Small Town Kids

10-24-88

Perspective:

Small Town Kids

It was a pretty good week for Cobber sports. And small town athletes again led the way.

-The undefeated football team beat St. Olaf behind quarterback Doug Toivonen of Starbuck, Mn, (pop. 1,138). Brian Bruns of Walker, Mn, (pop. 1,073) was named MIAC Player of the Week for his play against Carleton a week earlier.

-The volleyball team was atop the MIAC with Beth Tollefson of Kasson, Mn, (pop. 1,883) playing a key role.

-The defending national champion Lady Cobber basketball team opened practices, led by All-Americans Jillayn Quaschnick (Sebeka, Mn, pop. 668) and Patty Kubow (Rush City, Mn, pop. 1,130). And the combined home town populations of the Lady Cobber starters might just be all of 3,288. (A semi-big-city Fargo player is contending for a starting spot.)

-The men's basketball team is led by Mark Thimjon of Barnesville (pop. 1,782).

-The successful women's cross country team is headed up by Chris Fredrick of Foley, Mn., (pop. 1,271). The traditional small town makeup of Cobber teams continues. And those athletes tend to bring with them the healthy set of ethics, work habits and values which usually characterize Concordia sports.

The roots of this tradition run deep. The Lutheran church in the U.S. began and remains a decidedly rural based church. And its colleges, including Concordia, draw heavily from those rural towns.

But the ongoing tendency of Concordia coaches to recruit so heavily from the little burgs goes beyond that Lutheran tradition. And it can't be explained solely by the need coaches have to find athletes who are overlooked by Division I schools. The preference for the small town athletes among Concordia coaches seems to derive, in part, from a focus on values.

The cliche about a small town athlete's work ethic being stronger, like most cliche's, stems from real experience. An athlete from Walker or Sebeka is apt to feel that attending Concordia-Moorhead is a move to a pretty high level of competition. And their hometown will indeed pay attention to how one of their own is succeeding at "playing college ball."

While the big city high school athlete has often labored in relative anonymity, the small town athlete has played in an environment where how he or she played often mattered to seemingly everyone in town. The sense of responsibility and seriousness of purpose which that pressure engenders in athletes represents a priceless pool of maturity to a college coach. The fact that they also tend to come with a less muddled sense of values and a clearer willingness to learn can make coaching them simply delightful.

These pages are maintained by Jerry Pyle pyle@cord.edu. These articles are copyrighted © and may not be published or reproduced without the express permission of Jerry Pyle.

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