By Cyote Williams | Times Vedette

It’s possible no team has seen more meet cancellations than Panorama cross country this season (except for maybe nearby ACGC). The state has experienced one of its wettest months in recorded history, and cross country teams and courses have paid the price. Even still, that has done little to slow down Kylie Rochholz and her historic senior campaign. 

Rochholz has been a staple on both Panorama’s track and field team as a long distance runner and the cross country team since she was a freshman. In 2023 she finished ninth at the state meet. Ninth. As a freshman. Only four freshmen in total placed in the top 20, and only one other freshman finished above her at the biggest race of the season. She stepped back a bit the following season, finishing 14^th at state, but, again, this was still impressive for any sophomore. Her junior year season was hampered with injury woes, causing her to miss the state meet and robbing her of being a four-time qualifier.

There’s little doubt that Rochholz would have qualified for state last season had she been healthy. Despite fighting those injuries, she placed 16^th at the conference meet. If you take her time of 21:26 at the conference meet and put it into the state-qualifying meet where she would have ran, Rochholz would have finished 12^th. I understand courses vary greatly, and times are not universal, but, despite her ailments, she was putting together solid races. Panorama still raced well overall at that meet, placing fourth. But, a healthy Rochholz performance likely would have sent them to state once more.

Rochholz had the summer to get healthy and return with a vengeance, and that she did. She won the Southeast Valley Invite in the first race of the season, but immediately she and the rest of the Panthers had to deal with three straight meet cancellations. Rochholz shows up for the ACGC meet and places second, finishing in 19:06 — a new school record for any female at any cross country race.

Thought that was good? Well, just four days later at the Ogden meet, Rochholz wins the meet in 18:51, absolutely crushing the school record she just set herself. Want to know a fun fact? Rochholz finished one place ahead of the only other freshman who had a better time than her at the 2023 state meet, Madelyn Grothus of Madrid, on both of those record-setting runs. How cool is that? Two of the best runners in 1A have been battling it out for the top spot for four years.

Even coming off of an injury-plagued junior year, and dealing with three cancelled meets this season, in just three races, Rochholz has produced two wins, one second-place finish, set a school record, and then broke her own record.

Panorama will run again in the Jim Klein Invitational next week, then at the West Central Activities Conference shortly after that, then the state qualifier. It will be fun to see if Rochholz can keep up the break-neck pace she has been on this season through the end of the year.

If that wasn’t cool enough for this Panorama and ACGC sports follower, the Chargers, just a few miles down the road, have an eighth grader consistently placing inside the top 10 at meets. When Rochholz graduates this year, it looks like Vivian Crawford will take the reins from her as one of the area’s most dominant runners, likely emulating the successes that Ava Campbell had in her years as an ACGC runner. I am consistently amazed at the athletic talent that comes from this area of Guthrie County.

Reach out with comments, suggestions, story ideas and more to cyote@dmcityview.com.

By Cyote Williams | Times Vedette

I’ve written about many different things sports can be in this column in many different ways. One thing I haven’t written much about, though, is winning and losing. If you currently have, or had, children in sports, you probably told them, “Sports aren’t just about winning” at one time or another, whether it be to console them after a loss or relax them after some frustrations. Well, if they are not about winning, then what are they about?

The thing is, sports are about winning and losing. Athletes play to win the game, not to lose it. Winning feels great. Losing feels awful. And who wants to feel awful? When you watch your favorite team win, it can boost your mood. When you watch your team lose, like how I just watched the Green Bay Packers get completely embarrassed on Thursday Night Football, it can tarnish your mood. Anyone who says winning and losing don’t matter is lying, or at least not telling the full truth. Those things do matter, but they are not the entire reason we play or watch sports.

Look no further than recreational sports once you reach adulthood. For roughly 95% of us, the last “meaningful” sporting games we played were in high school. There are no real stakes involved in recreation and coed sports, but they offer something different like access to a community, some exercise and many memories. I look forward to playing pick-up basketball games with my longtime friends. We get to catch up, joke around, sometimes argue, and play some basketball. I’ve made more new friends than I could have possibly imagined by playing in a coed rec soccer league the past four years. Grabbing Mexican food and some margaritas at the end of each season feels better than any win we had during the season.

