I’m back on the beat after extensive travel outside the country. With such a whirlwind of sports activity this time of year, my apologies for no column last week.
The area boys 2A basketball regionals will be unique in lack of clear-cut favorites leading up to the Mendota sectional.
Take for example, Erie-Prophetstown. As a No. 5 sub-sectional seed, they beat higher-seeded Oregon and Byron in recent weeks.
Throw Rockford Lutheran, Winnebago, Johnsburg, Richmond-Burton, Aurora Christian and of course, Mendota, into the mix and we’re looking at a real free-for-all.
Whoever emerges from that bunch will likely face Peoria Manual, who is a clear-cut favorite in its sectional complex, for the right to advance to Champaign.
If 1A boys basketball is more to your liking, a potential sectional final match-up is No. 1 seeds Dakota and Sterling Newman. Both are ranked in the top 10 in the final A.P. poll.
Lurking in the background is dangerous Eastland, who beat favored Pecatonica in the sectional final last year with slow-down tactics. That completely flustered Pec and bolstered the cause for shot clock implementation (effective 2026/27) by the IHSA.
You have to like the Byron (28-2) girls’ chances to advance not only to the super-sectional, but make it downstate. The final A.P. poll has them No. 2 in the state, behind Nashville.
Individual state wrestling finished up last week with only a couple 1A champs (Newman and Le-Win/Stockton) from the area. There was a time when the northwest part of the state would claim at least half of the titles.
Coal City, which qualified all 14 of its wrestlers, albeit from a weak sectional, managed to earn 7 state medals and will be the favorite over Le-Win/Stockton at the dual-team state tournament.
When it was a 2-class system, the dual meet had some excitement to it. With 3 classes, 1A is so watered down, that other than Coal City, everyone else struggles to fill out a quality 14-man roster. That’s not state-worthy competition. Even the 2A state duals can be weak.
One IHSA tourney that you have to be on your A-game to win is in bowling, like Sterling’s Sarah Doughty did. One of her 3-game series was an 800 on Friday, which is No. 11 all-time for the girls.
Overall, she averaged 230 for 12 games, winning quite handily.
Perhaps the most difficult IHSA honor to pull off is making the All-Academic team, of which 26 boy and girl athletes are honored. Congratulations to Sarah Eckardt of Oregon for landing this prestigious award.
“The students named to the IHSA All-State Academic Team embody what education-based athletics and activities are all about,” said IHSA Assistant Executive Director Stacy Lambert. “They have challenged themselves in the classroom, committed to their teams and organizations, and found ways to give back to their schools and communities. Excelling at such a high level in all of these areas requires discipline and heart, and we are incredibly proud to recognize them as representatives of the IHSA and the state of Illinois.”
As Thomas Hammock leaves NIU to become the running back coach for Super Bowl champion Seattle, I will miss his friendly personality. Covering many of his press conferences, I found Hammock to be a genuine human being, not one of those marketed, slick coach talkers.
A movement afoot is for Huskie legend Jordan Lynch to take over. Lynch is coaching at Chicago Mt. Carmel, the top football program in the state.
That would be a huge jump, going right from high school to a D-I head coach job. Some of you old-timers will remember the name Gerry Faust, who went from a successful parochial coaching job (Moeller in Ohio) like Lynch, to take the head coaching position at Notre Dame in the early 1980s.
That experiment didn’t go as well as Notre Dame hoped and Faust was eventually fired after compiling a 30-26 record. And back then, college football was much easier to navigate than it is now with NIL, transfer portals and conference realignments.
The Winter Olympics have come and gone. Watching them always gives me hope for a true brotherhood among all nations. Additionally, in my travels around Central America and South America last week, I had the chance to see so many good-hearted people, who I would enjoy being neighbors with.
My hope is that we in the United States don’t become too exclusive in who can be here and who can’t. And, it could be a selfish motive on my part, as I want more hard-working, law-abiding, family-oriented people to keep our country going.
• Andy Colbert is a sports writer for Shaw Local covering high school sports in Ogle County.