Swimming "The reason I hate my life" Preview

As fall sports came to a screeching halt....Now starts the winter sport season full of excitement and rivalries....To kick off the sport previews, I have chosen swimming as the sport of choice to talk about.

Swimming is probably one of the most popular activities for Americans during the summer and seems like one of the easier sports too. While in actual fact its one of the most annoying sports ever. The idea of swimming back and forth seems easy then you realize that most times you will have to swim more than 50 or 25 yards at a time causing you to wonder how it is to be a fish and having nothing t0 do but swim. In the time that you think about how much your life sucks, chlorine starts getting soaked up into your pores and when you start heating up people around you start wondering what smells like chlorine, something that you would never need to worry about if your were on land...pretty much swimming sucks and the only benefit is when you race and when practice is over.

We bring back a core nucleus of senior leaders that include: Mike Missen, "Hot Karl" Rosenquist, Keyan Zarei, Mark"The Shark"Wieneke, Brian Lentz, Alan Choi, John "Jabba the Huff" Zhang, and Stan " The Man" Kamande. We added two seniors: Nick Nielson and Matt "China" Kelsay. Why they came out for swimming, I have no idea. We also added about 30 new freshmen and also embarrassed about 30 freshmen in our poster this year by leaving them in the cold with speedos.

We start the season againist Lin-Mar, which sound like a good team but need some breaking down to understand their talent.

Lin-Mar

They are probably one of the nicest teams in our conference other than Cedar Falls, but being nice only takes you so far. Last year we had an invitational at City High and about half of Lin-Mar's team under a water polo goal reading twilight. They also graduated all there non-harry potter/North Korea Scientist lookalikes and now are stuck with their yamanashi/harry potter lookalikes. Seeing as how we also dominated them in a meet last year winning 11 out of 11 varsity races, it will be hard for their yamanashi/harry potter lookalikes to muster the courage to be men and win a race against us.

With the way the team is developing, we predict that we could win the conference meet and bring the MVC trophy back to West. Also, a few funny meet flyers and t-shirts around the school so be aware!

Video of the week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGsoMbvHU50

West High Volleyball...SO GOOD!

First off: Go Hawks
Now down to business

This post has been a long time comin, mainly because the volleyball team deserved to have something written about how they dominate, and since their season just ended (fast forward to 40 seconds for hilarity), I'd like to put some thoughts on the blog.

So for those of you who aren't aware, West High volleyball is dominant. They made it to the state finals this year before losing to last year's winner Ankeny. I'm gonna go ahead and call foul play on the IHSAA, because they obviously rigged the match. But that's neither here nor there.

West has a few D-1 players on the team. Most notably seniors Jessica "Air" Gehrke and Christiana "Un" Fairfield. From what I could tell they were the leaders of the squad and provided the leadership on the court. Gehrke makes the opponents court look like Baghdad while Fairfield is apparently the setter or something (obviously, I'm one of the volleyball experts).

The Women of Troy played extremely well this year, and deserve the crown of "Best Fall Sports Team" narrowly edging out girls cross country, who also had a super season and have alot of talent coming back (note: the girls cross country team also deserves some respect, I've been nagged by a certain someone to write about them, but since I have 0 knowledge about the sport of cross country, I'm not even going to try and persuade you that I do).

So here's how I'll sum things up:
Volleyball=amazingly good
Girls XC=very good
Toy Story 2=ok
Dane Cook=not so great
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

With Love,
David "Lights Out" Rachke

Quick West High Season Review

Note: To get the full effect of this entry, you have to imagine that Green Day's "Time of Your Life" is playing in the background while you read this. Or Fire Burning by Sean Kingston, either one, it's up to you.

Well, it had to end eventually. Teams just can't play forever. As many of you know, the West High Football season ended at City High, in the first round of the playoffs. The game was a tough one, in which early turnovers created a mountain our team couldn't climb.

Now despite the playoff game, this season was a large success. Last year we had 0 wins, and although our offense was great on paper, we just couldn't win. This year, we improved vastly. Here are the things we need to look back on and smile.

1. We won THREE GAMES! That's like going from this to this. And the team covered all the types of wins too. A nail-biter, a blow-out and a third type of win that I haven't thought of yet. It's nice to win isn't it?

2. Some individuals really shined: Jamal "J-Train" Thompson, "Tayler-Time" Bontrager, Charlie "And the Chocolate Factory" Rogers, Jacob "Smash" Gannon, and Brandon "A Bay" Bay. If you're not listed, it's not because I don't like you, it's cause I couldn't think of a nickname.

3. Faith has been restored.

Not to say the turnaround is complete. Far from it. But the program is heading in the right direction. All the hard work is paying off and eventually West will turn back into the late 90's teams who dominated life.

It will be interesting to see how this team changes next year. I won't be around, so I won't care as much, but still. GO WEST!

With Love,
David "Lights-Out" Rachke