John’s Journal: One Season, Two Sports, A Very Busy Family

 

A few weeks ago I posted a note on Twitter, asking people to let me know about high school kids who are involved in two sports at the same time this spring. I learned about several Minnesota student-athletes who fit that model, including Cyrus and Elijah Jones of Minneapolis Edison High School.

They are juniors, they are twins, and they take the notion of “multi-sport athlete” to another level. They are football players in the fall, wrestlers in the winter, and in the spring they are members of the Tommies’ baseball and track and field teams.

They are very, very busy.

“It requires a lot of time management,” said Eli.

“It’s a lot of organizing my schedule,” said Cyrus.

Both are all-district football players, with Eli a varsity starter since eighth grade. Cyrus qualified for the state wrestling tournament in February, and this spring the twins have stayed even busier with practices and competitions in two sports at the same time.

Their parents, Jane and Kenny, are educators and former athletes who are well-attuned to the challenges of school and sports. The family’s busiest time was probably during the winter of 2021-22 when Cyrus was wrestling and Eli was playing basketball. Talk about chaos.

“That was really crazy,” said Jane. “One helpful feature of winter sports is Kenny isn’t coaching (he is an assistant football and baseball coach at Edison). We were able to get schedules on a planner and figure out who’s going where.”

With a routine that focuses on lots of moving parts, it’s no surprise that Eli and Cyrus have been moving at a rapid pace their entire lives. They were the kind of little kids who bounced off the walls with constant energy.

“In preschool they were lovingly nicknamed the twin tornadoes by some of the other parents,” said Jane. “Once they walked, they ran.”

The twins were involved in tee ball, gymnastics and other activities that kept them busy. “They were always moving and we tried to have them move in positive ways,” Jane said.

Playing two sports at the same time is filled with challenges, and Edison head baseball coach Joe Boyd said having Eli and Cyrus also competing in track (where they are sprinters and jumpers) can be cause for worry.

“Absolutely. I think any coach would be lying if he said he didn't (worry),” Boyd said. “But you know what? To be able to play two sports and to be able to condition two different ways, it's beneficial for them on the baseball field. They're so quick. Their reaction is so fast, and they're so strong.

“To have two boys who are multisport athletes, I'm a big proponent of allowing guys to do that. It would be selfish of me to say they shouldn't be able to do track. We can spread the love a little bit. I love it and I support those guys 100 percent.”

Eli said track, especially speed work, is important “because I want to get faster for football. Track helps me more with football.”

Cyrus called track “a fun thing to help me get stronger and faster, but baseball takes more priority for me because I’ve been doing it since I was young.”

Both of them have dealt with injuries. A hamstring injury kept Cyrus sidelined for a time this spring and Eli has been competing despite a lingering shoulder injury that will require surgery before the 2023 football season.

“They go all out, they go hard and they always have,” Jane said. “I’ll never forget when Eli was little, around fourth grade, playing first base when a ball was hit and he and the pitcher went for it at the same time. You could hear the two heads colliding.”

Eli suffered a broken nose, damaged eye socket and cheekbone. “But he held up his glove because he caught the ball,” said his mom.

One of the highlights so far in their athletic careers came when Cyrus won the Section 5AA wrestling championship at 145 pounds last winter. Having the opportunity to wrestle in the state tournament at Xcel Energy Center was special.

“It was a great experience,” Cyrus siad. “I was a little nervous because of how big the crowd is. But once you actually start wrestling you kind of forget it all.”

His season ended with a first-round loss at state, but that didn’t diminish his accomplishment. And with one more year of high school remaining, the Jones family will surely see more great moments.

“They both are really driven,” said Jane. “They don’t hold back.”

--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: Winona Cotter’s Bowlin Joins Softball’s 800 Club

 

As a young man, Pat Bowlin knew he wanted to become a coach. Growing up in St. Paul, where he graduated from Harding High School in 1978, baseball was his game. As a 19-year-old he was coaching a VFW baseball team. He took over an American Legion baseball program at 21. He foresaw a career coaching the game he loved.

