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The Lone Tree Reporter, Thursday, March 31, 2005 SPORTS/LOCAL P.,007
Local gymnast improves routine
in time for April meet
Rebecca Moore competed in
the Leapin' Leprechaun gym-
nastics meet in Cedar Rapids
on March 20.
Moore place second on
uneven parallel bars, third on
vault and floor exercise, fifth
on balance bean, and third all-
around.
Moore also debuted a new
skill in her floor exercise rou-
tine: a double back. To perform
a double back, the gymnast
does a round off, two back
handsprings, and an aerial
double flip.
The next meet is the Iowa
State Championships in Ames
on April 2 and 3.
Submitted Photo
Little Lions wrestlers Jackie Moore, Austin Ronan and
Ty Robertson hang out during the Liberty National
Tournament held in Kansas City in February.
Little Lions were on the road
in February and March
By Karen Robcrtson
Contributing Writer
The Little Lions Wrestling
team attended the Liberty
National Wrestling Tourna-
ment in Kansas City, Missouri
on February 26.
Some 1600 wrestlers form 30
states competed. The Lone
Tree Little Lions were well rep-
resented. Ty Robertson won
first place for his weight and
age group.
Then the Little Lions trav-
eled all the way to Denver, Col-
orado to compete at the Rocky
Mountain National Wrestling
Tournament held March 18
through 20.
Approximately 6,000
wrestlers from 47 states attend-
ed the tournament.
This was your normal
national tournament, if you
loose two matches before you
make it to the top six, you are
out. Ty Robertson lost his first
match and wrestled all the way
back to second place.
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Splinters
From the Bench
Congratulations to Zach
Ryerson, Kylie Ronan and Amy
Smith on being named to the
Press-Citizen's All-Area team.
Maybe you're too young to
know that old saying but, "The
cream rises to the top." I sup-
pose that is why they refer to
top-notch athletes as 'the cream
of the crop' because they have
risen to the top and become the
best.
-OW-
It was quite a weekend in
Iowa City Spring football prac-
tice opened on Wednesday On
Saturday and Sunday the soft-
ball team hosted the Hawkeye
Classic.
Besides Iowa, the partici-
pants were Butler, North Dako-
ta State and South Dakota
State. The weather gods smiled
upon Iowa on Saturday and
Sunday for the tournament.
There were four games each
day and each team played four
games.
On Saturday night the Big
Ten Women's Gymnastics
Championships were held in
Carver-Hawkeye Arena. The
prohibitive favorite to win was
Michigan and the Wolverines
squeezed out the victory by an
eighth of a point over Penn
State, 196.250 to 196.125.
Iowa slid to sixth place of the
seven teams competing. The
Hawks were hampered by
injuries to a couple of their top
performers. They also are a
young team, having lost some
key performers from last year's
NCAA National Finals qualify-
ing team to graduation.
As I have said before when I
am talking about gymnastics, I
don't know all of the finer
points of what the judges look
for, but there were a couple of
performances Saturday night
that made me wonder if they
were watching the same thing I
was.
The scores on two perform-
ances on the uneven parallel
bars seemed to me to be proof
that the ones with the reputa-
tions get the better scores.
Iowa's Annie Rue is a senior
this year and has been an out-
standing gymnast for the
Hawkeyes throughout her
career. She gave a performance
on the bars that looked pretty
routine to my untrained eye,
yet she got a 9.825 score.
Right behind her came
another Hawkeye, sophomore
Romina Mazzoni. She is still
building her reputation as a
gymnast.
I thought she gave a knock-
out performance, doing some
flips and catching the bar again
and she stuck the landing solid-
ly But, without a reputation
and only being a sophomore,
she only got a 9.750 for her rou-
tine.
It's fine for judges to decide
who wins in gymnastic events,
or diving events, with their
human frailties to pick a win-
ner, but it is not good enough to
just let the people in a couple of
polls decide which team should
be named National Champion
in football.
No, the Talking Head shills
for the greedy networks keep-
ing hammering 'playoff, play-
off, playoff,' at us all the time.
Along that same line of
deciding on the field who the
'true' champion is, how about
the NCAA basketball tourna-
ment this year? There have
been gobs of crazy finishes and
upsets, overtime games won by
only one or two points. Look at
Bucknell knocking off Kansas.
