Ready or not, winter is here — and that, of course, means it is hoops season. That’ right, area high school basketball games begin this week.
The first-year pairing of Heron Lake-Okabena and Fulda in girls’ basketball is the first area team to open. The Coyotes host Lakeview Saturday (November 24) at Okabena in an afternoon tripleheader, beginning with a C-Squad game at noon.
Action continues next week as the Murray County Central girls travel to Canby Tuesday (November 27) for their first game. HLOF hosts Ellsworth (at Okabena) that same night in the first Red Rock Conference girls’ game of the season.
Two nights later (Thursday, November 29), Fulda’s boys play their first game of the new season by traveling Highway 62 east to Windom to tangle with the Eagles.
HL-O’s boys play Friday night (November 30) in the Wabasso Tip-Off Classic, playing a 6 p.m. game against St. Clair. The Wildcats will tangle with Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley the next afternoon (1 p.m.) when the calendar turns to December.
Those same two days (November 30 and December 1), the senior-loaded MCC boys will be playing in the four-team Sleepy Eye Tournament as they have done for the past several seasons.
Adrian plays a girl-boy doubleheader at Tyler on Saturday afternoon, December 1. The Russell-Tyler-Ruthton Knights are the defending Class A state champions in boys’ basketball and the Knights return a pair of athletic starting guards in the Hansen twins — Carter and Cooper.
MCC’s boys host Canby on Monday evening, December 3 and both Fulda and HL-O have home boys’ games on Tuesday, December 4. The Raiders play Ellsworth in Red Rock Conference action, while HL-O hosts Madelia in a non-conference game.
The schedule gets busy that first week of December as the MCC girls host Pipestone that Tuesday (December 4) and the Adrian girls host Luverne in a couple of Red Rock vs. Big South (formerly the Southwest Conference) clashes. That same night, the HLOF girls travel to Mountain Lake to tangle with the new Mountain Lake Area / Comfrey co-op.
Speaking of Mountain Lake, the Wolverines have been impressive all fall on the gridiron and will take a perfect 12-0 record into Friday (November 23) morning’s Prep Bowl Nine-Man Football State Championship Game at US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. MLA’s opponent in the 10 a.m. kickoff will be the defending state champion Spring Grove Lions.
Both the Wolverines and the Lions won big in their semifinal games. MLA won 42-8 over Mountain Iron-Buhl and Spring Grove defeated unbeaten Cromwell-Wright, 48-12. Judging by comparative scores against R-T-R, the Wolverines have an edge. Mountain Lake Area defeated Russell-Tyler-Ruthton by a final score of 29-6 at Tyler on September 21. Spring Grove rallied to edge R-T-R in the state-tournament quarterfinals, 27-26, at New Ulm on November 9.
HL-O activities director and assistant volleyball coach Jason Fisher enjoyed a sparkling collegiate football career at Northwestern College in Orange City. A 1999 graduate of Worthington High School, Fisher was an offensive lineman all four of his years as a Red Raider. He played sparingly as a tackle when he was a freshman, played about two-thirds of all the snaps as a guard during his sophomore season in the fall of 2000 when Northwestern advanced all the way to NAIA semifinals and capped his Red Raider career as the starting offensive center both his junior and senior seasons.
“That was a lot of fun,” summed up Fisher. “Those were some great times playing with lots of super guys involved together in many highly-competitive games.”
Fulda’s Morgan Gehl continued her amazing distance-running success by placing eighth among 252 finishers from all across the Upper Midwest in the Nike Heartland Regional Championships at Yankton Trail Park in Sioux Falls on Saturday, November 11. Morgan clocked an all-time best 5,000-meter time of 17:43.9. Emily Covert, a senior from Minneapolis Washburn posted a winning time of 17:06.3, followed by Winona Cotter sophomore Grace Ping (17:10.8). The Top-12 finishers all ran the course in less than 18 minutes and a total of 78 girls bettered the 19-minute mark.
