Column: Another season has come and gone

Published 5:23 pm Friday, March 9, 2007

By Staff
After this weekend, the high school winter sports season will officially come to an end.
The individual wrestling state finals are being held right now at The Palace of Auburn Hills, where eight of our area wrestlers are hoping to come home with state titles.
The wrestlers are the last eight athletes competing for a title in our area as the wrestling, volleyball and basketball teams all fell in district or regional action.
This means, it's time to honor some players and teams on their success this season.
Let's talk volleyball first. My hats off completely to the Niles varsity volleyball team. These girls made a complete transition from the 2005-06 season to this year. Under the direction of new head coach Linda Goodrich and competing in a a new class, these girls had a lot of adjustments to make in a short amount of time.
The big shocker came when the Vikes defeated Kalamazoo Central in the first round of the Class A District tournament. Goodrich's excitement showed, even in the email she sent me, where every word was followed with an exclamation point. She really was proud of her team this season and had every reason to be!
On to the Brandywine basketball team. I was very impressed with the Bobcats this year and hoped they could have gone farther in the tournament.
The Bobcats faced a few obstacles at the beginning of the season, but started to come alive as the weeks went by. Even when they trailed teams by huge gaps, Brandywine never once gave up and played every game to the last second.
The only thing I noticed about the team was that they didn't always play with a lot of chemistry on the court. Some games they were right on and others they couldn't read each other's movements at all. When they played together, though, they shined.
Overall, I like their will and determination to never give up.
On to wrestling – I give props to all of our wrestling teams.
Niles, Brandywine and Buchanan all did great this season. All represented our community well.
Individually, I have to point out Brandywine senior Jeremy Hechtl, who just keeps pinning his way to victories. Hechtl won his first match at the state tournament on Thursday by, what else, a pin. I saw him in action only a few times this season and I must say he is a very impressive wrestler.
There were a lot of memorable moments this season and unfortunately not enough space to write about all of them.
For most, this is just another season come and gone and many athletes are now preparing for the spring sports season, which starts in just three short weeks.
I'm very excited and ready to get outdoors! I'm also excited because this is the first Friday night off since Christmas Break! Most people don't realize that during the fall season, I sometimes don't get out of the office until 12-1 a.m. and during the winter season I get out anywhere between 10:30 p.m. – midnight, so having Friday night's off makes my weekend a little longer!
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I just wanted to say a quick thank you to all of you who wrote and called me about the bridge article. I'm glad to see that everyone is on the same page as I am. It was nice to hear other opinions as well. I figured I would get positive feedback from it, but I also thought I would get some negative ones as well. To my surprise they were all on the plus side!
This is an issue I could go on and on about, but I said what I needed to and I will let it rest.
Have a great weekend and don't forget to set your clocks one hour ahead!