John’s Journal: A New Coach Gets Victory No. 1

 

On the penultimate Preps Today with John Millea podcast of 2021 my co-host, Minneapolis Star Tribune sports columnist Jim Souhan, asked if I had any final thoughts before we ended the show. My mind immediately went to the future, and I expressed optimism for 2022. (You can hear that podcast – Episode 180 -- here: https://www.mshsl.org/podcasts/preps-today-john-millea)  

That sense of optimism grew even stronger, and brought back ties to the past, after I attended a boys basketball game at Mounds View High School on Friday evening. The game was really fun, it was fast-paced, and the visiting Forest Lake Rangers came away with an exciting 65-57 win.

Before going into details of the game, let’s go back in time to the 1950s. A gentleman using a cane stood in the doorway to the gym on Friday and watched the action. He graduated from Forest Lake in 1959 and coached the boys basketball team at Mounds View for 45 years before retiring in 2012.

His name is Zigurd “Ziggy” Kauls and he is a member of almost any Hall of Fame you can imagine. The Mounds View gym bears his name: Kauls Court. Ziggy won 739 games with the Mustangs and stands fifth on the all-time Minnesota boys basketball coaching victory list.

Another name from way back was on the minds of a few people at Kauls Court on this night. Bob McDonald began his coaching career in 1955 at McGregor and became a legend at Chisholm, coaching for 59 years overall and winning a state-best 1,012 games. Bob was 87 when he died in October 2020.

The rookie head coach at Forest Lake is Kyle McDonald, one of Bob’s grandchildren. Kyle played basketball for his dad, Mike, the longtime coach at Cambridge-Isanti. His big brother Rhett did the same and is the head coach at Duluth East. Since Cambridge-Isanti did not have a game Friday night, Mike and Dayla McDonald came to Mounds View to watch their son’s team.

No matter the outcome, history would be made in one of two ways:

--The Mounds View Mustangs came into the game with 999 victories since the program began in the 1954-55 season.

--Kyle McDonald was hoping to notch his first career victory after the Rangers opened the season with three losses.

The second scenario played out, and it was historic. Kyle’s first win as a head coach came 66 years after his grandfather’s first.

When I interviewed Kyle after the game, the first thing he did was exactly what his father and grandfather would have done: He paid respect to the opponent.

“First, all the credit in the world goes to Mounds View,” Kyle said. “They’re a solid team, the atmosphere was crazy tonight.”

Indeed, the Mustangs are solid. They brought a 5-1 record into the game. Mounds View senior Dylan Wheeler made history in the final minute when he made a free throw for his 1,000^th career point. Dylan, who led the Mustangs with 16 points, is a prime example of the team’s rich history; his dad, Shell Wheeler, played for Ziggy, as did his uncle Rich. Older brother Mitchell played for current coach Dave Leiser (an assistant to Kauls for 21 years) and graduated in 2018.

Mike McDonald watched the game from the second row, close to the scorer’s table. During a timeout in the second half, one of the officials walked over to Mike and said, “The kid can coach.”

Yes he can. And he’s proud to be part of the first family of Minnesota basketball.

“Grandpa was watching over me tonight and I felt it all the way through the day,” Kyle told me afterwards. “And to have my mom and dad here means the world to me. They’ve been by my side all the way through.”

Kyle played college basketball at Wisconsin-Eau Claire, then was a member of his dad’s coaching staff for one year before becoming an assistant coach at Forest Lake for a year. He was named head coach last May. He is 24 years old.  

“Basketball is a really big part of our lives as McDonalds,” he said. “Our life revolves around it because of one man and that was Grandpa. We love the sport, but more importantly we love the people around it. And we love creating relationships and that's exactly what Grandpa did. And every single McDonald strives to be like him.”

Owen Waldoch, a 6-foot-6 sophomore, led Forest Lake with 22 points. Nolan Dumonceaux, a 5-11 sophomore guard, scored 20 and 6-2 senior Nick Bartlett had 14.

There will be plenty of McDonalds gathered at Augsburg College in Minneapolis in late December, when the teams coached by Mike, Rhett and Kyle compete in the eight-team Augsburg Holiday Tournament.

Kyle is thrilled to be in his new role.

“Honestly, it's a dream come true,” he said. “I remember talking to my dad and my brother less than two years ago and they asked me where my dream job is. I said it was Forest Lake. It’s where I always wanted to be. I had great respect for them when I was in high school. And it's just been a dream come true, being the head coach here. These guys work their butts off and I couldn't be more proud of them and our staff.”