It’s odd isn’t it, how life has other plans?

Today, Bowlin is 63 years old and one of the most highly decorated coaches in two sports. He coached a third sport for a time … and baseball is not one of the three.

He is on the cusp of history as the longtime softball coach at Winona Cotter. When the Ramblers defeated Plainview-Elgin-Millville 5-2 Monday in the opening round of the Class 2A Section 1 playoffs, it was the 801^st career win for Bowlin. The only Minnesota high school softball coach with more victories is Bob Mertz, who retired at New Ulm Cathedral in 2018 with 802. (The national high school record for career wins is 1,182 by Diane Laffey of Michigan.)

Bowlin can tie Mertz's mark when the Ramblers meet Caledonia at home on Tuesday. Should they win, they would play either St. Charles or La Crescent-Hokah on Thursday. And if Bowlin doesn’t match or exceed 802 wins this spring, he has no plans to step down.

“I’m having as much fun as ever,” he said. “We have kids and no one lives in town anymore, I don’t hunt or fish and my only guilty pleasure is golf. I really enjoy coaching and always have. I don’t see myself retiring any time soon.”

Now in his 39^th season as a softball coach – after graduating from the University of St. Thomas he spent eight years teaching and coaching at St. Bernard’s in St. Paul before moving to Winona –Bowlin remains the Ramblers’ girls basketball coach, as well. His 674 career basketball victories rank sixth all-time in that sport and third among active coaches.

He was inducted in the Minnesota Girls Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2009 and the Minnesota Softball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2017.

Oh, he also was head coach of the Cotter football team for 10 years. And for a time he hung onto the dream of coaching baseball.

When he left St. Bernard’s and was named athletic director at Cotter in 1991, he asked school president Jim Devine if he could take over as baseball coach, saying his heart was always in baseball. Instead, Devine wanted Bowlin to build up the softball program, which had gone winless the year before.

His first team finished 6-11 and as he said, “We started rolling pretty good.”

At St. Bernards, Bowlin was 24 years old when he became softball coach. He led the team to four state titles between 1985 and 1990. After he took over at Cotter, the Ramblers won state championships in 2003 and 2006, making 12 total trips to the state softball tournament. They will take a 15-3 record into Tuesday’s game with Caledonia.

Junior pitcher Madison Hazelton, who reached the 500-career-strikeout mark last Friday in the same game in which Bowlin got win No. 800, said the coach is tough.

“He is very tough, and he really believes in everyone and he spends a lot of time working with each athlete individually and trying to make them the best possible person and player they can be,” she said. “He shares a lot about his personal life and I feel like that gives us some really good life stories to take with us on the field and later down the road.”

Ann (Lee) Leahy, who played on Bowlin’s first St. Bernard’s team in 1984 and was a senior on the 1985 state championship squad, later was an assistant coach under Bowlin for two years. She played on the St. Bernard’s basketball team coached by Bowlin prior to his initial softball season.

“I knew of his intensity on the court, and that was cool,” she said. “I was happy to hear he would be coaching softball but I didn’t realize until our first practice that he had not coached softball before. I also thought he was a lot older than me and we are about five years apart.”

From the start of his coaching career, Bowlin made sure that preparation left nothing to chance. Leahy remembers the team practicing in the rain when that was not normal.

“He said, ‘What if we’re playing in the state tournament and it’s raining and we’ve never practiced in the rain?’ ”

Assistant coach Matt Hazelton, who has been on the staff for five years and is Madison’s father, called Bowlin “one of the most caring, passionate people that I've ever met. Everybody looks up to him and respects him so much, and you do everything you can to please him all the time because you want to make him proud of you. He's made me a way better coach just by being around him.”

