Minnesota – Page 3 – Collin Kottke: All-Around Swell Guy

Minnesota Vikings Shanked The Kluwe Report Non-Release

The Minnesota Vikings are never exactly shining examples of good PR. We could down the list and there would be a lot of things that the Vikings didn’t really have a lot of control over. For instance, Love Boat was a bad incident, buy boys will be boys and there was nothing the higher ups at Winter Park really could do. That’s not the case in the latest controversy that is brewing in Eden Prairie.

In January, ex-Vikings punter Chris Kluwe released a diary-like post to Deadspin describing what was seen as a very unfriendly environment to the LGBT community and their allies. Kluwe’s post was really damning towards special teams coach Mike Priefer. The franchise said they would investigate.

Earlier this week, the Vikings apparently told Kluwe and his legal team that the team would not be publicly releasing any of their report. On Friday, Kluwe answered back via Twitter and this saga will only keep on going straight into Training Camp and probably into the 2014 season. It is really the Vikings fault this time.

Throw out any way you feel about the LGBT community, so you can think about this issue clearly. Let’s strip it down to bare bones:

Player posts article saying the Vikings did something bad, Vikings say they’ll investigate that something, Vikings investigate, investigation takes a long time, investigation is finished and Vikings say they’ll not release anything.

Doesn’t that seem sketchy?

It sure seems sketchy to me.

By not releasing anything, the Vikings make it seem like they have something to hide. I don’t know if they do and the only people who know that answer right now are probably in Winter Park trying to put a fire extinguisher to this PR fire.

Let’s put this into an everyday situation. Ever ask someone to look up the price of something for you and then they say something to the tune of ‘oh, you don’t want to know’? You know why they didn’t tell you? They didn’t want to disappoint you. The Vikings are making this look like you, me and the rest of the public do not want to know what’s going on in Winter Park.

The Vikings don’t have that luxury. No one in any of the major sports has that luxury, no less an NFL team, nonetheless the NFL team in a town that loves said NFL team way more than any of the other pro teams and college squads.

It’s such a horrible PR move by not releasing anything. Maybe the Vikings found out something that they are not proud of, but it needs to be heard. This report might force the Vikings into doing things that they don’t want to do, but doing things that are not wanted is a much better alternative to having a franchise that will no longer be trusted.

MSHSL Screws Over BLHS Two Point Ohhhh

For once in my life I felt like Craig Ferguson this morning. I woke up to a tweet and emails telling me that Buffalo Lake – Hector – Stewart was moving to 9-Man in a couple years. This move does explain why the Mustangs were placed in the district that they were. It even crossed my mind that Renville County West was 9-Man but I assumed their rise and not the fall of my beloved high school. Despite me getting it wrong, in my previous posting, the Minnesota State High School League still got their districting wrong.

In 9-Man football in the state of Minnesota there are the guys way up north and there are the guys that are so close to Iowa that sometimes you have to pray for them not to be swallowed up by the children of the lot of corn. It doesn’t take a geography major, or maybe it does, to tell you that BLHS and RCW are a lot closer to Iowa than to Canada.

The Mustangs shouldn’t be taking on Hancock or Underwood for the homecoming game, but Fulda or Nicollet or Madelia. Welcome to the South District.

The West District currently has 21 teams with all but four of them being south of Mankato and Rochester. West Lutheran High School is in the north suburbs (they get screwed over wherever they get placed), Randolph High School is just south of the Minnesota concrete jungle and there is Cleveland and Nicollet which are virtually just north of Mankato.

The two teams based around the Twin Cities screw up the natural split of the district. There is an obvious east and west division coming with one going from Albert Lea/Austin to La Crosse and the other from Mankato to Sioux Falls. BLHS, RCW and possibly MACCRAY should all be in the Mankato to Sioux Falls subdistrict.

In the last post I pointed out that Rothsay is the furthest away in the obvious subdistrict being 164 miles from Hector. The longest travel in the subdivision the Mustangs would be in the South is 150 miles to Hills-Beaver Creek. Hills – Beaver Creek is by far the team that is the furthest away and is still closer than Rothsay.

Like I mentioned earlier, the two schools that are in the Cities makes the split a lot tougher to find for a subdistrict, but a common BLHS football schedule would be: Cleveland, Nicollet, Madelia, Granada – Hutley – East Chain/Truman, Mountain Lake Area and then a combination of the Cities schools and Westbrook – Walnut Grove and Fulda, the hometown of Patrick Reusse.

