October 17-18

The rainy conditions we had on Wednesday were gone on Thursday but the strong winds were not, I went to the rink in the afternoon to take a look around. There were leaves on the surface (no surprise) but the winds were mostly from the west-northwest which had them largely in pockets in the corners, after supper I was back to open up for the evening and the cleanup went reasonably without incident. Every team was playing its tenth game, on this night NTS defeated Risky Business, the Killbots beat the Trashers, the Owls won over Dutchmaid and the Misfits downed the Hammerheads. In the Fall 2018 season we were plagued by weather, at this point of the schedule we had a week's worth of outstanding makeup games. This time around we are right where we should be which will probably end up being The Kiss Of Death before it's all over. On Friday night I was at McCaskey for the final home game of football season, the Red Tornado hosted Manheim Township. Before kickoff we did the usual Senior Night recognition, twelve members of the cheerleading squad and seventeen members of the team were spotlighted. The game itself was about what anyone could have realistically expected, one team entered 8-0 with the league's top-ranked offense and defense and the other was 0-8 and has struggled on both sides of the ball. Township scored ten touchdowns, the final score was 71-0 (that is not a misprint) and it could have been much worse had they not missed two extra points and a field goal attempt. It should be pointed out that MT was in no way trying to run up the score, they had their fourth-liners in the game in the second half and still couldn't be stopped. On the other side the Red Tornado was held to nineteen yards of total offense and two first downs, both were in the first half and one of them was as a result of a Township penalty. It is not the worst loss in program history but it's not far away, in 1968 JPM lost a game 80-0 and the following year they lost to the same opponent 81-0. The 2019 squad was outscored in its six home games 309-53 (that's an average margin of 51-9), they finish the season with one last road game on the 25th. Take care, thanks for reading.