Bowlin and his wife Laurie raised their six kids – five daughters and a son – in a sports-oriented household. He was able to coach his son Patrick in football and his daughters in basketball and softball. Patrick, a former head girls basketball coach at Rogers and Totino-Grace and former head softball coach at Cretin-Derham Hall, is now on the women’s basketball coaching staff at Wisconsin-Green Bay.  Bowlin’s daughter Devin is the head girls basketball coach at Maple River. A son-in-law, Eric Larson, is the activities director and head boys basketball coach at Rochester Lourdes.

That’s a lot of family and a lot of coaching, and Bowlin credits Laurie for helping him keep everything in perspective.

“When I was the head coach of three sports, I think our kids were like from 3 to 16 years old and as you can imagine it was chaos,” he said. “And I said to Laurie, ‘Is it time for me to give up one of them?’ And she didn't take long to answer. She just said, ‘You know, this is a big part of who we are as a family. Our kids love the fact that you coach.’ I often would take my kids on the bus, they would come to practice. So it really was kind of part of who we were.

“I'm grateful to Laurie for that support, and she's been there the whole time with me in this journey.”

Asked about winning 800 games, Bowlin is happy to share that mark with everyone who has been part of his success all these years.

“It feels good,” he said. “Those milestones are a little too much sometimes but as I’ve gotten older I enjoy them more. It’s a chance to reflect and hear from a lot of former players, and the current team gets really excited about it.”

Savy Repinski, a ninth-grade infielder and pitcher, said the coach’s milestone is big, big news, and well-earned.

“He's been coaching for so many years and he just has a lot of knowledge of the game and it's great to have him as a coach. He's very intelligent, he's always teaching us new things about the game and always pushing us to be better.”

Bowlin was a social studies teacher and coach at St. Bernard’s for eight years, followed by 20 years as the A.D. at Cotter. For the last dozen years he has been the elementary principal at Cotter. Like other things in what is indeed a wonderful life, he almost didn’t go into education.

At St. Thomas, he started as an accounting major but the thought of preparing taxes for the rest of his life didn’t seem very attractive, prompting a switch to sociology. At Harding, his alma mater, teachers were being laid off and he didn’t want to get a degree and not be able to find a job. But he bumped into a Harding counselor at Target in St. Paul, and that chat changed things.

“He really encouraged me to follow my heart,” Bowlin said. “I really did want to be a teacher. He said something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘You’re good, you’ll get a job.’ ”

He loves working as an elementary principal, which also didn’t happen exactly to plan.

When he took over as elementary principal, it was supposed to be a one-year arrangement, basically an interim position. But after the year he said, “Hey, I like this. I want to take this on.

“I always tell people the difference is the high school kids walk in with their head down and the little ones come in and give you a hug. It’s whole different atmosphere. And I really have loved elementary education. It's just been a lot of fun.”

The one-time accounting major who dreamed of coaching baseball has done pretty well. Because, yes, life sometimes has other plans.

--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 Final Stretch Run For The Overgaauw Twins

 

Ashley and Amanda Overgaauw.

At Thursday’s Red Rock Conference track and field championships on the Murray County Central track in Slayton, Amanda and Ashley Overgaauw did exactly what they are famous for. They outran everyone.

The senior twins from Murray County Central took part in five events and won all five. Ashley won the 800 and 1,600 meters, Amanda won the 3,200 meters, they both were part of the winning 4x400 relay team and Amanda ran on the championship 4x800 team.

They run and they win, and that’s been the theme for years, during the fall cross-country season and on the track in the spring ever since they were in seventh grade. It’s a rare category, but the Overgaauws may be the top pair of twins in Minnesota high school running history.

“They're going to run with everything they have. That shows every time they run,” said Dominick Damm, who coaches the Murray County Central girls and boys cross-country teams and the girls track team.

The twins' final conference championship meet marked another point in a series of career-wrapping high school competitions. Next is a subsection meet in Pipestone on Friday, the Section 3A finals in Montevideo on June 1 and the state track meet June 8-10 at St. Michael-Albertville High School.

