Congratulations to Chad Salay and the Prescott girls golf team on winning their seventh consecutive Middle Border Conference Championship last week with an impressive 31 shot victory over second-place St. Croix Central. Senior Layla Salay finished atop the leaderboard with a round of 78 and fellow senior Macy Reiter grabbed the second spot on the podium with a score of 86. Reiter and Salay were both named 1st Team All Conference, Senior Lily Vesperman was named 2nd Team All Conference and ninth grader Claire Salay was named Honorable Mention. Reiter was also named Middle Border Conference Player of the Year. This Thursday the Cardinals will open the WIAA Tournament in Superior. 

Senior Cardinal harrier Kyra Dix apparently has decided that if she’s going to leave her mark on the Prescott cross country program, she might as well keep rewriting the record book along the way. The Cardinal 12th grader continued her remarkable final season last week by winning the D2 girls race at the Nightfall Classic in Marshfield, crossing the finish line in a school-record 18:12. The meet, held under the lights at River Edge Golf Course, brought together 40 girls teams and 46 boys teams, with competitors divided into four races and team scoring conducted by division. Dix’s record-setting run helped the Prescott girls finish sixth in D2, while senior teammate Emma Schmitz earned a medal with a 20th-place finish in 21:42 and moved into 10th place on the Cardinals’ all-time list of top senior performances. Sophomore Dawson Langer turned in a strong performance for the Cardinal boys, finishing 16th to earn a medal and moving into fifth place on Prescott’s all-time list of top sophomore performances. West Salem, ranked eighth in the state, won the girls team title, while La Crosse Logan, also ranked eighth, captured the boys championship. Prescott heads to the Altoona Invitational this Saturday.

Baldwin-Woodville remains the only team in the Middle Border Conference ranked in the Top 10 in the latest Wisconsin Football Coaches Association Poll. In Division 5 Durand-Arkansaw has moved up to #4, St. Croix Falls is #6, and Grantsburg is #8. Two Prescott non-conference opponents are also ranked in the Top 10 in their respective divisions. Prairie du Chien is ranked #9 in Division 6, and Northwestern is ranked #3 in Division 4. 

For many, the opening notes of Andy Williams singing “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” signal that Christmas is just around the corner. For hikers, campers and outdoor enthusiasts, though, there is another “most wonderful time of the year” and thankfully, it doesn’t require a Christmas tree, a shopping list or a frantic search for parking at Target. Fall. It is the season Wisconsin’s fallophiles have been waiting for all year. Soon, the maple trees will explode in brilliant reds and oranges, the majestic oaks will trade their summer greens for deep browns and reds, and the birch and aspen will shimmer in shades of gold. And that is when a simple stroll through a state park or a drive down a country road becomes something special. For a few glorious weeks, Wisconsin puts on a spectacular show, turning ordinary roads and familiar trails into some of the most scenic and awe-inspiring places imaginable.

Prescott alumnus Reese Ptacek and the Kansas Jayhawks opened Big 12 Conference volleyball play with a sweep of Houston, winning 31-29, 25-20 and 25-15 last Friday night at Horejsi Family Volleyball Arena in Lawrence. The Jayhawks improved to 8-3 overall and 1-0 in Big 12 play, while the Cougars fell to 7-5 and 0-1 in conference. Reese Ptacek was all over the stat sheet with six kills, a match-high eight blocks and two aces for the #19 ranked Jayhawks. 

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources announced that Delavan-Darien High School junior Kiet Tuan Tran is the winner of the 2027 Wisconsin State Park and Forest vehicle admission pass design contest. The design features one of the Wisconsin State Park System’s most popular outdoor activities: camping in the woods. The DNR-sponsored design contest is open to artwork submissions from high school-age students attending Wisconsin's public, private or parochial schools or home-schools. The annual contest, now in its 36^th year, received more than 120 submissions for the 2027 pass design. The new stickers will be available for purchase Jan. 1, 2027. Those who purchase 2027 tickets prior to New Year’s Day will feature the old design. And this reminder, much to the chagrin of one local reader, a State Park sticker makes a great Christmas gift.

