maly, too

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Coach's Comment To Reporter: 'Ask An Intelligent Question.' Reporter Wants To Know Why the Question Wasn't Intelligent. Coach Says, 'Because I Said So'

Following Iowa's basketball victory today over Maryland in Iowa City, there was kind of an unusual windup to the press conference reporters had with Hawkeye coach Fran McCaffery.

Hawkeye center Adam Woodbury, who has gotten plenty of attention in recent weeks from ESPN commentator Dan Dakich, was charged with a flagrant foul during the game for what McCaffery said was a a poke in the eye to a Maryland player.

The matter came up late in the press session, and here's what was said, thanks to the transcript furnished by Scott Dochterman of the Cedar Rapids Gazette:

Q. What did you hear from the officials regarding Adam touching the eye or whatever it was?

FRAN McCAFFERY: They said he poked him in the eye.

Q. Is it a flagrant now if you poke a guy in the eye? I’m just curious. I thought maybe that explained that.

FRAN McCAFFERY: You know, don’t misconstrue it. That’s an excellent crew. But on that one, I don’t know.

Q. That’s three times he’s got somebody in the eye. How does this keep happening?

FRAN McCAFFERY: Next question. Ask an intelligent question.

Q. Why is that not an intelligent question?

FRAN McCAFFERY: Because I said so.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Nothing good has ever happened to me in Carbondale, Ill., and nothing good happened to Drake's women's basketball team there tonight. The Bulldogs' 9-game winning streak ended with an 81-76 loss to a Southern Illinois team that has records of only 5-5 in the Missouri Valley Conference and 14-7 overall. Drake now is 9-1 in the Valley and 14-7 for the season. “Our rebounding disappointed me tonight,” said Drake coach Jennie Baranczyk of her team’s 47-36 deficit on the backboards. The Salukis scored 17 second-chance points. “Southern is a very good team and so are we, but we didn’t show that tonight," Baranczyk said. "We got rattled, and this is part of the maturity process. When people circle you, you have to bring it every game and I don’t think we brought it defensively tonight.” The game had 17 lead changes. Lizzy Wendell led Drake with 27 points, and Caitlin Ingle had 17 points and a career-tying 15 assists and six rebounds.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

I've Never Heard a Coach Say He Has a Bad Recruiting Class

By RON MALY

There are at least three certainties in this world. Death and taxes are two of them. The third is that every collegiate football coach

thinks he has a good incoming class on national signing day. I have never heard a coach say he has a bad group of recruits. As for me, I don't pay much attention to incoming freshmen. Check with me in two or three years on that stuff, and I'll let you know who I think are the best players.

Valley's Grace Vander Weide Is Quite a Story Both On and Off the Basketball Court

Valley High School senior Grace Vander Weide is one of the best basketball players in the state. The Tigers guard can do it all, averaging 19 points, 7 rebounds and 6 assists per game this season.

Grace Vander Weide

Off the court, Grace has a story not many high school seniors can match. Through her Kingdom Hoops AAU team (led by former Iowa State player Jake Sullivan) Grace has already been on four mission trips to Africa. The mission trips are designed to help underprivileged children in Ghana.

“It’s where my heart is. I’m playing basketball so that I can use this as a platform for what I want to do later in life,” says Vander Weide.

But her connection to Ghana stretches further than just mission trips. Her parents, Doug and Dawn Vander Weide, are also heavily involved in mission trips to Ghana; and in 2012 made their most important trip ever. When they returned, they had three new family members through adoption, Godwin (6), Angela (7), and Job (12).

“They’re something else, I couldn’t imagine my life without them. It’s cool what’s been built through the adoption process, they’re really like my biological siblings,” says Grace.

The Vander Weides are now a family of 8, and they love every minute of it.
“We tell people it’s the hardest thing we’ve done, clearly, but it’s also the best thing we’ve done, “ says Doug.

Grace, who has has an older sister, Emma, and a younger brother JD, will continue her basketball career next season at Missouri State.

