By CHRIS WALTERSKIRCHEN
“POOOOR BOBCATS”!!! This time that sarcastic cheer is not for the Bobcats in Bozeman but for two east coast sets of Bobcats. On Wednesday Night the Cleveland Cavaliers take on the Charlotte Bobcats in the final game of the season for both teams. It will be the final game the Charlotte Franchise will play as the Bobcats as they got permission to take back the Hornets nickname from Charlotte former team now located in New Orleans. New Orleans will now be the Pelicans. Saturday Night the Quinnipiac Bobcat hockey team played Yale for the Division I hockey national title and fell 4-0. In all other sports Quinnipiac is part of the Northeast Conference.
On September 7th the University of South Dakota Coyotes will travel to Lawrence Kansas to take on the Jayhawks. South Dakota coach Joe Glenn has won 3 national titles as a head coach while KU’s Charlie Weiss has three Super Bowl rings from his days as an assistant for the Patriots. By the way, the Coyotes will follow their Kansas game with a home game against the Montana Grizzlies the next week.
Sunday Angel Cabrera finished second in the Masters just as fellow Argentian Roberto De Vencezio did 45 years to the day. However De Vencenzio lost out because of a mistake on his score card which De Vencenzio signed before noticing the error. No one loves an odd trivia more than me but even I was taken aback when a CBS commentator mused “If Cabrera wins it will mark the first time the pope and the Masters winner hail from the same country.”
It was 25 years ago Thursday that the University Of Montana women’s basketball program signed a future All-American Shannon Cate. Cate had led Billings Central to 3 consecutive Class A titles and had drawn the attention from School’s across the Country, if you are wondering it came down to UM and Hawaii. It is ironic that back in the late 1980’s a hot topic among girls basketball fans was who was a better player Shannon Cate or Karen Deden, the two former stars have coached together in recent years in AAU basketball as they have daughters the same age.
Stew Morrill was head coach of the Grizzly basketball team from 1986 to 1991. With his wire-rim glasses and low-key manner at times he seemed more like a professor then a coach. Fun fact to report in reference to coach Morrill and his family. The coach’s youngest daughter Tiffany is a doctor of Physical Therapy in Utah. Tiffany played college volleyball at Dixie State in Utah.
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Chris Walterskirchen has been an observer of Montana sports for nearly half a century. A Kalispell native, Chris has worked in various capacities for professional and college sports organization of at various times: ranging from announcing and statistical work to the concessions and even a stint as a costumed mascot.
Chris has academic degrees in communications and elementary education. His style of sports trivia involves more than just who won and who lost, but also focuses on the obscure or human side of sports. In this blog you will learn things like the Grizzly football team has won 210 games over the 19 seasons since they have had Monte as their mascot or that UNLV is the only school that both the Griz and Lady Griz have both faced in the NCAA basketball tournament
When not following sports Chris enjoys taking care of animals of all kinds (a peacock rescue?) and reading to pre-schoolers.