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The key words were “positive,” and “future” around the Hall of Fame room at UMD’s athletic complex Tuesday afternoon, when the time came to introduce Mandy Pearson as the new UMD women’s basketball coach.

Plucked from a successful run at St. Mary’s in Winona, a stalwart Division III college in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, Pearson has established herself as a promising young coach headed impatiently upward. Her teams compiled a 64-18 record over the last three years.

“I’m really, really excited about this opportunity,” said Pearson, who signed a 3-year contract starting at $84,000. “I had to tell my St. Mary’s players I wouldn’t be coaching them anymore, and that was difficult. But I’m excited about everything about this.”

Pearson said her style would be to prefer a motion style on attack, and man-to-man defense, “but I’m not a control freak,” she said, adding that she knows the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference is more physical than the MIAC, which might take an adjustment by her.

A larger adjustment will be moving from Division III, where no athletic scholarships are allowed, to Division II, where fighting for scholarship recruits is every bit as ferocious as the play on the court.

“I’ve seen a lot of the teams play and I’ve talked to a lot of coaches, so I think I have a pretty good grasp on what to expect,” Pearson said.

So positive was the aura around the press conference that the name Annette Wiles wasn’t mentioned anywhere around the Hall of Fame room. Wiles was the former UMD women’s basketball coach, who said she had hoped to coach her whole career at the Bulldogs helm, but that things had gotten so cold and unfriendly that she felt “frozen out” over the past year, and decided to resign.

I asked Pearson if she had sought her predecessor for a little conversation. “No, I’ve never had any conversation with her,” she said. “But I’m not worried about the past, I’m looking at all the positives of the future. And I’m excited to be here.”

With coaching changes in women’s hockey, softball and basketball, the sports news out of UMD has been mostly off the fields and courts and rinks. But it won’t be long until football, volleyball and soccer swing the spotlight back from boardroom intrigue to actual on-the-field competition.

High School Football Kicks Off

You and I might be tolerant of NFL preseason games, and we may still be counting on a couple of weeks of real summer like weather, but this week’s cool down should snap us back to attention -- and realize that high school football begins this weekend.

And it’s not just high school football, but some huge games, beginning with the traditional rivalry between Denfeld and East, who play for the “city championship” Saturday at 1:10 p.m., at East’s new “Field the Red Plan Built,” on 40th Avenue East and Superior Street.

They came to Spirit Mountain in all sizes and ages, and before the Kraus-Anderson Bike Duluth Festival was over, Alex Rohde of Duluth had the swiftest run down the expert run through the woods to win the downhill championship.
Riders climaxed the day of youth and all-experience classes with a best run clocked at 2 minutes, 6.80 seconds. Defending champion Phil Ott took second in 2:10.98, and Trevor Crawford of St. Paul was third in 2:11.46.
Experience meant more than age, and, in fact, age was negligible as proven by Max Fierek, of Duluth, who finished fifth at the tender age of 15.

The courses for various categories traced some of the ski hills, with large variations into the woods. The expert course was run to the western edge of the toughest ski slope, and riders virtually flew down narrow groomed trails, sailing over boulders and rocky dropoffs as they negotiated the tightly twisting terrain.

One thing sponsoring Kraus-Anderson might want to work on for next year’s third Bike Duluth Festival is to find a way to make such a sensational spectator sport at least slightly visible to spectators, who had to climb halfway up the mountain from the bottom, or halfway down the mountain from the top, to get to the start. More hiking and climbing allowed access to several other vantage points before the finish.

However, since the riders went off one at a time, on two timed runs, and could pick the better of the two as their score, the finish line meant nothing.

Women ran with the men, and the top three women were Cooper Dendel, Emily Oppliger, and Jess Suprise.
As anticipated, the number of riders approximately doubled last year’s inaugural event, and will undoubtedly double again next year, as the Bike Duluth Festival becomes a standard feature of Duluth summer sports competition.

Archer 8th At Mid-Ohio

Under the circumstances, Tommy Archer did a stalwart job to finish eighth in the Mid-Ohio Trans-Am II road race last weekend.

Archer, joining the circuit in midseason, won the pole and took a strong second at Brainerd a month ago, and he anticipated making a run at the pole and victory at Mid-Ohio. But a stubborn fuel-feed problem hit his Chevrolet Camaro race car in pre-race practice, and the Archer crew couldn’t locate the trouble before qualifying. The car ran strong on the straights, and handling was improved, but on every tight turn, the g-forces caused a fuel starvation problem, and Archer qualified only 19th.
“We were trying to figure out everything we hadn’t changed,” said Archer. “We swapped a fuel system from another team that had crashed their car in practice, and it was better, but we figured we must have hurt the engine running it hard when it wasn’t getting enough fuel.”

Archer charged past several cars at the start of the race, and worked his way up from 19th to seventh before congested traffic squeezed him back to ninth, and he eventually wound up eighth.

I could see the leader,” he said. “It’s not like we were out of contention, but we couldn’t catch up. I think this is the worst I’ve ever finished. But we’ll be ready for the next race, at Elkhart Lake on August 28.”