I am beginning to wonder if football uniforms have quietly transitioned from requirements to suggestions. For most of my life, football players wore football pants. That's what football players wore. Growing up, you wore blue jeans for touch football at recess, shorts and a T-shirt with your team name across the front for your after-school flag football league, and when you reached middle school or high school, you finally got the official equipment: football pants, shoulder pads, knee pads, thigh pads and a helmet. Then came college football today, where apparently someone decided the pants had become too restrictive. Now we have NCAA Division I players wearing mid-thigh bicycle shorts. Yes, bike shorts. The explanation is that players at the “skill positions” need the extra flexibility. I'm sure they do. And if the NCAA really wants to maximize flexibility perhaps swimming trunks or speedos could be added to the mix. What makes this particularly ridiculous is that there is a rule. Players are supposed to wear pants below the knee, including knee pads. It's not buried in some obscure appendix that only three people have ever read. There is a rule, and there is even a penalty: 5 yards for the first violation and 15 yards for the second. In other words, the people who wrote the rule apparently thought it was important enough to regulate and important enough to penalize. Yet when players don't comply, officials often seem to treat it as though the rule is more of a polite suggestion.

It reminds me of “Animal House” and double-secret probation. Everybody knows something is wrong. Everybody knows there is supposed to be a consequence. But then somebody decides that enforcing the consequence might create an uncomfortable situation, so we all agree to pretend nothing happened. And that is a much bigger problem than football pants. It is what happens when we become more concerned about making someone angry than enforcing a rule. Think about the teacher who catches a student breaking a rule. The first thought is, “I should probably discipline this student.” Then comes the inevitable second thought: “But if I do, he might be mad at me.” So the teacher does nothing. Officials can fall into the same trap. “If I call it, the player might be upset. If I penalize it, the coach might complain. If I enforce the rule, somebody might think I'm being too picky.” Pretty soon, the rulebook is full of rules that everyone knows exist, but nobody expects to be enforced.

We've seen it with sportsmanship, too. Every year, the WIAA reminds schools, coaches, players and officials that sportsmanship matters. Every year, we're told inappropriate behavior needs to be addressed. And every year, players jaw at opponents, coaches scream at officials, players celebrate in opponents' faces and adults in the stands occasionally demonstrate that maturity is apparently not a prerequisite for buying a ticket. Then we do it all over again the next year, and sportsmanship becomes a “point of emphasis” — again. At some point, perhaps the emphasis should be on actually enforcing the rules. If a rule matters, enforce it. If it doesn't matter, change it. But putting a rule in the book, assigning a penalty to it and then refusing to enforce it because someone might get mad is not really having a rule. It's having a suggestion with paperwork.

Headshaker of the Week. Apparently, printed programs have become too old-fashioned for the modern sports fan. Thankfully, Prescott High School still provides programs for its sporting events. Somebody over there apparently hasn’t received the memo that paper is now an unacceptable way to remember where you were. At many college and professional sporting events, the program has disappeared. Don’t worry, though. The information is still available online. Because obviously, when you attend a game, what you really want is to pull out your phone, navigate to a website, click through a couple of menus and stare at a screen while sitting in the stadium. Nothing says “special sporting memory” quite like a webpage. Of course, this is the same world where we decided writing letters was unnecessary. Why put your thoughts on paper, put a stamp on an envelope and send them to someone when you can fire off an email in 12 seconds? Progress! I have programs and scorecards from games at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, County Stadium in Milwaukee and Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington. I kept them because they meant something to me. They weren’t expensive souvenirs. They weren’t signed by anybody. They certainly weren’t going to put my kids through college. But every once in a while, I come across one and it takes me right back. I remember the stadium. I remember the game. I remember the people I was with. That game day program somehow manages to do something a digital file struggles to accomplish: it brings back a memory. Imagine that. You could put a program in a scrapbook, tuck it into a drawer, put it in a box in the basement or stumble across it 30 years later and suddenly remember an afternoon you had completely forgotten about. Try doing that with an online program. Thirty years from now, maybe you’ll be able to log into your account, remember your password from 2026 and hope the team’s website still exists. Good luck with that. There was something satisfying about leaving a stadium with a program in your hand. It was part of the ticket, part of the experience and eventually part of the memory. A letter did the same thing. You could find an old envelope years later, open it and see the handwriting of someone who mattered to you. Today, we have an email sitting somewhere in an inbox with 18,000 other messages, most of which are probably asking us to renew something. We have certainly made communication more convenient. I’m just not sure we’ve made it more meaningful. Not everything needs to be stored in the cloud. Some things belong in a drawer, a scrapbook or an old box — waiting to be found years later. A program said, “I was there.” A handwritten letter said, “I was thinking about you.” An online program says, “Please accept cookies.” I’ll take the paper. No programs at professional or college sporting events? Now that’s a headshaker.