On the basis of one win
Bucknell is a 'better' team than
Kansas. I don't wish to belittle
Bucknell or its accomplish-
ment, but, in all reality, if the
teams played 10 times I'd bet on
Kansas every time and I'd also
bet that I'd come out ahead.
While we're talking about the
tournament I'd like to point out
that the only conference with
two entries in the Final Four is
the one that Dick Vitale and the
rest of the Talking Heads have
been bad-mouthing all winter.
The Big Ten has two entries
in the Final Four: Illinois and
Michigan State. They both got
in with overtime wins, but they
got in. Also in the Final Four
are Louisville from Conference
USA and North Carolina from
the ACC.
The highly touted Big East,
with the most entries of any
conference, is missing from the
Final Four. The ACC has also
been getting constant promo-
tion by the 'experts' and just
barely managed to get one
entry SO, Hail to the Big Ten
and stick that in your ear,
'experts.'
-OW-
Very much has been made of
the quality of the Iowa football
recruiting class that will be
coming into Iowa City this fall.
It's said to be the best class ever
at Iowa and is considered by
those so-called 'experts' again
as one of the best in the nation.
I certainly hope that all the
recruits who will appear on the
campus this fall have highly
successful careers and lead
Iowa to great new heights.
However, I ran across some-
thing in my 'cleaning' the other
day that might make us sit back
and temper our enthusiasm a
little bit.
As the old saying goes,
"There is many a slip 'twixt the
cup and the lip." What got me to
thinking about all this again
was finding the list of recruits
for the year 2000.
Some of them have become
very familiar names to us in
the last five years. Some of
them were never heard from.
I'm sure we all remember
Jonathan Babineaux, Warren
Holloway, Nate Kaeding,
George Lewis, Aaron Mickens,
Derrick Pickens, Derreck
Robinson, Fred Russell,
Demond Sanders and Kevin
Worthy They all played a lot
and were huge factors in Iowa's
success since 2000.
But, how about some other
names on the list? Michael
Allen, Kelvin Bell, Charlie Bod-
fiord, Aramis Haralson, Tony
Jackson and Jhante Jones. Do
you remember them? I do.
Vaguely.
There were also Benny Sapp,
Andy Thorn and Scott Webb.
Webb finally played a fair
amount as a senior. Sapp, of
course, was dismissed and
wound up doing a good job at
Northern Iowa. The others
either just left on their own
ByRon Rife
The Lone T-ce
Reporter
accord or stayed and never
made much of an impression.
In total, there were 19 names
on the list of recruits for 2000.
If you go back and do the count-
ing you will see that 10 made a
great impact on the Iowa foot-
ball team. Nine contributed
very little in the way of playing
time. Some of them may have
contributed mightily in some
other ways.
Some of them might have
been the Will Lack of that class.
In case you haven't heard the
Will Lack story, here it is.
He was a walk-on at Iowa. He
never did get high enough on
the depth chart to earn a schol-
arship and become famous like
some of the Iowa walk-ons, like
Dallas Clark for instance, but
he stuck with it through all the
years of his eligibility His
playing time was limited to the
ends of games in which the
Hawks were either safely ahead
or hopelessly behind.
Through all those years he
was doing more than playing
football. Since he wasn't on
scholarship he was able to hold
down a part time job. He did all
this while studying a pre-med-
ical curriculum, because, even
though he wasn't on scholar-
ship, he did everything they
did.
He put in time doing all the
conditioning and practicing
besides working part time and
going to class. Apparently, he
did a very good job academical-
ly because he is now attending
Harvard Medical School.
Coach Ferentz tells a story
about one time when he asked
Will how much sleep he got
each night. His answer was,
"On a good night, maybe four
or five hours."
So, I guess we need to keep
level heads about these new
recruits. They come very high-
ly touted and, according to
Coach Ferentz, there isn't an
ego problem in the bunch.
But, keep in mind that they
have yet to take a snap in a big
time college football game
against a Michigan or Ohio
State.
As I said at the beginning of
this, hopefully, they will all
turn out to be huge successes.
Just try to keep things in per-
spective keep an objective view
about them.
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