As I wrote above, I am extremely optimistic about 2022. Seeing coaches young and old do good things, watching kids work together and compete, knowing the importance of history and seeing positive examples everywhere I go in our great state, it’s impossible to not be optimistic about the future, into 2022 and well beyond.

Happy New Year.

--MSHSL media specialist John Millea has been the leading voice of Minnesota high school activities for decades. Follow him on Twitter @MSHSLjohn and listen to "Preps Today with John Millea” wherever you get podcasts. Contact John at jmillea@mshsl.org 

John’s Journal: New Coaches, New Energy

 

In the second game of the season for both teams, the Irondale boys basketball team traveled to Anoka for a non-conference contest last week. It wasn’t a highly anticipated matchup, considering that the Irondale Knights went 1-18 last season and the Anoka Tornadoes finished 0-19.

That combined record of 1-37 is in the past now, and both teams have new leadership in first-year head coaches who bring energy and solid basketball  backgrounds – including college coaching experience -- to their new positions.

Irondale coach Trent Davis and Anoka coach Jesse Jefferson are both 31 years old. They are Minnesota-born but spent time in other states before returning. Both work with students in non-classroom roles at their schools; Jefferson is a student achievement advisor at Anoka and Davis is a behavior specialist at Irondale.

“It’s impactful. It feels good,” Jefferson said of his job away from basketball.

Jefferson was born in Minneapolis and moved to Georgia when he was 12. He played on a state-tournament basketball team at Sprayberry High School in Marietta, Ga., and returned to Minnesota as a player at Bethel University in St. Paul from 2011-13. He was a junior varsity coach at Coon Rapids from 2013-17 before becoming a member of the coaching staff for the Bethel men’s basketball team.

He’s in his fourth year working at Anoka, and said he had never really thought about becoming a high school head coach until he had spent some time there.

“I worked at the school for a few years and fell in love with the school and the kids,” he said. “I wanted to change the basketball culture.”

Davis was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and grew up in Apple Valley. He attended St. Bernard’s High School in St. Paul, playing basketball there on teams coached by Ed Cassidy that went to state tournaments in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Among his teammates were future Minnesota Gopher Trevor Mbakwe and Jordair Jett, who was the Atlantic 10 Conference player of the year at St. Louis in the 2013-14 season.

“We had some good teams,” said Davis, who played basketball at Wisconsin-Superior and became an assistant there after graduating in 2014. He coached girls basketball at Gateway High School in Kissimmee, Florida, for two years before returning to Minnesota. He spent the last three seasons as an assistant coach at the College of St. Katherine in St. Paul.

“It’s a pretty wonky coaching background,” Davis said. He added that one thing he learned while coaching in Florida was the importance of a basketball team with support that included a program to teach the game to kids before they got to high school

“That made me come up with the idea that if I ever take a high school job again, I would want more support,” he said.

Davis said he has found that at Irondale, calling it “the perfect opportunity. I always wanted to stick with college basketball, but if I had the chance to coach in high school I definitely wanted it to be a team with kids coming up.”

Four Knights are averaging double figures in scoring, with D.J. Anthony at 15, Dane Dedominces at 14, Drake Gomez at 12 and Jordan Tieh at 10.

At Anoka, Jay Nyamari leads the team with a 22-point scoring average, Keenen Rodriguez is at 14, Peyton Podany at 13 and A.J. Howze at 10.

Unlike Jefferson, who has been at Anoka for several years, Davis is new on the scene at Irondale this year and learning about the school and the students.

“I’m trying to get to know the players on a game level at this point,” he said. “We want people to talk about Irondale with a positive aspect and we want our players to be good young men, which starts in the classroom. We want them to go to class, do their job and be students first.”

Both coaches stress the importance of culture on their teams, and both know that expectations – at least on the outside – are not high this season.        Anoka is in the Northwest Suburban Conference and Class 4A Section 7. Irondale plays in the Suburban East Conference and Class 4A Section 5.

“We have high expectations for ourselves and I think we can compete to win our section,” Jefferson said. “We want to compete in every game.”

Davis said, “I’m not sure how far we will go. We could end up in the middle of the pack in our conference, which is tough with teams like East Ridge and Cretin-Derham Hall, Mounds View and others. We’re trying to take it game by game because it’s so new to me. … We really want to get Irondale basketball on the map and get people talking about us.”