After that, the twins will become college cross-country and track athletes at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, S.D., which is 80 miles from Slayton.

“I'm excited to take the next step after high school, to compete collegiately,” Ashley said. “That'll  be so much fun and see how I can improve and how much I can bring my times down and have fun.”

For the next few weeks, however, they will be working hard in the hopes of winning state titles. Their list of accomplishments is already lengthy …

The twins made their Class A state cross-country debut as ninth-graders in 2019, placing 51^st (Ashley) and 53^rd (Amanda); teammate Morgan Gehl, a then-junior, placed second. After the pandemic wiped out the 2020 state cross-country meet, Amanda won the state title in 2021 and Ashley was sixth. In 2022 Amanda and Ashley finished second and third behind Jade Rypkema of Nevis.

On the track, Amanda finished third in the 3,200 meters at state in 2021 and both twins were part of the Rebels’ fifth-place 4x800 relay team.

At last year’s state track meet, Amanda was second behind Rypkema in the 3,200 and Amanda and Ashley were members of Murray County Central’s runner-up 4x800 unit.

Asked about their personal goals for the remainder of this season, Amanda said she looks forward to a final high school meeting with Rypkema (who will run collegiately at Gonzaga).

“I would love to finish high in the two-mile again, I'd love to get first or second. I'd have to race Jade, which will be a fun battle. We're thinking I might do the open 800 this year and possibly try to get a state championship in that.”

Ashley said she also may compete in the 800.

“I'm thinking for the mile I've been trying to bring my time down, and under five flat would be really cool. And then I'm thinking about doing the 800.”

If they both compete in the 800 in the postseason, it would be fitting to see them running side by side for high stakes. They have done so many times, especially in cross-country, and they had some sisterly fun this spring during a meet in Windom.

Running the 800 together, they decided beforehand that they would absolutely run together. In fact, they wanted to finish in a dead heat.

“We decided just to do it for fun and see if we could tie, and we were only .01 apart. Ashley won with a lean,” Amanda said. “That was a really fun race. We played rock-paper-scissors down the homestretch. It was an awesome memory.”

Damm said the Overgaauw sisters have shown growth and maturity over the years, beginning when they joined the cross-country and track teams as seventh-graders.

“How different are they now? Well, in the first year I don't think they talked,” Damm said. “They don't say much now, but they've been kind of thrust into the spotlight and people talk to them so they talk back. They're much more outgoing. A great thing about a sport like this is how it's changed their personalities, talking with people all the time. They've been hard workers their entire careers. They've never been rah-rah-type teammates, but they've been just like, ‘All right, that's next. We'll do that.’ ”

The twins are known for their work ethic, something that has carried over to the rest of the team over the years, and not just female athletes.

“They definitely have instilled a culture,” Damm said. “What they do has crossed over from the girls to the boys team. My boys cross-country team spent a bunch of time trying to beat the girls. That was a practice goal, “We're gonna beat the twins today. We're gonna beat the twins in this run.’ That just kind of trickles down. And now, next year I think we’re going to have a really good boys team because of it.”

In September 2020, as several small meets were held during the regular season, Murray County Central hosted teams from Heron Lake-Okabena and Southwest Minnesota Christian/Edgerton at Slayton Country Club. The fact that there was no state meet was tough to swallow for the Rebels, because Gehl was a senior that year who hoped to repeat as the 1A cross-country champion. The Rebels were also coming off a fourth-place team finish at state, with every runner returning, including the Overgaauws.

The top three female runners that day on the golf course were named Overgaauw, Overgaauw and Gehl (who was working through an injury). The twins were sophomores then, and after the race Gehl made a statement that could come true this season, more than three years later.

“Their work ethic is super,” Morgan said of Amanda and Ashley. “And they're really super nice, they're great people. And I hope they get to go to state one year and hopefully finish one and two.”

--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