It’s becoming clear that BLHS was placed in their new district based on enrollment more than anything. BLHS has the fourth highest enrollment in their West District, but would be number one in the South according to the State High School League’s numbers.

Not by much though, Mountain Lake Area claims 140 for their enrollment while BLHS sports 147. A handful of other teams are in the high 130’s and 120’s.

It is 147 miles from Hector to Austin. It is 139 miles from Hector to Brainerd. The problem in those eight miles is that BLHS fans should never have to travel to Austin with the subdistircts, but BLHS will be traveling consistently to the Brainerd area

The South District simply makes a lot more sense for BLHS and RCW. We’d much rather play the Iowa Hawkeyes than the Winnipeg Blue Bombers… Mainly because the Hawkeyes are a college team and the Blue Bombers are a Canadian pro team, but that’s beside the point. They are weird up there. Haven’t you seen Fargo?

Here’s the map of the Mustangs’ new West District.

Here’s the map of where they should be playing in the South District.

MSHSL’s New Districts For Football Does No Favors For BLHS

UPDATE: Sources tell me that BLHS will be switching to nine-man football in two years, so in reflection of that this plan does some sense sense. It still does a screw job on BLHS and RCW, though.We’ll explore that in a new post coming quite soon.

Hey, Buffalo Lake – Hector –Stewart football fans, are you ready for 2015 Homecoming against Hancock High School? How about 2016 against Underwood High School? How do you feel about traveling just went of Brainerd to see your son play under those Friday night lights? Well, you better like it because that is what a 10 person committee under the direction of the Minnesota State High School League has just assigned the BLHS football team to do.

On Monday, it was announced by the High School League that they have adopted ‘District Football’ scheduling for 2015 and beyond. The claim is that this is to help some smaller schools in the state that were having trouble filling out an eight game football schedule every year. The High School League puts it on the small town schools, but what they did to BLHS makes it seem like it was so that Eden Prairie doesn’t have to fly to Winnipeg, Canada to play another team.

The High School League divided the state up into 18 districts taking into account the size of the school and apparently location. The Mustangs were put in the West District with 26 other teams in the state. The kicker of it is that along with the Mustangs, Renville County West and MACCRAY are the only teams in the district that are south of St. Cloud.

The districts are tasked with breaking into subdivisions, assuming that the district will break into south and north divisions, BLHS will have the following teams to play during the regular season: Renville County West, MACCRAY, Hancock, Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley, Wheaton Hermann Norcross, Brandon-Evansville, Ashby, Bertha-Hewitt, Verndale, Underwood, Hillcrest Lutheran Academy and Rothsay.

If BLHS and Rothsay were to play, one team would have to travel 164 miles one way. By the time the bus departs after a football game the visiting team would probably not arrive home until around 2 AM.

On the Minnesota State High School League’s website it says the following on its post about the districting process, “More than 90 percent of the schools’ requests were met, and a significant majority of schools were placed in a district with most, if not all, of the schools that they now play.”

BLHS didn’t play a single team in their new district in 2013.

The High School League did this in an attempt to even out the playing field, but it really does screw over a little team like BLHS. Gone are the rivalries with Cedar Mountain/Comfrey, New Ulm Cathedral, Sleepy Eye Public and Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s and instead the biggest in-season rival now for the Mustangs will be RCW.

All those now soon-to-be former rivals of BLHS are in the same Southwest district, a district that barely reaches south of Mankato instead of reaching all the way up to Thief River Falls, a district that would be perfect and really the same as what BLHS currently has.

The bright side for BLHS is that in the district placement, they are one of the big dogs enrollment wise. BLHS will be the fourth biggest school enrollment wise in the West district, where they’d be 12th out of 19 if magically placed in the Southwest.

When undergoing a big task like this someone is always going to get hurt. It just happens to be that a couple farm schools down on 212 didn’t quite grab the attention of the districting squad. It just seems wrong that the country boys have a better chance of playing a team on the Iron Range than taking on the kids on the other side of the corn field.

For more on the Minnesota State High School League’s new district program for football click here.(you may need to click on District Football at the top to stop it from scrolling)

To see a map of where all schools in the new district for BLHS are click here.

The Minnesota Sports Attitude Has To Stop

The infamous weeping blondes. Picture via: http://stmedia.startribune.com/images/900*619/7patr1221.jpg

David Ortiz taunted us. Not even on the baseball diamond or even about baseball. Big Papi taunted the Minnesota sports fan about basketball on Twitter. The former Twins first baseman/DH turned Boston Red Sox DH took time out of his feud with Tampa Bay Rays ace David Price to troll the seemingly helpless Minnesotan. Oh, how far we have fallen.

