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Here's my schedule for the rest of the week…

Wednesday – Church night… kids- go to youth group or confirmation.

Thursday – Siren hosts Drummond… tries to get retribution for those pesky Drummond boys always knocking the Dragon boys out of the tourney (since 2007).

Friday- The Webster Tigers look to get by their nemesis, Eau Claire Regis in the Sectional Semi-Final. Do the Tigers have it in them to make an improbable run to Madison?

Saturday – Could be two games, or could be zero games. We'll follow Siren girls and Webster boys as far as they'll take us!

Good luck to our area teams!!!

Tune into 105.7 WXCX to get the games.

The winter seasons are complete.

Tonight the Grantsburg girls met their demise in St. Croix Falls (as their male counterparts did just one week prior).

The Pirate ladies fell 46-26 to the Saints, thus ending their season.

The girls improved upon their previous season's win total and got better this year. Hopefully the trend continues as the Pirates have a young team and would like to finish in the top half of their conference next season.

I caught up with Grantsburg's head coach Penny Curtin after the game.

The girls brackets are out (Division 3, Division 4) and there are some noteworthy matchups.

In division 3, Grantsburg will be traveling to St. Croix Falls, a West Lakeland rival, to start their postseason. It's also who they play to end their regular season. So March 5th will be a playoff preview game against SCF for the Pirates. Another note… the boys playoffs also see Grantsburg and SCF with the opening game of the playoffs.

In division 4 The Siren Dragons receive a number two seed (behind Northwood). Siren lost their first conference game this past week against Luck. Both teams are now 10-1 in the conference and will most likely finish tied for first (Luck still plays Frederic and Siren has one left against Webster). Both Siren and Luck received number two seeds in division 4.

I think Siren is still a very dangerous team, although they've been shaky down the stretch here losing to Luck and getting shut down in the second half against Grantsburg. Hopefully coach Ryan Karsten can right the ship and provide another deep run in the playoffs.

This is a pretty cool award. Carley Emery won the January Wisconsin Girls Basketball Player of the Month from the mega-site wissports.net.

Here's the write-up from Jay Messar. Here's the final voting tally along with fans who commented on the contest.

Carley is a Junior (JUNIOR!) at Siren and is having an excellent season, again. She's averaging 21.6 points per game (the next highest among conference players is Michelle Gibbs with a 13.7 ppg average). She plays great defense and is a spark for the Siren Dragons who are now 14-3 (8-0 in the West Lakeland) and have won ten in a row including a 99-4 drubbing over Solon Springs.

Congratulations, Carley!

The Pirates boys and girls basketball teams both lost close games tonight to the Webster Tigers in Grantsburg.

The girls dropped their fifth game of the year by the final of 55-52. The Pirates trailed 31-21 at the half, rallied big time in the fourth with some intense defense, but they fell short putting their record at 1-5 overall and 0-2 in the West Lakeland conference.

The boys game was very similar to the girls. The Tigers built a 10 point halftime lead and escaped with the victory. Grantsburg got within one during the third quarter and within two with about fifteen seconds to go in the game, but Webster stayed calm and finished the game out with some clutch free throw shooting down the stretch.

The senior-less Pirates now fall from the ranks of the undefeated in Wisconsin and go to 4-1, 1-1 in the West Lakeland conference. Webster is now on top at 2-0.

In regards to the boys game, I feel like both teams are pretty good, but not great. If these two teams were in last year's conference there is no way they'd be contending for the top spot. That's just my humble, but accurate, opinion.

 We have a couple games tonight with local interest. First, on 100.9 WCMP at 7:30 the Pirate Girls take on the Rush City Tigers in a border battle meanwhile on 105.7 WXCX we'll be covering the boys Blizzard taking on Pine City at 7pm.

I'm working the girls game while the wayward son, Dan Hinrichs, comes back and does the hockey game. (EDIT 4:30pm – Dan and I are switching games to make life a little easier with equipment and proximity issues)

The Blizz are coming off a nice conference win against Minneapolis East West (yes, that's a conference game). While the Pirate girls look to rebound from a 67-52 loss against Frederic on Friday.

Well a new season is upon us and the schedule is out for December. We'll be doing a lot more hockey this year, which is exciting to me because there are rarely 30 point blowouts in hockey

Here's the schedule for the rest of December:

"So you're not dead" was the warm greeting I received from a Grantsburger (I don't know why Kozy or Dale's hasn't tried to cash in on that name for a sandwich. I'm going to copyright it someday) at the concession stand after Grantsburg beat Siren tonight in straight sets to finish their conference season undefeated. She was ever so subtly eluding to the fact that I've done a horrible job updating this blog. So in this post I'm going to try and recap all the news that has occurred in the week and a half I've strayed.

1. Nick Hallberg and Penny Curtin are the new coaches for the boys and girls basketball teams, respectively. I couldn't be happier as a fan of Grantsburg athletics. Both are knowledgeable, good teachers and easy to talk to. I feel like both will have a lot of success in the upcoming years.

