I am Phil Knee with sports.
Last Friday night, it was a great show of community support and unity when Richland Center football invited the Ithaca football team to the game following the death of one of the team members, Briggs Maxwell.
And this week, I spoke with Andrew Troxel, head coach of the Richland Center football
team.
When it comes to football, it's more than just, you know, your.
your colors, right?
I mean, we're all a football family, and especially, you know, with the ethical community and the Mitchell Center community, there's a lot of overlap, right, with people that are friends and neighbors and coworkers.
And so it was absolutely the right thing to do to honor Briggs.
And I know that that's not going to be an easy road on the road to recovery as a community and as a team.
But, you know, if we can play a small role in just helping and letting me know that they've got a support system here, like by all means, that that'll always be the case.
It seems a so wide range of people are feeling that, you know, 50, 100 miles away.
It's just not an easy time.
Is it?
You know, I think that's the beautiful thing about social media is that it will bring people together in times of crisis like this and just let them know that we are unified together as, as one community when it comes to events like this.
Coach of Ithaca Weston Kyle Kelly talked about being invited last week to the Richland Center game.
It was very incredibly thoughtful of them to do that.
It was very very hard to stand at that 50 yard line.
It was cool as we got going to hear the conversation with the kids behind us during the game talking about football again.
Ithaca Weston went back to practice this week.
We practiced for the first time as a whole group on Tuesday night.
It was
Pretty difficult, obviously, as difficult as anyone could ever imagine.
But it did feel a little bit OK to have some sense of normalcy as a team again.
And I felt the focus and everything was there better than anyone could have imagined.
But it's been hard.
I would guess that the team, and probably the coaches too, you kind of need this to get back to some sort of normalcy, don't you?
Yeah, that's kind of what I said is as difficult and challenging as this is.
We're going to try to go forward.
Even if it's only one centimeter at a time, if we got to crawl on our teeth to get there, we're going to try to move forward.
The Westin football team will be at New Lisbon tomorrow night.
Richland Center is on the road at Prairie Duchenne Riverdale with an ice wind last week over Hillsborough.
I asked head coach Jeff Johnson about that game.
The highlights to me were the fact that despite a couple of mistakes, we played a really good game from start to finish and it was good for the kids as a fun bus ride home.
Something that they really needed.
Yeah, it was a nice bounce back
win.
And I think you kind of need those.
Does it help build confidence a little bit?
Oh, absolutely.
Every game that we were in like that built confidence.
You can go back to last year from our first game, week one to our last game against Iowa Grant, and the level of confidence from start to finish was amazing.
I feel like even last week against Ithaca, we had confidence going in.
We made too many mistakes.
This week we made a couple of mistakes, but battled back from those and had a really, really nice game.
Riverdale will be home against Wasika Stubin-Seneca Friday night.
It's also a night when they will pay tribute to all military veterans.
They will have a special ceremony prior to kickoff time and before the national anthem.
All veterans are invited to the game at Riverdale tomorrow evening.
Well, let's look at the schedule for tonight.
Volleyball action.
The Southwest Conference begins.
Richland Center will be at Dodgeville in area volleyball.
Coach Jamie Johnson says the team won some difficult matches at the Reedsburg invite last
week.
Be the lady Smith team who's just scrappy.
Their their program has always been very good.
Their coach has been there as well for a long time.
We probably played the match of our tournament, knocking off Cuba City.
in three.
That was just an outstanding match, high quality volleyball, intense runs.
Keep It City is huge.
They're the biggest team I've seen in a very, very, very long time.
And they took it to us the first set, but we came around and figured out a way to win and able to pull away in that third set and won that.
And then finished off the day, knocking off Stratford.
who typically is always the top five finish at the sprawl.
So just another good program.
The great opening day, you know, and then we had to deal with the news that kind of hit the local community here and impacted our team as well.
And just, you know, we participate, but we really didn't play.
And our hearts go out to the families involved yet, you know, with that, but we're trying to, we're moving forward and getting ready for Dodgel at this point.
Coach Jamie Johnson talked about tonight's first round opponent in the Southwest Conference.
You know, they got a new coach.
Um, again, they, um, I think she's going to be really outstanding.
She actually was a teammate with one of our new coaches in high school at Hartford.
Um, you know, we play them twice within a week.
Uh, so we got to run into them.
Um, and the second go around, uh, was like 25, 23,
you know, 25, 21 or 22.