As we open up June in the state of Minnesota, a couple storylines run wild amongst the rubes: how horrible Joe Mauer looks and what in the world is going to happen to Kevin Love. The faces of the Target Plaza franchises are currently the talking points and points that aren’t exactly good for them personally or for their current franchise.

It’s been ten years since the Minnesota Timberwolves were in the NBA Playoffs. Never say never, but it will more than likely be a four or five year absence before the Minnesota Twins return to play in the MLB playoffs. Hell, the Vikings look to be in a rebuilding year, so we might as well throw that in here, too. This is our outlook. Our very Minnesotan piss poor outlook.

We ignore the Golden Gophers winning the NIT tournament despite it being Richard Pitino’s first year as coach. We ignore Jerry Kill getting the Gophers back to bowl games and building back up what Tim Brewster tore to the ground. We ignore the fact that the Minnesota Wild won a playoff series, their first in ten years. We ignore the Minnesota Lynx who have been to the WNBA Finals three years in a row, won two of them if you hadn’t noticed, and are the only undefeated team in the association in 2014. Snap out of this crappy attitude people.

It’s sports. The ball won’t always bounce your way if we want to be cliché, but there’s no reason to have this poor, poor pitiful me attitude about the sports teams in this state. Success ebbs and flows. Not that long ago, the Twins were winning division championships, the Timberwolves were making the playoffs every year and the Vikings had a boatload… of talent.

The Wild will win a Stanley Cup sooner than later, they are way too young and talented not to. The Twins have Byron Buxton, Miguel Sano and a field of dreams of prospects coming up the pipeline that we lead this team to the playoffs again. Give it a couple years of fermentation and a couple years of Aaron Rodgers getting older, the Vikings will probably see the top of the NFC North soon enough. If the Timberwolves pull off the Kevin Love trade right, they should be setting themselves up for success sooner than later as well.

Has it been a longer valley of defeat than most, God, I hope so, but let’s stop being an easy stomping ground for Big Papi slam tweets. It’s hard to imagine, but maybe one day the Twin Cities can steal the hashtag Ortiz used and claim themselves to be: #CitiesofChampions.

Postcards From The Past: Greetings From Buffalo Lake, Minn

As I get older, I get more interested in the history that came before me. This might be because I now have a little bit of history to share with the world myself or maybe I’m just becoming more curious in things that actually matter instead of the typical teenage and twenty-something drama.

Recently, I went down one of those endless rabbit-holes the internet provides. The severe weather warning sirens had gone off in my dorm, that brought about me telling my roommate about the Buffalo Lake tornado and I couldn’t remember what year it was, so naturally I googled it. I found the date and read about an hour’s worth of material despite living through the darn thing 11 years ago.

My search for the tornado lead me to Google Images which brought me to generically searching for images of Buffalo Lake. This first actual picture that is seen is a shot of Main Street from 1908. I’ve seen this picture multiple times, but never investigated more. Eventually, I landed on the Minnesota Historical Society’s website and multiple images of my hometown that I had never seen.

Instantly an image jumped out to me. A lovely postcard illustration of what Buffalo Lake, the actual lake, used to look like. The Minnesota Historical Society says that the postcard is from the 1940’s, but Buffalo Lake’s official website says that Renville County drained the 40-acre lake sometime in the 1920’s to provide more acreage for farmers.

It took my interest because I instantly knew where this was. I haven driven by that location a thousand times, but my whole life it’s been a field. Sometimes during a wet spring, it has looked like a lake, but by my Google Earth approximation this is where the illustrator was standing all those years ago.

I don’t know how embellished this drawing is. I find it hard to believe that we had well-manicured flowers right along the roadway and that the shoreline was that perfect, but maybe our work ethic has fallen off that much even here in the hardworking Midwest.

My formula has the hill that you see on the left hand side of the postcard being where the cemetery on County Road 8 is currently. The hill across the lake is now the trees that are located across the field. County 8, the road that leads back home, has been straightened out over the years it seems.

A second postcard popped up. All I can figure is that this had to be from a little further north than the initial one.

I love my hometown. I still believe it’s one of the most beautiful little towns that I’ve ever set foot in, but in her younger days, oh boy, she sure was pretty.