-- John Sears, WHO-TV

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Totally Deflated

By RON MALY

I think coach Bill Belichick and his New England Patriots have been up to their same

Bill Belichick

old dirty tricks. They deflated the Seattle Seahawks' balls in the Super Bowl, and that's why they were able to win. I have it on good authority that Seahawks coach Pete Carroll was the guy whose balls were the most deflated. Indeed, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell personally inspected Carroll's balls after the game, and found them totally empty. [By the way, I'm still waiting for pictures of that inspection scene]. Because Carroll's balls [and quite possibly his head] contained nothing, it's no wonder he made the worst play-calling mistake in Super Bowl history in the final seconds of the game, enabling the dirty Patriots to win. I think Belichick and New England should be suspended for the entire 2015-2016 season.

Sunday, February 1, 2015

It wouldn't be a normal day without another Johnny Manziel story. Today's report from Twitter, Pravda, ESPN, the Yangtze River Times, the Victor Record and Nutcase Tales is that Manziel, who is a Cleveland Browns quarterback, has checked himself into a treatment center "as a direct result of his lifestyle away from the field." I'm wondering why it took Manziel so long to find out that he needs therapy. Frankly, I thought the guy was sick four or five years ago.

Yangtze River

Super Sunday, Drake Women's Style

Drake's women's basketball team experienced its own version of Super Sunday today. Neither a blizzard nor a Wichita State squad with an 8-0 Missouri Valley Conference record

could stop the sizzling Bulldogs this afternoon. A gathering of 2,263 fans braved snow, treacherous streets and highways, plus cold winds, to cheer coach Jennie Baranczyk's players along as they moved into sole possession of first place in the Valley with a comeback 64-61 victory that improved their league record to 9-0. “I think one of the biggest things today was having as many people come out in these weather conditions and believe in us,” Baranczyk said. “We needed a crowd and we didn’t think we were going to have one. But to have the energy we did allowed us to win the game, and that’s when it’s really special.” Lizzy Wendell scored 17 points to become the 27th woman in Drake history to eclipse 1,000 for her career. She's the fourth sophomore to accomplish that, and the first to do it since Lori Bauman in 1982. The Bulldogs got a major contribution from freshman reserve Paige Greiner of Williamsburg, who made all four of her three-point attempts for a career-high 12 points.

JOLTIN' JOE GOT IT STARTED

When Ron Maly was a kid in Cedar Rapids, he wanted to enter an essay contest, and he did. He wrote about Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees being his favorite baseball player. For finishing second in the contest, Ron won a Louisville Slugger baseball bat autographed by DiMaggio. Ron later wanted to be the first person in his family to attend college, and he was. He earned a degree in political science from the University of Iowa, and did what all political science majors do. He became a sportswriter. He had, after all, covered high school football, basketball and baseball games for the Cedar Rapids Gazette while he worked parttime during his university days. Ron wanted to sit in the press box and write about an Iowa-Minnesota football game, and he did. It happened while he was the sports editor at the Albert Lea [Minn.] Tribune, and the game was at Memorial Stadium in Minneapolis. Ron wanted to cover a World Series, and he did. Also when he was working for the Albert Lea newspaper. Ron wanted to cover Rose Bowls, Sugar Bowls, Orange Bowls, Cotton Bowls, Holiday Bowls, a Freedom Bowl, a Sun Bowl, a Super Bowl and NCAA basketball tournaments, and he did those things after he moved to Des Moines. Ron was a four-time sportswriter of the Year in the state of Iowa [the years were 1977, 1978, 1994 and 1996]. In 2006, he was named a charter member of the University of Iowa's media Wall of Fame in the Kinnick Stadium press box. A photo of the plaque that's displayed in the press box is displayed above this story. Following Ron's retirement from the newspaper business, a publisher asked him if he wanted to write a book about the rich football tradition at the University of Iowa, and he did. The hardback version of "Tales from the Iowa Sidelines" was a best-seller, and so was the revised, softback version. Now he's been asked by his publisher to update the book for a second time. He's in the process of doing that at the present time. Ron considers being asked to update a best-selling book for the second time to be the supreme compliment, considering the Hawkeyes won just four games in the 2012 season. When Ron isn't working on books, he's busy traveling and spending time with his family. Indeed, he attends the athletic, theatrical and musical [both vocal and instrumental] events in which his six grandchildren participate. He also writes about anything that interests him for his many websites. Every chance he gets, Ron proudly wears his America Needs Farmers T-shirt.

