Back to work for everyone

After what seemed like an unusually long, for what is always an oh-too-short break, everything at SCHS is back up and running. Let us hope we are up for the long haul too.

If you missed it, John Madden died last week. He was a lot of things to a lot of football fans. From video games, to broadcasting games, to selling Lite Beer, to coaching the Oakland Raiders, John Madden was successful. For me, first and foremost, he was the coach of the Oakland Raiders in the glory days of the late 1960s and then the '70s.

For those of you who are too young to remember his coaching days I have pitched this book in my columns before but here it is again. Peter Richmond’s “Badasses: The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death and John Madden’s Oakland Raiders” is an awesome book, especially for fans of the titles’ aforementioned characters but also others known as the Assassin, the Hit Man, the Soul Patrol, the Mad Stork, the Ghost, and others. It is an easy read.

You know me; I can work the glory day Raiders into any column. Madden was 103-32-7 in his ten years on the left coast. Pretty good.

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Wrestling is on a run of unprecedented success right now. With the exception of the reign of John Robbins (1999-2005) a high area finish in duals was generally a pipe dream. From the outset of wrestling (1987-88) the team’s season-long duals record was an afterthought. That has changed. The past three seasons the dual-sovereign coaching team of Andy Tomlin and Griffen Greene has produced a runner-up (2019) and back to back championships in the category. This success has come after one runner-up spot in 2002-03 and nothing else.

Over the next month that success will be put to the test. Injuries, eligibility, and the natural growth of boys (read that as weight gain over time) may make the duals repeat tougher this weekend for now sole monarch Greene. 2021 area runner-up Montgomery County hosts the tournament Saturday.

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A really big deal to the SCHS athletic program, the student part of student-athlete, has arisen to possibly bite some of our coaches in the butt this week. Multiple sports have probably lost some very key ingredients to their success stew as members of their roster failed too many classes to maintain their eligibility to participate.

I always say to my students, there are unanswerable questions in the universe. One of those unanswerable questions is why student athletes allow themselves to end up in this situation. For at least the final six weeks of the just completed semester, there were after school study sessions. The school provided transportation home. Coaches for the winter sports provided extra study time for their athletes who needed it. Remember you can lead the horse to water but… No one is to blame for this situation save the students themselves.

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I wrote about the near unprecedented early successes of basketball in my last column. Things have stumbled a little since then. For the boys the looming loss of a couple of starters could turn everything. We will see. For the girls I hope a pre-Christmas bad performance against a good team does not signal anything ominous. Last week the Lady Gamecocks were sixth in the Maxpreps poll and third in the Sandy’s Spiel poll. Don’t really think that we are there yet. A 56-31 loss to the number one ranked AAA team in GISA, Bulloch Academy, was evidence of that fact.

If you plan on following the cage teams in person, the schedule I posted in the paper a while back does contain a mistake. Basketball returns this Friday in Darien with MCA and plays again on Saturday. The upcoming Saturday game with Jenkins County is in Millen, not Sylvania. A trip to Bryan County on January 11 will be a key girls’ matchup.

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Again, the opening date for Lady Gamecock soccer is January 25. My Telephone preview is just two weeks away. Of course tennis and baseball are not far behind. As always, track operates on a different plane of existence.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Kemp column: Back to work for everyone