Happy New Year!
With a new decade arriving soon, it’s a good time to look back and reflect on the past before we jump into 2020! Or maybe you choose to simply stay focused on the present. Whatever your perspective, time moves on for sure, it seems the faster the older you get. The years truly have just flown by.
Over the last decade, the sports scene in Midwestern Ohio has really seemed to blossom. Thanks to being retired and the internet (especially Fish Report), I can stay attuned from afar to all the local high school sports events. Between the SCAL and MAC, it just doesn’t get any better. Looking back over the last decade, there are so many successful high school programs, teams, coaches and players, that it’s arguably impossible to pick the best of the decade. But I’m going to do so anyway. My pick is Ft. Loramie’s girls basketball coach Carla Siegel.
Why Carla? Well, she’s a very talented educator as well as coach, who seems to bring out the best in her student-athletes. No doubt she can look over her 5th grade class at Loramie Elementary and visualize the girls with the demeanor, intelligence and early athletic skills who will be playing for her a few years later. Having won two state championships and six SCAL championships over this past decade, and arguably on the verge of adding to the list this season, Carla really stands out.
It’s no surprise how successful Carla is, given her parents are Vernon and Mary Jo Siegel, with whom I grew up in Ft. Loramie. The school bus's first stop was at our place, followed next by picking up Mary Jo and her 7 siblings including brother Joe whom I had written about in this previous blogpost. If I recall, Mary Jo was a cute cheerleader and Vernon an excellent basketball player for the Redskins. And they were high school sweethearts, and still are, as pictured below.
Good luck, Carla, with the rest of your season and the best to your parents.
There’s another area coach whose parents I knew well, Fairlawn’s Brad Francis, upper right in this photo. His parents, Tom and Corrine, were exceptional people, as is Brad!
Tom & Corrine were responsible for establishing the Francis Women’s Center at Wilson Health in Sidney. Here’s hoping for Brad’s success in his new coaching position. May he be my best of the decade in 2030!
Back to 2020, here are some New Years quotes and jokes from the past:
"I wish for everyone this New Year an opportunity to earn sufficient, to have that which they need for their own and to give that which they desire to others, to bring in to the lives of those about them some measure of joy, to know the satisfaction of work well done, of recreation earned and therefore savored, to end the year a little wiser, a little kinder and therefore a little happier.” Eleanor Roosevelt
If your born on October 1st, its pretty safe to assume your parents started out the New Year with a Bang!
May all your troubles last as long as your New Year resolutions.
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