Don Crim
QUINCY — Matt and Amy Longo decided to finally test the snowbird experience by spending January and February in southwestern Florida. They had the opportunity to play bingo, poker, shuffleboard and pickleball and develop friendships with other residents in a 55-and-older community. There were trips to the beach, to spring training baseball games and to…
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The Major League Baseball season opens Thursday. Say hello to the pitch clock and bid goodbye to drastic infield defensive shifts and the unbalanced schedule. With that as a backdrop, the St. Louis Cardinals will attempt to be the first repeat champion in the National League Central Division since the Chicago Cubs in 2016-17. The…
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QUINCY — It has been a bracket-busting tournament. No, we’re not talking about 16th-seeded Fairleigh Dickinson toppling No. 1 Purdue. The Boilermakers, after all, have now lost to a double-digit seed in each of the last three seasons, so the outcome should not have been a complete shock. Rather, this concerns the NCAA Division II…
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ROCHESTER, Minn. — A case could be made that the Meisters are Rochester’s first family of basketball. Kurt and Angie Meister’s oldest child, Lincoln, is a 6-foot-10 junior forward on the Minnesota-Duluth men’s basketball team. The Bulldogs won 23 games during the regular season and qualified for the NCAA Division II national tournament for the…
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QUINCY — The NCAA Division II swimming and diving national championships begin Tuesday in Indianapolis. Quincy University freshman Wyatt Walsh, one of the country’s best in both the 200- and 400-yard individual medley, should be competing. But he’s not. You see, Division II swimming and diving teams are required to have a minimum of eight…
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QUINCY — Pat Rafferty says he will know when it’s finally time to walk away from basketball and coaching. At 72, after spending nearly a half-century with teams in high school and college gymnasiums, that time has yet to arrive. “He’s in his happy place,” John Wood Community College coach Brad Hoyt said of his…
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QUINCY — As the Great Lakes Valley Conference enters the final week of the basketball regular season, the only certainty on the men’s side is that nationally-ranked Indianapolis will finish first and be the top seed for the league tournament March 2-5 in St. Charles, Mo. Otherwise, we’re left to decipher the GLVC’s rating system…
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QUINCY — The Quincy Notre Dame girls basketball team begins its quest this week for a second consecutive Illinois Class 2A state championship and seventh overall in program history. Only Chicago Marshall with eight has captured more titles since the first girls champion was crowned in 1977. Adding to the potential legacy of another first-place…
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QUINCY — Kaci Bailey inherited 14 players on a team coming off a two-win season when she was hired as the Quincy University women’s basketball coach in April 2021. Not the ideal recipe for immediate success. “It was late in the recruiting cycle, and I told the coaches we needed to try to sign a…
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QUINCY— Quincy University coach Steve Hawkins likes to compare a basketball season to an airplane flight. “There’s always going to be some turbulence,” he explained. His team is trying to navigate its choppiest stretch yet. After surprising preseason prognosticators by winning six of their first seven Great Lakes Valley Conference games to rise to the…
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PITTSFIELD, Ill. — Charlie and John Hull were slipping on headsets and helping broadcast sporting events when most kids their age were collecting Pokémon cards. Just 10 and 13 years old, respectively, they would tag along with their dad, Jack Hull, who was working alongside the late Harry Wagy for WBBA-FM in Pittsfield. Jack soon…
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MACON, Mo. — My cellphone rang the day after Christmas. I looked at the screen to see it was Tom Sneed, or Tommy Joe as he was called growing up, a moniker some of us in the family still use. He’s a second cousin on my mother’s side. It had been a while since we…
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QUINCY — This week marks one year since joining Muddy River Sports, and what a year it has been. As we begin 2023 and start the countdown to Matt Schuckman’s 50th birthday celebration, let’s look back at some of my favorite columns of 2022. From Warsaw to West Point to the world, Rothert’s journey is…
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NEW SALEM, Ill. — Jim Shields retold the story of a reporter once asking him about the difference between coaching boys and coaching girls in high school basketball. “I said the boys never gave me a state championship,” Shields laughed. It was a vintage answer by a career coach, a straight shooter, a man who…
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QUINCY — The voice. Instantly recognizable, it was a fixture on Quincy airwaves for more than four decades. Commanding yet comfortable, perfect for radio, whether Jeff Dorsey was doing play-by-play of a sporting event or hosting a daily morning show. “There have been a number of great play-by-play guys, with (future baseball Hall of Famer)…
