Years ago, Joe “Ducky” Medwick once said, “I’ll stack my 1937 season with anybody.” He could have said that about his incredible career, too. After all, Medwick was one of the most aggressive St. Louis Cardinals ever to wear the “Birds on the Bat” jersey, becoming well-known during the “Gas House Gang” era and leaving… Read more »
News
Year: 2019
Missouri State University Volleyball Program
Looking at the nearly endless banners in their home arena, it’s easy to assume it was always this way for the Missouri State University Volleyball Program. The reality, however, was that the Bears traveled there the hard way – and not just literally. In April 1970, 12 years after the program’s launch and having played… Read more »
Nixa Eagles Basketball Program
Every winter, the Nixa Eagles are among the state’s must-see basketball teams. After all, notice the Final Four banners in the gym? Heck, the trophy case is crowded, too. “Our program has been successful going back to the 1950s and 1960s,” Nixa coach Jay Osborne said. “We always talk about our history with our new… Read more »
Anita Rank Oplotnik
Years ago, on a western Missouri farm just outside of a town called Lincoln, her parents bolted a net-less basketball goal on the barn door when she was just a grade-schooler. Anita Rank Oplotnik has never forgotten it. Nor she has forgotten the girls who were teammates from then through high school, or the guys… Read more »
Kirk Pedersen
For Kirk Pedersen, his arrival to the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg in the mid-1980s wasn’t supposed to be anything more than a pit stop on the way back to rural Iowa. There he was, a college graduate in need of a job, so he figured a graduate assistant role for UCM track and… Read more »
Gary Pinkel
Paging Gary Pinkel … you are wanted by the statues … Gary Pinkel. Indeed, had public address announcers of press boxes across the Show-Me State bellowed those words, they would have been met with applause. After all, he is the man who rode off into the sunset in 2015 as the winningest football coach in… Read more »
Don Provance
Ask sports folks in Springfield about the most impactful baseball coaches of the city’s high school programs, and the short list includes the name of Don Provance. In fact, in the spring of 1992, just weeks before he would call it a career, the local newspaper published a feature on Provance on the sports page.… Read more »
1994 Republic High School Girls Basketball State Championship Team
Had a Hollywood producer cast them for a basketball movie, the opening scene probably would resembled an old western and high-noon showdown, complete with dead stares. And why not? As the curtain rose on the 1993-1994 basketball season, the Republic High School Lady Tigers were on a mission. After all, just months earlier, Republic’s Cinderella… Read more »
Rock Bridge High School Tennis Program
In a way, the tennis complex sitting behind Rock Bridge High School is an impressive site. After all, it’s here where they’ve install 12 — yes, 12 – courts and have done it right, with that blue and green colors like what you might find at the U.S. Open. A place fit for a queen… Read more »
Sandbothe Family
Back in the 1980s, if folks running Missouri’s tourism board wanted to attract even more eyes to the state, it could have included this line without anybody thinking twice: Sandbothe Family Basketball Machine. No, it wasn’t a factory that produced basketballs. More accurately, it was a seemingly endless assembly line of Sandbothe children – seven… Read more »
Jim Scanlon
Some college graduates want to go straight to the big time after walking across the graduation stage. However, Jim Scanlon wasn’t afraid to start his career at the bottom of the coaching ladder. Nor was he allergic to rolling up his sleeves to get a job done. Call it a great road taken. Scanlon coached… Read more »
Show-Me State Games & Missouri Senior Games
For decades, amateur athletes would check out Sports Illustrated magazine weekly and dream. Perhaps they would land in Faces in the Crowd. Maybe their sports team would get some ink in a short story about a remarkable achievement. So imagine the pride felt when Sports Illustrated delivered a lengthy feature on the Show-Me State Games… Read more »
Francis Skalicky
Francis Skalicky still smiles about almost not applying for the position he now calls “the best job anyone could ever hope to have.” He recalls the fall of 1995 when he learned of a new position – media specialist – the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) would have at its Southwest Regional Office in Springfield.… Read more »
Rod Smith
In almost every community across America, a unique connection exists between sports fans and their local sports reporters. Nowhere is that more pronounced than in mid-Missouri. In 2008, at the height of the Great Recession and its layoffs, longtime KRCG-TV 13 Sports Director Rod Smith was among the casualties, for financial reasons like so many… Read more »
Smith-Cotton High School Girls Golf Program
Years before the arrival of Duane Brandsgaard and then B.J. Curry as coaches – and long before the trophy case became crowded – the Smith-Cotton High School Girls Golf Program was lurking just beyond the fringe. Suddenly in 1984, only 10 years after their inaugural season, the Lady Tigers found themselves – get this –… Read more »
Charlie Spoonhour
“Spoon” was one of a kind. There are those who believe Charlie Spoonhour remembered every person he ever met, every conversation he ever had and every basketball game he ever saw. He loved basketball, he loved people, he loved life and was passionate about the St. Louis Cardinals. Spoon had a world class sense of… Read more »