That is just a wrong road to go down without the facts

I am not an apologist for the Cape Henlopen School District and will not make excuses where outrageous claims are verified by hard and fast and provable facts. Tom Ott, the disgraced former head football coach at Cape, is currently portrayed as public disappointment No. 1 in the community, charged with despicable crimes. And perhaps he is guilty on all counts, but the judicial process gets to play itself out, which takes time. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to want to only pile on Ott all kinds of charges for which there is no evidence. As I’ve written before, I’ve known the guy the last seven years and never witnessed or heard a single person suggest or insinuate that Ott was a major drinker who on occasion showed up drunk for practice. What we’ve been asked to believe about Tom Ott is so unbelievably horrendous that it’s not out of the question that we believe any and all things about him, and that is just a wrong road to go down without substantiated and verifiable facts.

WHAT’S MORE IMPORTANT? - Grand Mom Rose: “The people who claim academics are more important than athletics are usually the people who can’t play anything.” There are so many eligibility rules for athletes because the old and stodgy are afraid athletes will focus on fun to the exclusion of things which are not, like trigonometry for the spatially spastic or geography for the criminally insane or creative writing taught by people with no history of actually being able to write themselves. I get angry when athletes flame out and are taken off teams and it’s argued it’s for their own good. Take fat and out-of-shape people out of honors classes until they drop their blood pressure and lower their body mass index; after all it’s for their own good. My message for student-athletes - a forced term that means nothing - is they should play all the talent cards dealt to them by nature and nurture because if they don’t someone will chump them out by some obscure rule and there’s nothing they can do about it. We are a society strung out on sports; there are more viewers of ESPN than CNN.

THE WIZARD OF WISWELL - Ben Wiswell, seventh-grade Beacon math whiz and a really cool kid, finished first in a recent statewide math competition, not fourth as reported by this writer whose short story “Euclid the Truck and the Mathematician” was panned by his own grandmother as “funny in an uninteresting sort of way.” The competition came down to the final six students in a tie-breaker round and Ben was on the question like Ptolemy on a protractor beating everyone to the punch to be grand math wizard standing atop a field of 160 seventh-graders.

SNIPPETS - Pop Warner is in fundraising mode because of the name change to Vikings and purchase of new uniforms for players and cheerleaders. Greene Turtle and Outback are helping out, so stay tuned. A second registration will be held from 5 to 7 p.m., Tuesday, May 11, at the Greene Turtle in Lewes. Go to leaguelineup.com for all the information you could ever want and more. The Sussex County Dart League Championship match was played Tuesday, April 27, at the VFW in Rehoboth. The league consists of 21 teams that played each other once during the regular season. The top 16 teams advanced to the playoffs. With a single elimination bracket, the two teams that battled for the title included the league’s two top point leaders, the Arena’s Highway One Points R Us and the Gray Hare Tavern Chargers. The Points R Us team shot very well and beat the Chargers to claim the title. Championship team members are Marty Kellagher, Tom Deptula, Jennifer Lynch and Michael Meadows.

Personally I love the dart athletes; they even have their own bus.