View from the cheap seats

A weekly perspective on sports

Casey Krautkramer Reporter The Record-Review

I missed not seeing Bette Kainz’ friendly face at the ticket table as I entered the Edgar High School gym on Tuesday night. I enjoyed seeing Kainz’s smile as I entered through the doors to cover an Edgar High School sports event for The Record-Review newspaper. She unfortunately passed away on Aug. 22.

Both Edgar athletic director Jim Steinke and Marathon athletic director Curt Miller did a great job keeping their respective schools’ sports fans socially distanced during Tuesday night’s season-opening high school volleyball matches.

People at each door of the Edgar High School gymnasium checked off people’s names on a list before they entered the gym, to ensure only the four fans invited by each team’s coaches and players attended the volleyball match.

Edgar volleyball fans were only allowed to enter the west door of the gym and sit on that side of the bleachers. Wisconsin Rapids Assumption fans, meanwhile, only entered the east door of the gym and sat on that side of the bleachers.

Family and friends who were given four tickets from each school’s volleyball coaches and players did a great job sitting next to each other away from the other groups of four fans each. All volleyball fans, coaches and players wore masks.

I was greeted with a familiar face when entering the Marathon High School gym on Tuesday night to cover the Marathon volleyball team’s home match against Auburndale. It doesn’t appear school secretary Jackie Hanke has aged at all since I was in high school in the 1990s.

qqq

Ben Barten of Stratford is enjoying a wild ride in his first season playing for the Wisconsin Badgers football team.

His father, Todd Barten, told me at Miss Jen’s Tigers Stop Cafe last week that Ben and his Badgers football teammates were suddenly no longer allowed to lift weights. The coaching staff told the players they were constrained to their college dormatories because of the many students on campus testing positive for coronavirus.

Now all of a sudden things have changed this week. Today the Big Ten Conference announced it’ll begin playing football on Oct. 23 instead of next spring. This is quite a turnaround for Ben Barten and his Badgers football teammates, who’ll now return to lifting weights and training for the upcoming season that begins in just one month from now.

Todd Barten told me his son rooms with a Badgers football teammate who hails from Kewaunee in their college dormitory. Ben Barten was on Stratford’s football team that beat Kewaunee in the playoffs two years ago.