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QUINCY — Entering the season, it appeared the Great Lakes Valley Conference did the Quincy University men’s basketball team no favors by scheduling it to open league play against Indianapolis and Lewis, opponents projected to finish first and third, respectively. The one caveat was that both games would be in Pepsi Arena, and the Hawks…
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One month after sinking to a last-place tie, Iowa is poised to win the Big 10 West. Such is life in college football’s strangest division. The Hawkeyes, written off after being blown out 54-10 by Ohio State on Oct. 22 to fall to 3-4 overall and 1-3 in league play, control their destiny after pulling…
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What did we learn last weekend in college football? Defending champion Georgia is clearly the best team after throttling the high-powered Tennessee offense, Alabama is no longer invincible after losing on the road for the second time, and Illinois is not quite ready for prime time after falling at home to a struggling Michigan State…
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Around the horn … Former Quincy University men’s basketball coach Ryan Hellenthal has landed a new job as director of basketball development and basketball administration at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, the school announced last week. At SIUE, he is reunited with Cougars coach Brian Barone. Both were assistants on the coaching staff at Garden City (Kan.)…
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Notes, quotes and great thoughts from a sports weekend that, for the first time in a month, did not include my alma mater turning a winnable college football game into an excruciating loss: OK, so Missouri was on a bye. No game, no angst. Surely the Tigers won’t lose on Saturday to Vanderbilt, the only…
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When it became apparent I wasn’t going to make a living pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals, even though I had spent most of my childhood emulating the windup and mannerisms of Bob Gibson, it seemed the next best thing would be writing about the team every day. A baseball beat writer. In St. louis.…
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SHOREWOOD, Ill. — Dean Cappel and his wife, Connie, live in an active 55-and-older community west of Joliet. When they’re not traveling or doting on their six grandchildren, they like to spend time playing water volleyball and bocce ball and riding bicycles. “I just came back from the weight room,” Cappel said as we began…
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QUINCY — It would have been a trade that changed the course of baseball history. In July 2000, with Eli Marrero on the disabled list and Mike Matheny playing with cracked ribs, St. Louis was in the market for a backup catcher. The Cardinals, who would go on to win 95 games and the Central…
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Stats, stats and more stats for your reading pleasure on a leisurely Labor Day. Every Cardinals fan knows 42-year-old Albert Pujols looked like a younger version of himself at the plate in August, fueling a surge that propelled St. Louis to the top of the National League’s Central Division. Just how hot was he? Jayson…
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In case you missed it, Alabama is once again the consensus pick to win the college football national championship, with Ohio State nipping at its heels, and so yawn. Sure, Georgia, Clemson and Utah have the potential to reach the four-team playoff, but the Crimson Tide are expected to avenge last season’s championship game loss…
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FRISCO, Texas — D.A. Weibring was keeping an eye on the Open Championship, wondering whether rain would cancel an afternoon trip to the driving range with a grandson and anticipating the arrival the following day of four grandkids ages 6 and under for a sleepover. “You want to know what the old guy is up…
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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Chandler Hayden has always defied stereotypes. “Doing things out of the norm builds confidence,” she explained. The 2019 graduate of Pittsfield High School is anything but typical. And perhaps her boldest move yet came last month when Hayden, a University of Tennessee track and field thrower, was one of 15 college athletes…
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QUINCY — Youth baseball had a different look when Darin Dodd was a player. “Traveling” for competition then meant driving from the family home in the Hickory Grove subdivision on the eastern edge of Quincy to play Little League games at Maranatha Park on Einhaus Lane, just west of North 12th Street. Fast forward to…
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QUINCY — The boxscore shows Max Richardson playing only a few seconds for the Illinois boys basketball team in the inaugural Muddy River Showcase, more than he expected, yet long enough to create a memory that will last a lifetime. The 6-foot-4 power forward from Illini West who has since signed to play for Eureka…
