When I was in high school, our two main rivals in sports were Sleepy Eye Saint Mary’s and Minnesota Valley Lutheran, the other two private schools in the Tomahawk Conference. I once heard some alumni talking before a game, saying, “You could lose every other game this season, but as long as you beat SESM and MVL, it’s okay.”
Rivalries were intense affairs with packed gyms and bleachers. It didn’t seem to matter if one of the teams playing had more talent, the games were always close. Those were fun nights with the energy from the crowd flowing into the participants.
When I started at NRHEG in the 90s, I was told our two biggest rivals were Waterville-Elysian-Morristown and Blooming Prairie. It sure seemed that way over the years with the same type of atmospheres I remembered so well from my high school days in New Ulm.
I also remember that we didn’t ever have anything to do with kids from rivalry schools when I was playing. We even wanted to beat them out at the county fair! However, that aspect of rivalries has changed over the years. With the advent of social media, kids stay in contact with opponents from schools all over. You might battle it out for the duration of a football, volleyball, or basketball game, but then spend time hugging and smiling with your friends from Mapleton or Wells or Medford when it’s done.
Is this a good thing? Does it dull the edge of those rivalries?
Who cares. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to over the past few years. Kids compete and work hard, so what does it matter if they know the name of the other school’s star player’s dog from Instagram? What does it matter if you went to hang out with kids from local schools on a weekend?
I wrote earlier this year about a new view of competition. The opposing team should not be viewed as “bad guys” but rather as worthy players who help us compete. We should respect them and shake hands afterward and move on with our lives, win or lose. After all, life is about a lot more than just sports, right?
Absolutely. And recent events have really encapsulated that idea. The tragic car accident involving a Blooming Prairie teacher and her kids as well as the crippling tornadoes that hit Waterville and Morristown (among many other areas) have brought that into sharp focus.
Many of NRHEG’s students and staff have reached out to their peers and friends in Blooming Prairie since that horrible accident. Money has been sent to help with expenses, along with cards and food and numerous other ways of sharing the burden the entire Blooming Prairie district had on its shoulders. Other area schools have all joined in that effort too; the Gopher Conference has stepped up for one of its own.
And after NRHEG’s volleyball team was in Waterville while the storms raged around them, there was barely a day to take a breath and be thankful that nobody was hurt. But after that breath was taken, our communities can be proud of what happened next.
We all know the devastation of a tornado, having witnessed that power not long ago around here. And we know how much clean-up is involved, just trying to pick up the pieces and get things looking semi-normal again.
A group of NRHEG students and coaches took a bus to Morristown last Sunday and helped that process. They hopped out of bed early in the morning and joined volunteers from other communities in the area to pick up garbage, drag branches, and rake public parts of Morristown back to a condition that things can begin to look okay again.
In fact, so many people showed up in Morristown that what was figured to be a day-long project was done in a few hours. There were plenty of hands there to do whatever was asked and to get the job done.
Morristown and Waterville still have a long way to go. Blooming Prairie will not soon forget their losses. Residents of NRHEG can relate to this all too well. We can still drive around and see areas where there used to be huge stands of trees that no longer exist. We still have memories of the students and former students we have lost in accidents. But we also have the thoughts about the help that was given to us during those events, as well as our floods, by other towns.
It frightened me a bit on Thursday, as the winds howled and the tree branches crashed down, to think back on last week’s column. In there, I prognosticated that we’d be due for plenty more floods and tornados in the next decade. It was too spooky how soon that came true. Trust me, of all my forecasts, that was the one I was least hoping I’d nail.
But we know that whenever those things happen, we’ll have friends from other schools who will come to help. This is how humanity should work. And it does work that way, much more than the doom and gloom of the nightly news will tell us.
And you know what? Our volleyball team plays at Blooming Prairie this week. Our football team plays WEM for Homecoming on Friday. The rivalries will continue and the players will battle. But at the end of the game, the respect for each other might be a little bit brighter, the same as the future.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is kindergraph, which means a photograph of a child, as in, “The volunteers found many a kindergraph over a mile away from the house that had been hit by a tornado.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!