One thing many Americans are asked when they meet people overseas is if our cheerleaders are real. They also want to know what American football is like. Meanwhile, many countries have now adopted baseball and basketball as major national sports.

Some foreigners say the United States has no culture. I say you need only look at our professional sports teams. Culture, tradition and rivalries are the result of the passion that comes from fans of teams in the NFL, MLB and NBA, as well as local high schools.

Above all else, sports are an escape from daily life. They help us forget about our problems, trials and tribulations. When I’ve had a bad day, I can go shoot hoops for a couple hours or hit some shots (soccer ones, of course). I can also turn on the TV and watch my favorite team. Sometimes, that’s a good thing. Sometimes, that’s a bad thing.

For others, sports provide an even bigger escape. Just look at the tradition started by the Iowa Hawkeyes and their fans in waving to young patients in the nearby children’s hospital. How many kids in the Make A Wish program have chosen to meet their favorite players over the years? These athletes inspire countless numbers of people to make efforts to pull their entire family out of poverty just by playing a game.

Sports make us laugh, cheer, cry, boo and everything in between. They involve community, respect, tradition, culture and competition — all wrapped in one. Sometimes, they play out like a fairytale. Sometimes, they play out like a nightmare. Yes, they are about winning and losing, but they have always been — and always will be — about much more than that, too.

Reach out with comments, complaints, story ideas and more to cyote@dmcityview.com.

By Cyote Williams | Times Vedette

For those of you who tuned into Monday Night Football to watch the Kansas City Chiefs vs. the Denver Broncos, you might have seen the Chiefs score on a play you either have never seen or haven’t seen in a while. That is, unless you’re an ACGC or similar sized school football fan.

At the start of the fourth quarter, the Chiefs were on the goal line, seeming primed to add to their 24-10 lead. The Chiefs have one of the greatest offensive minds in football history leading their team in Andy Reid. The coach, earlier in that game, was caught smiling before his team went for it on fourth down. Reid, almost never smiles. Period. So, it was even more surprising to see the walrus-stached coach flash a grin before Kenneth Walker broke free for a 60-yard TD.

No grin was caught on camera before this Chiefs TD, also scored by Kenneth Walker, which was technically a pass because Patrick Mahomes tossed it forward. The Chiefs executed a wing formation play, which is basically extinct in the modern NFL and largely extinct from all levels of college football. Reid, Mahomes and Walker broke some of it down in the post-game press conference. If you’re an ACGC fan, you’ve been watching plays similar to this one for years.

Teams like ACGC and other schools all over the state have been running power option style offenses like this for decades with incredible efficiency. The Chargers have been dominating the area for years and have barely reached more than 10 passing completions in a season doing so. It completely flies in the face of what “modern” football is to most people. Even Lincoln High School, where I went, ran the Wing T offense during its most successful period of football in the last 30 years. Just look at these highlights. You would never expect to see a 4A or 5A school running an offense like this today. But it worked for Lincoln, it works for ACGC, and it still works at the highest level of professional football.

That is something I love about football. It takes shape in so many different ways. ACGC, old Lincoln, most of A, and 1A football use option, deception and pitches. Look to the bigger schools, and most all of them run some form of spread, air raid, or multiple offense to move the ball.

In the NFL, the entire league has become pass heavy. But in the chess match that is football, leave it to a coach like Reid to break an old classic like he ran on Monday night. The Broncos didn’t even know who had the ball until he was in the endzone. This is one of the many reasons why football is such a great sport. On the surface, it’s one of the most physical and brutal sports one can play. Underneath, a seemingly endless stream of plays, calls, audibles and adjustments exist. And just when you think defenses have started to figure it out, a veteran like Reid breaks out a play most haven’t prepared for since the 1930s.

Reach out with comments, suggestions story ideas and more to cyote@dmcityview.com.

By Cyote Williams | Times Vedette

Asking sport fans how they feel about analytics usually results in one of two responses. The first answer is that sports are meant to be played on the field, not on the calculator. The second is that analytics have always been in sports, but we simply know how to use them better now.

I land somewhere in the middle. Sometimes I prefer when we get to see the deeper side of why something worked or didn’t work. Other times, I just want the game to go on, untouched. But what I truly like seeing is when people smarter than I am dissect the games they love.

