No question our local college basketball teams have been taking it on the chin a bit – as they take their early 2023-24 schedules on the road. And the question that just jumps out is why there are virtually no local games here.
OK, UC’s Bearcats will host NKU Sunday but that’s something of an outlier, the result of NKU allowing the Bearcats to play in Truist Arena while their own Fifth-Third Arena was being rebuilt. But that’s it.
NKU and Thomas More don’t play – either the men or the women. No excuse for that. Why in the world would the NKU men head to the Pacific Coast twice – to play Washington in Seattle and Saint Mary’s in Moraga, Calif. – when they don’t play TMU’s now NCAA Division II program.
Same for the TMU women. They’ll head to Wisconsin and Northern Indiana, but not to Highland Heights. And the NKU women have a place for Pitt and Chattanooga, Indiana State and Marshall, and a trip to Florida, but how about inviting Thomas More’s three-time national champs for a visit to Highland Heights. Good for both fan bases – and the travel budget.
As for Xavier, the Musketeers play Robert Morris out of NKU’s Horizon League this season. Why not NKU? The teams have played six times in history (XU leads 4-2), but only once in the last 44 years.
Xavier (UC, too) plays somebody called Bryant this season. Why not start a series with TMU?
How much better for Thomas More fans to be able to just head across the river to Evanston than to have to find their way to Bolivar, Mo., where the Saints opened.
As for UC, the Bearcats play NKU’s Horizon League mate Detroit Mercy – and Eastern Washington and Illinois-Chicago and Howard and Merrimack – why not make NKU a regular rival?
But as long as NKU and TMU don’t play, it’s hard to make the case that the two Cincinnati programs should start looking this way for opponents. Let’s start there. C’mon, NKU and TMU. Time for the Norse and the Saints to get together on the court.
Now that TMU is an NCAA Division II program, there’s really no excuse for these two not to play. And maybe when they do, we can start a search for that cool Kentucky Post Long Rifle Trophy the teams once played for. No one seems to know where it is.
Play a doubleheader. At NKU’s Truist Arena. Every year. In December. A win-win for college basketball in Northern Kentucky. Far better than the Norse heading off to Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
LISTENING IN ON WEDNESDAY’S HALL OF FAME INDUCTIONS
Some humor, some history and just an all-around good time Wednesday in front of a large crowd at the November inductions for the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame with a Covington Holmes’ slant.
A big part of the crowd was there for the induction of jockey Mack Garner, a Covington resident and Iowa native who was considered the nation’s top jockey during his era, the 1920s and 1930s. Three generations of the Garner family were there to share the man who pre-dated Northern Kentucky’s other Racing Hall of Fame jockeys, Eddie Arcaro and Steve Cauthen, a distinction historian Dr. Jim Claypool noted in his introduction of a man who won 1,346 races in his career while finishing first on 17 percent of his mounts while winning every major stakes race in America.
His grandson Andrew Mack Garner III accepted for Mack, noting that Andrew Mack IV and V were both in the audience. He read a poem written in the New York Times for his grandfather’s 1934 Kentucky Derby win aboard Cavalcade after 20 years of racing all around the nation. And later noted that his grandfather, who died of a heart attack at the age of 37 after riding four races at River Downs, also had homes in Jamaica, Queens, N.Y., and Florida, where he spent much of the time on the racing circuit.
• Woody Cottengim and Tom Hicks were 1965 classmates for the Holmes Bulldogs. And also good buds of NKSHOF Vice-President Randy Marsh, who will take over from retiring Joe Brennan (both Holmes grads) after Joe’s 13 years at the organization’s helm. One thing that both inductees noted is that each has been married 55 years as they thanked their wives for helping them get here.
Woody talked about how he was thinking of “who to thank” and then said the heck with it, “at my age, you’re not going to be able to remember it anyway.” But he did “thank all you older teenagers for remembering me.”
Hicks remembered his basketball coaches – Reynolds Flynn, who was here, and Orland Hoskins and the legendary Tom Ellis. “This is really a big deal for me,” Hicks said and as he recalled what playing for the one-of-a-kind Ellis, who coached football, basketball and baseball like no one else ever, was like in one story. He described an injury where he had a finger on his shooting hand dislocated and wanted to get medical help to straighten it out. Ellis said no need. He’d straighten it out for him. No need for Hicks to tell you which finger it was as he held up his hand with that still badly dislocated finger.
• Saint Henry’s Amy Franks Garner was the lone woman inducted this month but the Crusader alum could not have fit in better on this day. The track/soccer star and college athlete is married to Mack Garner’s great-grandson. “I had such great coaches,” she said. “But the best part of sports are the people you meet along the way.”
• Bellevue and NKU tennis star and coach Rob Hardin had one secret he told his quarter-century of teams at Notre Dame Academy, where his won-loss record was 226-41 and his Pandas won three state titles. “I’m not Catholic,” he’d whisper to them, “if they find out, they’ll fire me.” Hardin joked that he did it to see if any of his teams were unhappy with him and would turn him in. They wouldn’t. “Without Roger Klein, this wouldn’t be possible,” he said of the legendary Northern Kentucky tennis patriarch.
• And finally, as the guest speaker, retired Cincinnati Bengals trainer Paul Sparling, who became a Northern Kentuckian 38 years ago to cut down the drive from the airport on those late-arriving Bengals’ charters. The Wilmington College grad, who was trainer for the Bengals for 43 years and some 875 games, said he could not be enjoying his first year of full retirement anymore. “If I’d have realized how good this would be, I’d have retired a long time ago.”
Paul said he was glad his wife, Karen, wasn’t a football fan when they started dating because he wasn’t sure what, as the team was going through 15 straight losing seasons, she’d have thought of him. A big part of what Paul did that affected Northern Kentucky was incorporating both NKU and TMU into the team’s intern program for student trainers.
He said that being an NFL trainer, where “you work seven days a week for six months of the year” and then “five days a week during the non-playing season . . . it’s no longer the offseason anymore,” is pretty tough. So is losing. And going through 10 different head coaches, naming Forrest Gregg as by far “the toughest” of the 10 and how Northern Kentucky native Homer Rice might have just been far too nice.
Said that one thing he learned was that “if you can be an athletic trainer for a losing team, being an athletic trainer for a winning team is a piece of cake – everybody wants to play.” No one wants to be hurt. It’s miraculous.
Talked of a private conversation with Bengals’ Pres. Mike Brown when Paul was in the process of adopting two children from Russia and the window of time when he might have to go to Moscow came in October and he might miss a game and how Brown told him, “Go, those children need you.” As it worked out, it was the bye week and he didn’t miss a game, but he could have.
And finally, in a bit of news no one knew, Paul told the behind-the-scenes story of Buffalo’s Damar Hamlin’s on-field return from death at Paycor Stadium a year ago here – the first time that ever happened in the NFL – and how it went according to a plan he’d put together with a crew of people he’d selected that everyone hoped would never have to be used.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.