It’s all about muskrat lust, herding deer and treeing racoons

MARSH MADNESS - Muck diving, truck driving and a Sussex County comical dog not worth nothing outside of eating Wawa donuts and snagging pizza crust out of midair. If you live here and own a dog with lab and retriever blood, you need to untie the gay bandanna and open the door to the pen and see what he can get into.

Darby dog was prompted into a little muskrat lust burying his head in marsh mud. He has also harassed honkers, chased a herd of deer, run down a red fox, once treed a raccoon, an animal described by outdoorsman Ralph Short as a “bad getter,” and played cat and mouse with a freshwater otter, an animal that is all the way silly stupid.

HORNET HORSES - Why the long faces, Delaware State equestrians? The Hornet equestrian team - get used to it - in only the second year of varsity status - came “within a whisker” - their words – of beating Kansas State at the 2008 Varsity Equestrian National Championships in Waco, Texas. The head-to-head competition was neck and neck all the way and decided on a tiebreaker.

Equestrian is a women’s sport which helps with the whole Title 9 gender equity landscape and it also helps Delaware State boost minority enrollment as most, but not all, hang out at horse shows. Fence jumpers and flat racers are not minority kids. Kamerra Brown is one of Delaware State’s top riders coming out of Culpepper, Va., and has been riding for 10 years. She is a top-flight student majoring in English and in 2003 was 16th in the the Ohio pony competition. She is now majoring in preveterinary medicine.

COACH BEIDEMAN - Coach Warren Beideman is old school cantankerous and he may be pushing 70, but no one is pushing him and the little maniac can still play. And if you pull the loyalty lever on the slot machine of friends, Beideman will always be there when others have jumped ship. His sideline quotes crack me up like two years ago when he told some Beacon players on the sidelines to stop playing grab tail and watch the game. They looked at each other and whispered “Grab tail?” before returning to horseplay.

Last Saturday I intercepted this Beideman nugget at the Cape girls soccer game. “You’re the closest and even though you can’t catch her you still have to chase.” The moral to that observation is pushing the pace otherwise an attacker may settle the boy and deliberate the next move, make a great pass and hear the crowd exclaim, “Nicely done!”

COUNTING CROWS - I am in a place where I can go where I want when I want to and that includes covering athletic teams. I can watch girls soccer with the best of them and I love the players, but a 7 p.m. start in Smyrna, for example, is such a fan effort that many parents say, “Text me the score and when you get back text me again and then come straight home.”

I did a quick crowd check last Saturday prior to the game versus A.I. du Pont and counting visiting Tigers and sequestered siblings and erring on the generous side I’d say 40 people, much less than two parents per child. The girls lacrosse game on Friday night versus Worcester drew a large crowd and my quick perusal came up with a total of 150 fans. Baseball and softball draw about 50 fans per game. There are a lot of people at an invitational track meet, but if you got rid of athletes, coaches, officials, concession stand workers, relatives and media you are left with Conway Davis, Cape’s No. 1 sports fan. Off the Hook
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WATER EVERYWHERE! - “With all this water around here why do we need a swimming pool? It’s just what we need, more water!”

That was the most common argument advanced in the early 1970s when Cape first considered a pool. I am all about the pool and requiring students to survival swim a lap up and back in baggy clothes in order to graduate from high school. And they should know how to rescue someone and if they are in water how to get to the closest flotation device. And I’d go so as far to say, no pool then drop physical education altogether and in total because what exactly is the point?

We live in a first-class community, why not a first-class school for our kids? And it’s not a high percentage of minorities who are not swimmers.

There are hundreds of Cape grads who are on the water all summer wearing no lifejackets and fishing and if they get pitched into the brine they are done. Ever notice how many kids show up for junior lifeguard programs? We are all about the water!

SNIPPETS - Jeff Braxton, who played for George Glenn at Sallies and once interviewed for the Cape football job, left his position as offensive line coach at Delaware State to accept the head coaching position at Cheney State. I used to have a dog named Shaney Maedel which my mother said translated to “Pretty Maiden” so my brother and I changed the dog’s name to Chaney State. Only now through the Google translator do I find out that the dog’s name was really Ziemlich Jungfernflug. Gehen jetzt, git!