around Brookings lobbying the school to stay in the relative safety of Division II. State lawmakers introduced resolutions against the move. As a writer for the Brookings Register, I recall sitting through hours of testimony before the Board of Regents in Sioux Falls.

SDSU had a plan, but executing it was not easy. Men’s basketball coach Scott Nagy has always been honest about the struggles of the transition (hear him talk about them in this interview with SDSU athletic director Justin Sell, recorded before this year’s Summit League conference tournament).

But success has once again come to SDSU, and it’s clear the University of South Dakota — which reclassified several years after SDSU — is on the upswing as well. And so are other schools, like Augie, Northern, the University of Sioux Falls and Dakota Wesleyan University, whose boisterous students rock the”Corn Crib” at each home game in the Corn Palace.

It’s a good time to be a basketball fan in South Dakota.

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Lakota Nation Invitational

We sent a writer to the Lakota Nation Invitational Tournament (LNI) last weekend in Rapid City. We’ll have a major feature article on the LNI in the fall of 2015, but we thought we’d share some photographs of the big winter extravaganza that has been held for the past 38 years at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center in Rapid City. Photos by Bernie Hunhoff.
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Yankton: An Athletic Village

By Bernie Hunhoff

The Cincinnati Reds gained a lot of fans in Brookings and Yankton last week when they smartly drafted Yankton’s hometown hero and SDSU star Layne Somsen in the Major League baseball draft. We might still watch a Twins game or two, but surely Joe Mauer will understand that many of us had hot dogs and popcorn while we watched young Layne strike out batters at Riverside Ball Park.”

And now we’re watching the NBA draft, set for next week, to see what sort of cap we’ll be wearing in the winter because we’re rooting for another local kid — 7-footer Colton Iverson.

One can only imagine the amount of work put forth by Layne and Colton as they reached this stage in their respective athletic careers. And most of the credit goes to them as individuals. But it takes a village to raise an athlete. Their parents and grandparents and siblings, their coaches from T-ball to Division One, teachers and neighbors and anyone else who gave them a cheer or threw them a ball can share in these summer triumphs.

The accomplishments for Layne and Colton are especially sweet because both suffered adversity along the path. Layne had a near-career-ending arm injury, but recovered from Tommy John surgery to lead the South Dakota State Jackrabbits to the NCAA tournament.

Colton started his college career at the University of Minnesota, but it was a frustrating few years with the Gophers. He bravely packed his bags and re-located at Colorado State University, only to become First Team All Conference.

There are no guarantees in life and even fewer in professional sports. Nobody knows what will happen next for these two fine young men. But they are already winners, and all of Yankton can be proud of how they’ve represented Yankton, the little village by the river.

So back to the Reds. Where is Cincinnati? Isn’t that where Johnny Bench played? What is a Red?

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My Perfect System

By Roger Holtzmann

This is the time of year when millions of us across the country, from President Obama to Vegas odds makers, fill out our brackets for the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament. For a select few, this is a rational, scientific process. Everybody else is guessing, and that includes the talking heads on ESPN. I find this oddly comforting.

My own system is quite simple. I assume that the tournament selection committee got it right. A #1 seed will always defeat a #16 seed, a #2 seed a #15 seed and so on to the end, when the #1 seed overall wins the championship. This has only happened twice in the last nine years, but I said my system was simple, not necessarily very good.

Which brings me to the South Dakota State Jackrabbits, who are in the tournament for the second straight year. The Jacks are a #13 seed, and will face off against a #4 seed, Michigan, on Thursday night.

Couldn’t be simpler, right? Michigan will advance.

Except … Michigan was a #4 seed last year, and they lost their first round game to Ohio, a #13 seed. That’s bound to be in their heads when they take the court in Auburn Hills. That loss wasn’t a fluke, either. In each of the last five years a #4 has fallen to a #13. In 2008 it actually happened twice, which means the Jacks will definitely win and advance.

And I need a new system.