So it was a battle.
They're a little bit taller than us.
I mean, every team is going to be taller than us.
We might as well just get that out in the open.
We have Elevee and Kylie, and then we've probably got the shortest team around the area with the rest for sure.
Richland Center at Dodgeville Volleyball tonight.
River Valley plays at Prairie Duchenne.
Fenimore at Bosquebell.
Lancaster at Platteville.
Cassville at Highland.
Kickapoo at Lafarge Youth Initiative.
Wasika Steuben travels to Weston.
Royal at Hillsborough.
Verroqua at West Salem.
Mineral Point at Southwestern.
Cuba City travels to Darlington.
Belmont at River Ridge.
Barnabelle at Blackhawk.
Reedsburg at Salk Prairie.
Wisconsin Dells at Westfield.
And Baraboo at DeForest.
High School.
soccer tonight.
Wisconsin Dells at Boston.
Soc Prairie Visit Stoughton.
Edgerton at Platteville Lancaster.
Wisconsinites Barnabelle travels to River Valley and Dodgeville Mineral Point is playing at Richland Center for the conference opener and the home opener for coach Tom Stadler's team.
I ask him about the good numbers this year and if many teams will have enough to play a JV match with Richland Center.
Most of our teams will have JVs that we can play again.
We are the largest team in the conference as far as I have heard so far.
But we should find JV matches as the year goes on.
Varsity starts at 5 tonight at Avidus Ripfield.
I asked Tom about the team getting ready and trying to make improvements.
You can see where you need to improve.
So we've been taking time at practice to work on some of those spots that needed improvement.
and build upon the things that we're working already.
I know
defensive wise you've been given more goals than you would like.
What are some things or some changes you can make there?
Well, we're going to actually move our personnel around a little bit.
We're going to put some players in the back that we're playing up front and we're going to do a little bit of shuffling of players in the midfield.
WRCOS coverage of that one tonight.
Dodgeville mineral point at Richland Center kickoff time at five o'clock.
The Brewers overcame a rare rough outing from Jacob Mizorowski and beat the Cubs.
Nine five at Wrigley Field.
Milwaukee erased an early two run deficit with a three run fourth inning and pulled away late behind a dominant bullpen effort.
Jackson Cherry led the offense going four for six with a home run and a double while the Brewers pounded out 14 hits after allowing five runs in the first two innings.
Milwaukee pitchers shut out Chicago the rest of the way.
Manager Pat Murphy talked about pulling Mizorowski earlier than normal.
Yeah I mean I thought all in all he learned he's gonna learn a lesson from this.
He didn't command his fastball and he just had to bob and weave.
He was slipping on the mound again early but you know he didn't command his fastball.
He didn't have his perfect delivery and that's gonna be a key going forward.
Also in baseball yesterday, St.
Louis over the Dodgers, 8-6.
San Francisco 5-4 against Pittsburgh.
It was Arizona 1-0, shutting out Philadelphia, Atlanta 9-0 over Washington.
Cincinnati beat San Diego 7-3.
In the American League, the Athletics 9, Texas 2.
Seattle 8-3 over Boston.
Toronto beat Cleveland 11-0.
Houston 2, the White Sox nothing.
Detroit 11, Minnesota 6.
The Yankees 6, the Angels 3.
Interleague play, Colorado 6-5 over Baltimore, the Mets 10, Tampa Bay 4, Miami 9-6 over Kansas City.
Elsewhere in sports, Lambeau Field adding another event to its calendar.
The Green Bay Packers have announced the frozen Tundra
a college hockey doubleheader set for February 20th of next year.
The defending national champion Wisconsin women will take on Ohio State, followed by the Badger men against Michigan.
It marks the first hockey event at Lambo in 21 years since Wisconsin beat Ohio State there in 2006.
A ticket presale begins September 9th, with tickets going on sale to the general public on September 11th.
Meanwhile, at Lambeau Field and in Green Bay, the Packers preparing for the season opener next weekend.
They have a free weekend this weekend.
Matt LaFleur talked about what that means.
There's a bunch of stuff that you want to try to get done and utilize your time when you just aren't so pressed.
There's deadlines when you get to the regular season in regards to when you need to get your plan done by.
So you have a chance to put it on paper and draw it up and do all that and get it to the players.
So I would say there's less of a deadline.
The Packers opener is coming up September 13th against the Vikings and I am Phil Knee with an update on sports.