On my 50th birthday, my wife of 28 years threw me a surprise party. I was getting dressed for dinner that night when there was a knock on the door. Montra asked me to answer it. Still buttoning my shirt, I swung the door open and on the front porch stood my mom, brother and niece from Florida; my dad, whom they picked up from across town in St. Charles; and my aunt Gail and her sons from southern Illinois.
Montra pulled off this complete surprise after months of planning. We had dinner at Westport Plaza in St. Louis and returned home for cake and celebration. It was a night to remember.
How much has changed in those five years? That was the last night we were all together. My dad died a few years later at age 88. Montra and I visit my family in Florida every couple of years, but weren’t able to last year because of COVID-19. I haven’t seen my mom and niece since 2018. I miss them a lot. Cards and video chatting don’t replace hugs and laughter together.
This week I am in Independence covering the girls and boys state wrestling championships. I’ve reported on state wrestling since the early 1990s and this year will be unlike any other for several reasons, with the coronavirus as the main agent of change. Instead of three days packing in the girls and boys together with the always-glorious finals march on Saturday night, the girls and all four classes of boys wrestle on separate days.
The girls were first on Tuesday, after the Leader deadline. Representing the county and De Soto High School was senior Jaycee Foeller. By the time you read this, Foeller most likely will have won her third state championship. If she succeeds, in her three years of girls wrestling, Foeller never lost a match. Most of her bouts ended in the first period, with her opponent hearing the familiar thwack of the referee’s palm on the mat, signaling a pin.
Jaycee has received a lot of ink in the Leader because of her exploits, and deservingly so. The only unfortunate note about her prep wrestling career is that the girls didn’t have their own show a year earlier so she could have ended up a four-time undefeated state champion, a true rarity among the boys.
Even if you don’t care about high school wrestling or the other prep sports, please take a minute to think about what Jaycee’s legacy means to the county. She’s very humble and doesn’t consider her accomplishments as exceptionally noteworthy. But she’s wrong about that. None of us will know how many hours she spent toiling in the wrestling room, at first just surviving each practice among boys, and what it took for her to be perfect in a sport that demands so much.
The biggest sports story to come out of this county in the last decade is the success of the Festus boys cross country team and its seven straight state titles. But Jaycee is a close second.
I’ll be closely monitoring Hillsboro’s boys in the Class 3 championships Friday and then Seckman in the Class 4 state meet Saturday. Both teams have enough firepower to finish among the top four teams in their class, or even challenge for a title. We’ll see how the wrestlers react to the all-out one-day assault on the mats. One thing is for sure: Hawk head coach Matt Mitchell and Jaguar head coach Ryan Moyer, and their many assistants, have put themselves on the line mentally and physically coaching the sport during a pandemic while teaching and raising young families.
Basketball season comes to sudden end
At the time the Northwest girls basketball team lost to Jackson 61-29 in the Class 6 District 1 girls basketball tournament about 8 p.m. on March 4, the prep basketball season in the county officially came to a close.
Only the Crystal City boys won a district championship among the 24 boys and girls teams in the county. The Hornets won the Class 2 District 4 title but lost to Valle Catholic 73-63 in the sectionals on March 2.
More surprising than the county’s lack of district champions is that among all of our teams, only the Lions and Fox boys reached a district final. The stouthearted Warriors hadn’t been that far in 30 years but after knocking off top-seeded Lindbergh 59-54 in the semifinals, Fox (No. 4) couldn’t muster a comeback against Marquette (No. 2) in a 57-49 loss on March 2.
This season was filled with spectacular individual performances from De Soto’s Jordan Mertens, Cole Rickermann and Arhmad Branch of Festus, Sonny Amabile at Windsor and the last hurrah of Herculaneum senior Paige Fowler – just to name a very few. But putting together team efforts to beat Farmington, North County, Jackson, Park Hills Central and Oakville is still a riddle to be solved this time of year.