They did something new at Richlands a week and a half ago—practice football after a loss.
The Blue Tornadoes’ 18-13 defeat against Graham Sept. 21 was stunning, because the G-Men didn’t appear to match up that well with them on paper, yet inevitable because Richlands had played without much passion at times in the season’s first half.
So coach Greg Mance, after watching films and racking his brain to discern the problem, put his team through a test while they eyeballed the tape.
“I told them if they saw a play when they saw a teammate helping each other up or playing with emotion to raise their hand,“ he said Tuesday night. “Out of [123] plays, they raised their hand four times.
“That told me they were going through the motions, playing without emotion. We challenged them to pick it up, have fun again.“
Mance also made some position changes, moving receiver Romulo Fajardo to running back and sending the season’s leading rusher, Kheven Schweingruber, to wide receiver.
In Friday night’s all-too-predictable 49-14 rout of winless Tazewell, Fajardo rushed for 93 yards, which doesn’t sound like a big deal until one realizes it’s the second-highest total for a Blues RB this season.
“Romulo’s 180 pounds and he’s been through the battles for three years now,“ Mance said. “Kheven’s 140 pounds and he was getting beat up. We just wanted to find a way to get all our good athletes on the field at once.“
Fajardo perhaps becomes the team’s key player in the second half and the playoffs. If he can keep averaging 93 yards per game, it will force defenses to respect the run enough and permit improving QB Joel Elswick more opportunities to use athletes like Austin Fuller, Ben Addison, Matt Davis and Schweingruber in one-on-one matchups.
That’s how the offense was so powerful last year. Caleb Jennings’ presence at running back made defenses play seven men in the box, gIving the likes of Fuller and C.J. Arms one-on-ones which QB Justin McCracken exploited adroitly.
With a trip to Marion on the horizon for Friday night, Mance feels his team is back on the beam. What’s more, one gets a sense the loss may have lifted a huge burden off this team’s back.
“Sometimes, you can get complacent in what you’re doing,“ Mance said. “Kids can take things for granted. Since the loss, they’ve practiced hard and they played extremely well at Tazewell.“       

Posted by The Continuous News Desk
High School Sports Football

Chairman Brian France didn’t talk specifics, and said the deal came after “a very thorough process of trying to find the right partner, adding up what we think is important for the series and all the things that you would expect us to be thinking about.”
Exactly what would we expect NASCAR to be thinking about? Ponder things like sinking TV ratings and attendance, rising ticket prices, maybe an increasing sense of disconnect between the fans and their heroes behind the wheel, and it’s pretty easy to venture a guess as to what France and Co. were and are thinking about. Money, money and money.
Word is the sponsorship deal is worth $10-12 million a year, which reportedly is similar to what Anehuser-Busch had been paying. Not bad for a racing league that was once just a step or two from the short-track stock racers you can find at Volunteer Speedway, Wythe or Lonesome Pine Raceway. Not that anyone is pretending that the awkwardly-named Nationwide Series is any kind of minor-league system anymore. Anyone except the NASCAR big wigs, that is.
Nationwide’s representative at Wednesday’s announcement said the fact that Nextel Cup drivers who moonlight in Busch Cars - maybe NASCAR should have a contest to come up with a catchy new nickname to replace “Buschwhackers” - wasn’t a big deal to the sponsor. That’s no news flash, either. The suits aren’t likely to change much in the series, since more racing fans are likely to turn on their televisions to watch Carl Edwards, Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch drive on Saturday afternoons than Jason Keller, Danny O’Quinn and Scott Wimmer. Then again, wouldn’t 100,000 people be just as likely to pack Bristol Motor Speedway to watch less experienced drivers spin and wreck for 300 laps? Note the fact that while the drivers raved about BMS’ new surface after an alarmingly clean Sharpie 500, more than a few fans called the race “boring.“
If the death knell for the old Southern Tradition that was NASCAR hadn’t already sounded, the demise of the Busch sponsorhip ought to take care of it. Granted, the loss of alcohol and tobacco sponsors for the main series isn’t going to hurt anyone’s feelings, and we do still have the Hooters Pro Cup - unless they get a new sponsor and change that to the Bath & Body Works Pro Series.
As far as the Winston/Nextel Cup goes, that’s getting a new handle, too. From now on, call it the Sprint Cup, just don’t use an AT&T cell phone to do it. By the way, doesn’t “Sprint Cup” sound like something local drivers should be competing on dirt tracks for?

Posted by From the Archives
NASCAR

Posted by Brian T. Smith
High School Sports Volleyball

Posted by Brian T. Smith
College Sports

Posted by Brian T. Smith
High School Sports