2. Grantsburg volleyball wins the conference. It is really a testament to the program that this news is really not that surprising. Think of any other sport… go ahead… except for fast pitch, they are all a huge achievement. This conference win is a big achievement, too, but one that was very expected. Congratulations, Pirates!

(This photo of Grantsburg's seniors comes courtesy of this site maintained by the multi-talented Deb Johnson)

3. I'll definitely have more to say on the following if it passes, but the proposal of realigning football from conferences to districts is a really a bad deal for Grantsburg. It would make Grantsburg travel sooooooo far to play other teams in their division.

The closest team in the new district realignment would be Cameron which is 76 miles away and is currently the FARTHEST team from Grantsburg in the Large Lakeland conference. There would be FIVE teams well over 100 miles away, Rib Lake/Prentice being the farthest at 170 miles. To give you some perspective… St. Paul to Duluth is only 150 miles. The average travel distance for Grantsburg in this new format is 119 miles (in our current conference it is only 46 miles… which includes Cameron and Clear Lake – both over 70 miles away). Good grief.

From what I've read it seems like this proposal has a lot of momentum, as in it might be adopted this winter and may be implemented for the 2010 season.

I wonder how much more it will cost Grantsburg in travel. Where will that money come from? By the way… Grantsburg is not the only town this stinks for… northern Wisconsin is DOOMED! (OK… maybe not doomed, but definitely adversely affected).

What about JV and Middle School games? Let's look at JV. Say they play at 5:00 Monday evenings (like now)(Middle School generally plays on Tuesday or Thursday evenings). Assume it takes three hours to get to Prentice . They will have to leave school around 1 o'clock. and they won't get back home until maybe 11pm! And that's only true if the game doesn't go into overtime! A school night. Homework. Sleep. Not to mention the families who have to make the trek there and back.

I couldn't be more against it. If you're against it please write a letter to the WIAA.

The contact info is:

5516 Vern Holmes Dr., Stevens Point, WI 54482.

The WIAA phone number is (715) 344-8580.

Click on the map to be able to read it better and zoom in.

Wissports.net has this resource that shows you some of these things. And read Todd Beckmann's article from the Burnett County Sentinel which includes many quotes from Grantsburg Athletic Director, Mike Amundson. If you'd like to read the proposal in it's entirety… enjoy.

4. Eighth grade thriller against Unity. Ok, so I'm biased because I'm a football coach for the middle school team, but the game the eighth graders won (their last game in middle school) was one of the all-time best moments in a sporting event that I've been a part of.

We took the lead with about a minute and a half to go in a tight ball game. We were very excited. Then we kicked-off and Unity returned it for a touchdown. Ugh. What a bummer that was, but these guys didn't give up. Unity kicked it back to us with just over a minute to go in the game.

We trailed by six points.

We work our way down the field and have it third and goal at the two yard line. Nine seconds to go and we had just used our final time-out. We hand the ball off and score a touchdown. More jumping and yelling. Now we are tied. The two point conversion was good so we take the lead with six seconds left on the clock.

We don't make the mistake of kicking it deep this time. One of the up-men for Unity fields the ball and is tackled. Two seconds remaining.

Ball near mid-field.

They line up with trips to the right. QB drops back and unloads.

Then the crowd goes WILD as the ball is batted back and falls harmlessly to the ground. Grantsburg wins in a thriller.

Unity was a bigger and faster team, but Grantsburg had more heart!

I am still smiling about that one

5. I will be broadcasting Grantsburg volleyball on the radio starting next Tuesday as the playoffs begin. Grantsburg will be taking on Glenwood City in first round action from G-burg. Catch the action on 105.7 WXCX. I am sorry we weren't able to bring you any regular season games, but it was kind of nice for me to just go enjoy the whoopins without having to describe them. But, I'm very excited to be getting to bring you the state tournament.

That's all I can think of and care to opine about tonight. Congratulations, again, to the volleyball team. Another awesome regular season. They have a final tune up for the playoffs this weekend at the Cameron Tournament. They have won every other tournament they've entered this year and there's no reason they can't win the next two.

Don’t miss my recap of the All-Sentinel Girls team.

Congrats to the All-Sentinel award winners:

Here’s the article in the Sentinel.

All five Grantsburg starters make All-conference… what an accomplishment! I don’t know if that has ever happened before (probably) but Grantsburg finished second in the conference. It shows that it was truly a team effort for those guys.

I feel like Siren sort of got snubbed with selections as they had a very good season and I thought that Charlie Brown definitely had a good enough season to warrant an All-conference selection.

I like the fact that Gab Witzany got an honorable mention. She had a good season and really played well at the end of the season.

I think the conference is going to be highly competitive for the next couple years as a lot of the players on this list are sophomores (Morrin, Carley Emery, Ashley Guevara, Michelle Gibbs) and Witzany is a freshman. I might have missed a couple younger players, but that would only strengthen my arguement.