I have two examples from this week that I found interesting. My favorite morning newsletter is Y! Sports AM, a daily roundup of all things sports from around the world. In addition to scores and highlights, they drop in Yahoo Sports articles. This week, writer Kendall Baker added the piece “A dying art,” which is about how the one-handed backhand in tennis is dying.

I’m not much of a tennis fan, if at all. Even so, the athletes are much more athletic than the world gives them credit for. See my point here between Ben Shelton and Carlos Alcaraz. But, as I stated, I love it when fans break down the game in ways I never could have thought of. Did you know that, from 1970-90, players with one-handed backhands won more than 60% of Grand Slams? I sure didn’t. These days, only five men ranked inside the top 100 use the swing. I would have never noticed that, but I’m glad someone did.

A realm I’m much more familiar with had its own new development. The NFL is increasingly experimenting with international games, and Commissioner Roger Goodell has stated publicly, multiple times, that he expects to see an international-based team join the NFL in his lifetime. With this influx of international travel, NFL teams have a new challenge to figure out.

The San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams played in Melbourne, Australia, yesterday. The teams took differing approaches in handling the time change and long travel. The 49ers flew into the land down under on Sept. 2, a full week before the game. They wanted to give their players as much time as possible to recharge after the travel and 17-hour time difference.

The Rams left the day before. The team’s theory — one they tested last season when playing in London — is that if they leave as close to before the game as possible, and leave right after the game is over, there would be no need for their body clocks to adjust. Last year, the Rams destroyed the Jags, but they Jags weren’t very good anyway. So, who’s to say it made that much of a difference?

Well, the 49ers won this year’s game, 27-7. This result flew in the face of what neurologist and sleep specialist W. Christopher Winter predicted, which was the basis for the column. The theory is that because athletes reach their physical peak typically in the late afternoon and early evening, the Rams players’ bodies would still feel like it’s 5:30 p.m. The 49ers, who let their bodies adjust, would be playing a time earlier than their peaks.

He was wrong, analytics and sleep studies be damned.

That is why I land somewhere in the middle on analytics. I want the numbers. I want the sleep studies, the percentages, the trends and the people who are much smarter than I am explaining why something should happen. But I also want to see what happens when the numbers are wrong.

That’s the beauty of sports. Analytics can tell us what is most likely to happen. They can tell us what has happened thousands of times before. They can even tell us what should happen next. But they cannot tell us what will happen. And sometimes, thankfully, a tennis player hits a shot that nobody saw coming, a football team ignores the science and wins anyway, and all the spreadsheets in the world are left staring at the final score. That is when sports stops being a science and reminds us why we love it.

Reach out with comments, suggestions, story ideas and more to cyote@dmcityview.com.

By Cyote Williams | Times Vedette 

College football made its triumphant return this week. While I still think it’s ludicrous that so many games are played at seemingly random days of the week instead of exclusively on Saturdays, the beginning of the season did give us arguably the biggest upset of the year already. UMass, which didn’t win a game last season — and hasn’t beat an FBS school since 2023 or beat a power conference school since 1978 — smoked Rutgers, 37-21.

What makes that even worse for Rutgers is the school paid UMass $1.55 million to play against them. It’s something larger colleges frequently do to convince smaller (worse) programs to essentially guarantee them a win. Well, even as a 29.5-point favorite, Rutgers got absolutely humiliated. The victory will stick in the minds of the fans of both teams forever. It brought back  some of my favorite college football memories from over the years.

My first remembrances of college football are from ISU games my stepdad took me to when I was younger and he and my mom first started dating. I have plenty of memories of those games, but none sticks out more than watching Todd Blythe, one of the team’s best-ever players, snatch a game winner with one hand to beat Toledo in triple overtime.

Ask most any Cyclone football fan, and they can tell you where they were the night a middling ISU team blew up the BCS system, defeating No. 2 Oklahoma State in one of the most heralded upsets of all time. OSU clobbering the Clones seemed like a foregone conclusion, a quick stop on their way to the national title game. Brandon Weedon, a Heisman favorite, would surely pick apart ISU’s defense. He didn’t. An electric Jack Trice stadium proved to be too much for the Cowboys, and ISU running back Jeff Woody will never be forgotten by fans. That win resulted in fans storming the field, and it was my favorite college football moment of all time.