--MSHSL media specialist John Millea has been the leading voice of Minnesota high school activities for decades. Follow him on Twitter @MSHSLjohn and listen to "Preps Today with John Millea” wherever you get podcasts. Contact John at jmillea@mshsl.org 

John’s Journal: Mankato East Remembers Pal Kueth

 

The Mankato East boys basketball team was on the court Saturday at Hopkins High School, meeting South St. Paul in one of 15 games on two courts as part of the Breakdown Tipoff Classic. The court was standard, with two hoops, out-of-bounds lines, free throw circles, etc. But it wasn’t quite the same as the Cougars’ home court.

New this season at Mankato East are two initials, a P and a K, inside a black circle in one corner of the court. They are in memory of 2021 grad Pal Kueth, who died suddenly at home on Sept. 11.

Pal’s initials were placed at the spot from where he launched a game-winning three-point shot at the buzzer to give East a 45-44 win over crosstown rival Mankato West last March. Everyone who was there will remember it forever.

“That's just a moment we'll never forget. It was crazy,” said East senior Puolrah Gong after the Cougars lost to South St. Paul 66-62. “I remember the play exactly. A kid missed a free throw, B.J. (Omot) got it, passed it to me and I couldn't get the shot off. I passed to Pal and he hit the shot, like he always did.”

A photo of Pal’s initials on the court was posted on Twitter recently by the East activities account (@Mankato_East), with these words: “Remembering Pal Kueth this season...the initials PK mark the spot Pal shot the game-winning three-pointer against Mankato West last season here at East. We miss you Pal.”

“He was an all-around leader and an all-around great person,” said Gong, a 6-foot-7 forward. “He was fun to be around, always smiling. Always. He really taught us a lot. He means a lot to us.”

Omot, a 6-8 senior who led the Cougars with 19 points Saturday, said, “If you were having a bad day, you’d just look at him and he made you smile. He was just that type of person. It was really tough losing him.”

Coach Joe Madson said, “We loved him. Pal was a great teammate, a very unselfish player who always had a smile on his face. He loved basketball. We want to remember him. He went way too early.”

In a game story about Kueth’s big bucket against West last year, the Mankato Free Press’ Chad Courrier quoted Pal: “I trust everybody on my team, and I know they could make a shot if we need to. But my teammates trusted me, and all I had to do was make the shot.”

The Cougars remember Pal with fondness and will keep him in their hearts throughout this season and beyond, on the court and off.

“I think it makes us play harder now,” Omot said. “You just want to do it for him, because he's one of us.”

--MSHSL media specialist John Millea has been the leading voice of Minnesota high school activities for decades. Follow him on Twitter @MSHSLjohn and listen to "Preps Today with John Millea” wherever you get podcasts. Contact John at jmillea@mshsl.org 

John’s Journal: Moorhead Is 2021 Sack Hunger Champion

 

The Minnesota State High School League is proud to announce that Moorhead High School is the champion of the third John’s Journal Sack Hunger campaign, in which schools all over the state are encouraged to collect non-perishable food items for those in need.

The Sack Hunger campaign began in 2018, when Spring Grove High School was the champion. Owatonna High School won the Sack Hunger campaign in 2019 and the drive was not held in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The effort returned this year and the Moorhead Spuds went above and beyond to feed those in need. Moorhead High School and other buildings in the district collected canned food as well as monetary donations. A total of 15,846 canned items was collected by the Spuds, along with more than two thousand dollars in funds to feed the hungry.

Moorhead’s effort was part of the annual Fill the Dome campaign in the Fargo-Moorhead area, with the goal of filling the floor of the Fargodome with food donations for those in need. During Fill the Dome’s 14 years, four million meals have been provided to help feed hungry children, seniors and families in the region. Students also have collected more than $690,000 during that time. Fill the Dome is led by Great Plains Food Bank in Fargo-Moorhead.

Fill the Dome has been happening in the Moorhead community since the beginning in 2007. At Moorhead High School, teachers and classes are encouraged to compete to bring in the most food, with a pizza party being awarded to the "winning" class. They have created a culture that supports this community food drive and they have worked hard over the years to raise awareness about hunger and food insecurity.

The Fill the Dome project at Moorhead High School is coordinated entirely by two student council members, who attend meetings throughout the summer and fall to coordinate and plan the food drive and the community activities associated with FTD. They also work with other schools in the district to encourage their food-drive plans and gather all the food at the end of the designated time. 

This year's student leaders at Moorhead High were Evie Kenkel and Megan Wilke. Congratulations to them!

The Sack Hunger campaign is a partnership between the MSHSL and Second Harvest Heartland to fight hunger in Minnesota and the upper Midwest.

According to Second Harvest Heartland, more than half a million Minnesotans are now facing hunger, including 200,000 kids who are going to bed hungry, and 63 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, when one unexpected expense can mean choosing rent over meals.

