Flathead coaches reach out
Last week was the annual trip for the coaches at Flathead High School to reach out to all the rural and elementary schools, let kids know what is available at FHS in terms of activities and athletics, and give specific information to those kids who will soon be affected as they move to the junior high School.
After several presentations at the junior high in the morning, volleyball coach Christy Harkins and I visited Creston, Fairmont-Egan, and Cayuse Prairie in the afternoon. Each presentation varied a little as we tailored each to our audience, but the overall message to the kids was "get involved or stay involved" with activities associated with school. Harkins had each audience talk about the things it was involved in, and most of them are available at FHS. We went over the benefits of involvement including getting better grades, making friends, learning teamwork, and lessons preparing the students for the rest of their lives.
Harkins focused a little more on athletics because several of the fall sports begin before school starts, so it's very important that students all get their physicals now so that they can hit the ground running when things kick-off in mid-August. On June 1, from 5:30-8 p.m. at the high school cafeteria, physicals will be available to all students for $15, so any kid interested in football, volleyball, golf, soccer, or cross country should really pay attention to this date. Actually, the parents of the kids need to pay attention!
Last weekend was a big one for sports, and I got to watch some of coach Buck Measure's Flathead tennis players for the first time. Just as in golf, I learned that the score doesn't always tell the story that you see when you watch something in person. If you just saw the final score of Janessa Hatfield's match with Sentinel's Kirsten Marne you might think that it was totally one-sided, but that was not the case. Hatfield has a great serve, a good return of serve, and good ground strokes. With a little more patience, letting the points come to her instead of trying to force them, the outcome would have been far different.
Shea Koness' match with GFH's Zach Alfred was equally misleading. The final score was 9-7 with Koness losing, but his overall game was more consistent and his strokes superior to his opponent. Koness had a great return of a difficult serve going, and was placing it down the lines nicely in the early stages of the match. Once he overcomes those streaks of double faults in serving, which will allow his opponents to make the mistakes instead, the rest of his game will take care of him and he should have many more winning matches. Good luck to the entire team this week at divisionals!
How to change that momentum when it starts shifting to the negative is one of the hardest things to learn in sports, and I have only my last tournament a month ago in Japan to show me that I haven't learned it yet, at least not always. I tried to relax and think positively, and focus on what I intended to do coming up, not what had been going wrong before, but all those best-laid plans failed to work, and I lost six shots in five holes. On tour they have a saying that when you're losing strokes to par on the last day, you're "spending money." I was on a spree. The more that any athlete can just fall back on good, basic fundamentals in periods of stress, the better, but it isn't foolproof.
Alice Ritzman is a pro golfer from Kalispell and head coach of the Flathead High School golf program. She can be reached by e-mail at ritzman@dailyinterlake.com