The Hawkeyes' Rich Football Tradition, Revisited

I mentioned a while back that I was in the process of updating my Tales from the Iowa Sidelines book. Updating it for the second time. The original hardback edition of Tales from the Iowa Sidelines [pictured at the right] was published in 2003, during the 10-3 season, when coach Kirk Ferentz and his Iowa football team had a 10-3 record that included a 37-17 victory over 15th-ranked Florida in the Outback Bowl and after the Hawkeyes went 11-2 in 2002. That book was a best-seller, so the publishers came to me again in 2005, a season that finished with a breathtaking 30-25 victory over No. 11 Louisiana State in the Capital One Bowl on New Year's Day, 2005. Because buyers had cleaned out the the shelves in the bookstores, the publishers wanted to know if I'd do an updated version of the book. I agreed, The revised, soft-cover edition [pictured at the left] was published in 2005. Warren Holloway, who teamed with quarterback Drew Tate on a miraculous 56-yard touchdown pass to win the Capital One Bowl, was featured on the cover. That book, too, turned into a best-seller, So I had reason to feel very good about my years as a published author. It's not every day that a the original version is a best-seller, and so is the updated version. Then, imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail from a senior editor at the publishing company last fall, wanting wanted to know if I was interested in doing a second updated version of the book. It came at a time when things weren't going well for the Hawkeyes in the 2012 season. They lost their last six games and finished with a 4-8 record. Frankly, the thought of doing a revised edition of the book during a 4-8 season seemed to be a stretch. "Maybe producing a revised edition in a year or two would be a better idea," I told the publishers. "We'd like to do it now," I was told. "Let me think about it," I said. After a few days of thought, I accepted the idea. I talked myself into the idea that this was the supreme compliment--being asked to do a second book update during a 4-8 season showed strong confidence by the publishers in me and in the Hawkeyes' football program. So I got back into the business of interviewing players and coaches again, going to postgame press conferences, weekly press conferences and a scrimmage in West Des Moines. After a press conference in Iowa City, I did a one-on-one interview with coach Kirk Ferentz, and mentioned to him that I was in the process of doing a revised edition of my two best-selling books. I congratulated him on the excellent things he had done for Iowa's football program--all of which contributed to the success of my books. "I think Coach Fry had more to do with it," he told me, bringing up the name of Hayden Fry, his one-time boss at Iowa and a man who brought Iowa's football program back from the dead in the 20th century. That's modest Kirk Ferentz for you. Even though the 2012 season wasn't something Hawkeye coaches, players and fans will recall with any special feeling, Ferentz has a 14-year record of 100-74 at Iowa that includes two 11-victory seasons [2002 smd 2009], two 10-victory seasons [2003 and 2004], plus he's been the Big Ten coach of year in 2002, 2004 and 2009, and national coach of the year in 2002. Indeed, Ferentz has done some wonderful things at Iowa City, and I fully expect his success to continue. I've concluded my writing for the second update of Tales from the Iowa Sidelines, and the senior editor has furnished me with an early look at the book. Not only are the Kirk Ferentz years included in the updated version, but so is the stuff I previously wrote about Howard Jones, Dr. Eddie Anderson, Heisman Trophy winner Nile Kinnick and the 1939 Hawkeye Ironmen, Ronald Reagan, Ozzie Simmons, Ossie Solem, Randy Duncan, Alex Karras and lots of other legends from Iowa's rich football history. I expect the book to be in stores soon. I hope you like it.