 

--MSHSL media specialist John Millea has been the leading voice of Minnesota high school activities for decades. Follow him on Twitter @MSHSLjohn and listen to "Preps Today with John Millea” wherever you get podcasts. Contact John at jmillea@mshsl.org 

John’s Journal: Basketball Is A Family Affair At NRHEG

 

Every time the girls basketball team from New Richland-Hartland-Ellendale Geneva hits the road for a game, they are driven by someone special. The Panthers may be the only team in Minnesota with a bus driver who also won back-to-back state championships as a head coach.

John Schultz stepped down after 11 years as head coach after NRHEG won Class 2A state championships in 2013 and 2014, completing three consecutive trips to state. Those teams were led by Carlie Wagner, who is the second-leading career scorer in state history (behind Braham’s Rebekah Dahlman) and went on to play at the University of Minnesota.

Schultz is retired from teaching but remains busy working as a substitute teacher and bus driver, including his duties with the basketball team (and the volleyball team in the fall). Onika Peterson, who was one of Schultz’s assistants, became head coach when he retired. She was more than happy to add Schultz to her staff a couple years ago.

There also was a family dynamic to his return to the bench. John’s daughter Sidney, a varsity player since seventh grade, is a junior who reached the 1,000-point milestone last week.

The Panthers won at Blooming Prairie 68-44 on Tuesday night to improve to 3-0 on the season. After chatting for a few minutes on the court afterwards, John Schultz excused himself because he had to warm up the bus for the trip home.

“It's amazing,” Peterson said. “Why would you not want him on your staff? All the experience he has, having the state run and back-to-back state titles.”

Sidney was a little kid when the Panthers had their championship run, and she was on the inside of it all.

“I was at all the practices,” she said. “I always tried to listen in on everything and take it all in as much as I could. I tried to learn from everything they did.”

Another key player on those teams was Sidney’s sister Jade, who now is a special education teacher at Maple River (while she misses a day of teaching this week, the substitute teacher will be her dad).

John has lots of wonderful memories from the Panthers’ state tournament experiences, including taking the court at Target Center.

“When we walked into Target Center for the very first time and that place was packed, that was breathtaking,” he said. “But the biggest thing was those kids. I had them from third grade on and they were the toughest kids I’ve ever seen. They were so fine with their roles, it didn’t matter what it was; they were so happy and proud of what they did for the team. We didn’t talk about scoring because everybody knew that we would score, we worried about defense and rebounding and things like that.”

The current players also had John Schultz as a coach before he returned to the bench. He worked with Sindey’s class beginning when they were in third grade, which helped make his return to the varsity staff seamless. John’s career record as a head coach is 225-58.

“He has a lot of knowledge and the girls are obviously comfortable with him since he's coached them for so many years,” Peterson said. “And it's always great to have another set of eyes, and more experienced eyes when he's coached way more games than I have. It's been really, really great.”

Sidney Schultz is the 13^th girls player from New Richland-Hartland-Ellendale-Geneva to score at least 1,000 points. The list is a who’s-who of talented athletes, led by the top three of Carlie Wagner and her younger twin sisters, Maddie and Marnie. Jade Schultz is No. 5 on the list and current senior Sophie Stork is No. 12.

Sidney is a 5-foot-5 point guard who is talented, relentless and poised.

“She's an absolutely hardworking, extremely driven athlete,” Peterson said. “I want to call her a bruiser, but she has more finesse than that. But she's just tough and she has been that way since she was in seventh grade. She works extremely hard, she attacks the basket really well. She has a good three-point shot and as a point guard she sees her teammates well. She gets knocked down, she hops back up, kind of shakes it off and starts sprinting the length of the court.”

Sidney wore a big smile when posing for a postgame photo with her dad.

“I’m very used to it,” she said of being coached by her father. “It's actually comforting. I'm always looking for him to be there on the bench, cheering me on, and he's always there.”

--MSHSL media specialist John Millea has been the leading voice of Minnesota high school activities for decades. Follow him on Twitter @MSHSLjohn and listen to "Preps Today with John Millea” wherever you get podcasts. Contact John at jmillea@mshsl.org 

 

John’s Journal: “The Other Side of Glory” Is A Glorious Read

 

I am in the midst of reading a Hemingway novel and it involves some heavy lifting. That fellow believed in using a massive amount of detail in his writing and it takes commitment – at least for me – to conquer those 470 pages. I will get there, but in the meantime a book arrived in the mail that I have been looking forward to reading.