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It was nearly the perfect ending to a magical high school sports season. Brown County was the sixth team in the Muddy River Sports area to play for a state championship during the 2021-22 school year when it took the field Saturday against Louisville North Clay in the Illinois Class 1A baseball state finals in…
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QUINCY — It was a sunny, calm morning on the final Saturday in May in downtown Quincy. A row of pickup trucks and tents were stationed in the shade along Hampshire on the north side of Washington Park between Fourth and Fifth streets for the Farmer’s Market. Maine Street was barricaded between Fourth and Fifth…
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QUINCY — Tom Obert continues to defy the odds on the golf course. The 66-year-old Quincy man scored holes-in-one in back-to-back rounds May 8 and 10 at Westview Golf Course and narrowly missed a third a day later. They were the sixth and seventh aces he has recorded in the last dozen years, which, in…
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Quarterback remains an unsettled position at Missouri. Coach Eli Drinkwitz continues to be in the market for a veteran transfer as he prepares for his third season in Columbia with hopes of improving on his 11-12 overall record there. Various media outlets reported he hosted former Southern Miss and Mississippi State quarterback Jack Abraham for…
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NORMAL, Ill. — Bruce Firchau was known as a “fixer” during his 38-year basketball coaching career, taking downtrodden programs and turning them into winners. His 557 career victories, mostly at schools in northern Illinois, and 2007 induction into the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame are testaments to the success he achieved. His biggest…
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QUINCY — During most of his tenure as athletic director at Quincy Notre Dame, Bill Connell followed a familiar routine. Find opponents for the school’s various athletic programs, determine mutual open dates to schedule games and then hire crews to officiate them. That’s not the case anymore. “You have to find officials first and then…
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Stream of consciousness … The University of Missouri men’s basketball team has largely been a non-factor in the SEC. Cuonzo Martin was fired last month after posting a 78-77 record in five years that featured two NCAA tournament appearances and three losing seasons. That followed the disastrous Kim Anderson experience (27-68 in three seasons). The…
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CANTON, Mo. — The list of football players with ties to Culver-Stockton College who have been selected in an NFL draft begins and ends with Bob Hendren. The offensive lineman, who enrolled in C-SC before transferring to the University of Southern California, was chosen by Washington in the seventh round in 1946, when the league…
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Welcome to arguably the best week on the sports calendar. It begins with college basketball crowning a men’s champion Monday night. The matchup features two of the sport’s blue bloods in Kansas and North Carolina, although many were hoping Mike Krzyzewski would get a fairy tale ending to his career. (Proud Mizzou graduates will be…
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NORTH PORT, Fla. — Once a coach, always a coach. While it has been 28 years since Kathy Turpin walked away from Culver-Stockton College as the winningest women’s basketball coach in school history, never to coach another college game, she is still doing her part to create an atmosphere for student-athletes to succeed. The competitive…
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ALPHARETTA, Ga. — Tim Fischer vividly remembers arriving home after the 1984 Western-Macomb Holiday Tournament. His Pittsfield Saukees had beaten the top two seeds back-to-back that day to win their first championship there and he had been named the tournament’s most valuable player. Pretty heady stuff for a high school senior harboring aspirations of playing…
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LIBERTY, Ill. — The road to Liberty High School’s first appearance in a basketball state tournament championship game began in 1975, when Paul Kreke accepted the only job offer he had after graduating from Quincy College. He became the head coach of a Liberty program that posted winning records only three times the previous 20…
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CANTON, Mo. — Rod Walton quietly moved back to Canton last month, a place he called home during a 30-year association with Culver-Stockton College. He spends his days visiting with old friends, some former high school basketball coaching colleagues, and other old C-SC hands he remained in contact with after retiring in 2012. He tries…
Read Full Article Sometimes sports are best consumed in smaller bites. It helps a fan forget about Major League Baseball owners locking out players, Phil Mickelson making the biggest misread of his career, and the national media’s endless infatuation with everything LeBron James and Aaron Rodgers say and do. There’s only so much greed and ego a person…
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