ISU pulled off another gargantuan upset, this time against No. 4 TCU. The Cyclones were ranked No. 25 heading into this game, so not quite the same earth-shattering upset as the one against OSU but a major one, nonetheless. Early in the Matt Campbell era, this game showed what the team was capable of doing. I vividly remember when ISU picked off TCU with 1:17 left in the game. An older Cyclone fan looked at my friends and me and said, “You better get down there,” seemingly knowing the field storming was coming. It was great advice. My friends and I high-tailed it from our seats and were on the field in what seemed like an instant.

The date of that game was Oct. 28, and my friends and I went out for Halloween parties immediately after. You can imagine how college students in Ames were behaving after a huge upset during Halloween.

Matt Campbell’s reign in the year’s following provided even more great memories. Sure, there were some bad ones, too. It’s almost a requirement for ISU sports to have some disappointments baked in. But focusing on the positives that stick out: the Fiesta Bowl win over Oregon; a win over No. 3 Oklahoma in Norman the same year as the TCU win; and ISU’s 10-win season in 2024.

This new season under Jimmy Rogers provides another opportunity for memories to become logged into my mind. The same goes for Hawkeye and Panther fans, and whichever team you support. I’m excited, and I hope you are, too.

Have a favorite college football memory of your own? Reach out to tell me, or give me any comments, suggestions or story ideas at cyote@dmcityview.com.

By Cyote Williams | Times Vedette

This news might not concern the people of Guthrie County too much, unless some of you are as big of soccer fans as I am.

The city of Des Moines, citing budget shortfalls, decided to end negotiations with Krause Group over a proposed downtown soccer stadium that would have brought both a professional men’s and women’s soccer team to the area.

I will not bore you with all the nitty-gritty financial details, even though there are plenty of them. The long and short of it is that Krause Group, Des Moines and a whole bunch of other organizations have been trying to put together funding for this project for seven years. Naturally, the pandemic created a snag, and since then, costs have gone up.

If there was a finger to point at for whose fault it was that this project had not gotten off the ground, let alone started or finished, it was often pointed at Krause Group. Years later, with the funding finally secure, the city of Des Moines backed out.

It will be difficult for people to find much sympathy for the Krauses, who have burned through plenty of public goodwill. Truthfully, though, I am not interested in pointing fingers or placing blame. I am just disappointed.

That is right. I am taking the stance of a frustrated parent. As a kid, what stung more than being chewed out, grounded, having your toys taken away or being sent to your room was Mom or Dad saying, “I am not mad. I am just disappointed.”

I have been patiently and excitedly awaiting a professional soccer team to come to the metro for years. I already wake up at the wee hours of the morning to watch my favorite soccer team in London play.

If I had a local soccer team to support — maybe Des Moines FC, or perhaps the Pork Tenderloin Soccer Club — I really would not care what they called it. I, along with many other soccer-crazed fans, was ready to throw my support behind an honest-to-God professional soccer team.

Take a look at the other professional sports organizations in Des Moines. The Iowa Wild, Iowa Wolves and Iowa Cubs are often noted as some of the most well-attended and well-watched minor league teams in their respective leagues.

I understand soccer is lower on the totem pole than those sports, but I believe the city would rally around it. Either way, the project, at least for now, feels dead in the water, and we will not get to find out.

What hurts the most was the reaction from many of my friends — friends I know would happily attend these games. They were not angry. They were not even disappointed. There was more of an air of, “That is just Des Moines for you.” A growing expectation of missing out on, or giving up on, doing the “cool” thing. They did not even get their hopes up in the first place. That is something the city should be trying to do more of. Excite people. Find ways to make things work.

If Des Moines really is supposed to be a city that punches above its weight, then it should start punching harder. Maybe that is naïve of me to say. And, like I said, I left out the nitty-gritty financial details of this project. But it just feels like Des Moines used to make fun, interesting and exciting things happen through sheer force of will. There was a sense that if someone had a big idea, the city would figure out a way to make it happen. This stadium project somehow falling apart after clearing what should have been the final hurdle feels entirely too familiar.

So, no, I am not mad. I am just disappointed.

Reach out with comments, suggestions, story ideas and more to cyote@dmcityview.com.