In 2011, Carl Pierson wrote “The Politics of Coaching: A Survival Guide To Keep Coaches From Getting Burned.” It’s basically a manual for coaches, explaining lots of circumstances that coaches face and offers methods for dealing with them. I found it to be very well done.

Pierson’s next project, which I just received, is “The Other Side of Glory: A Team’s Quest for High School Girls Basketball History.” It is a compelling read about the Waconia Wildcats in 2019-20, the first season after Pierson stepped down as the team’s head coach.

While on a weekend family trip to Iowa, I began reading the book on Friday night and I didn’t put it down until I finished the last of its 242 pages. It is fast-paced, fun and extremely insightful.

I found it fitting to have read the book in Iowa, where I grew up watching high school girls play six-on-six basketball. (If you’ve never seen it, go to YouTube and type in “Iowa six on six girls basketball” and prepare to have your mind blown.)

Iowa girls began playing six-on-six in the 1920s and never stopped. In fact, for most of the 20^th century, including during my formative years, the Iowa girls state basketball tournament was bigger than the boys tournament and the state’s best female players were household names statewide. In Minnesota and most of the rest of the country, girls sports were shut down long ago and revived only with the passing of Title IX in 1972.

Pierson – a social studies teacher at Waconia High School, member of the Waconia City Council and executive director of the Minnesota Girls Basketball Coaches Association  -- does a great job of describing the history of Minnesota girls basketball, specifically in Waconia, where teams had so many state tournament near-misses over the years that the term "curse" was used. The book is a start-to-finish chronicle of Waconia’s 2019-2020 season and the Wildcats’ dream of becoming the first girls basketball team in school history to reach state.

Pierson offers plenty of superior behind-the-scenes storytelling and drama, from the locker room to the practice floor to bus rides and beyond. The book also includes lots of play-by-play details from games, which sometimes are literally basket-by-basket breakdowns. There are several references to officials and controversial calls (oddly, none of which apparently worked in the Wildcats’ favor).

There are precursors to this line of books, of course, most notably Buzz Bissinger’s “Friday Night Lights” in 1990. Another one I enjoyed was Joe Drape’s “Our Boys” about a Kansas football team and published in 2009. I have seen very few books chronicling a season for a high schools girls team. If “The Other Side of Glory” is breaking new ground, it’s doing so in an impressive way.

There was something in the book that caught me by surprise: No players are identified by their real names. Instead, Pierson used the nicknames that all members of the team went by: Bird, Mel, Raptor, Salsa, Scrunchie, Snake, Ozzie, Rookie, Dozer, Sauce, etc. This was a bit disconcerting, at least for me, and seemed to make the individual players somewhat less genuine and human. Head coach Dusty Niebauer, assistant coach Ashley Westphal and school administrators are identified in full, but the players are basically anonymous to anyone not familiar with that specific team.

To be honest, I just don’t know what to make of that. I found it difficult to identify with the players when I didn’t know their names. I can’t imagine “Friday Night Lights” without fully identifying everyone in the story and going into depth on each of them, on the field and off. In reading “The Other Side of Glory,” I would have liked to learn more about the key players; basic things like their future goals, their parents’ professions, the size of their families, the classes they liked and disliked … just more depth into their lives. 

That being said, Pierson is the perfect person to tell this story. The father of two young children, he stepped down as the Waconia coach after the 2018-19 season, which ended in a heartbreaking one-point loss to Cooper in a section championship game. I wrote about Pierson’s teams on occasion over the years, including a stretch when his players, undersized but quick, raced up and down the court, shot threes with abandon and averaged nearly 95 points per game.

After Pierson stepped away, 15-year assistant Niebauer took over in 2019-20. Pierson knew Niebauer and the players very well and tells a tremendous tale of their season.

The foreward is written by University of Minnesota women’s basketball coach Lindsay Whalen, whose hometown of Hutchinson is 35 miles from Waconia. She wrote: “My journey and the journey of the Waconia girls basketball team shows us that if you persevere through adversity, stick together as a team, work through conflict, and have passion for the game you love, then anything is possible.”

That indeed is the great lesson of Pierson’s book.

With that, I’ll take some deep breaths, pack a lunch and get back to Hemingway. I don’t believe I’ll enjoy old Ernest as much as I enjoyed “The Other Side of Glory.”

--MSHSL media specialist John Millea has been the leading voice of Minnesota high school activities for decades. Follow him on Twitter @MSHSLjohn and listen to "Preps Today with John Millea” wherever you get podcasts. Contact John at jmillea@mshsl.org