View from the cheap seats

A weekly perspective on sports

Casey Krautkramer Reporter The Record-Review

I survived sledding down the large hill on Allen Street in Athens so I could write this column.

Every winter I love taking my daughters sledding on this perfect hill in Athens. On Saturday, however, it was already dark when we arrived at the hill. The darkness didn’t hamper our enthusiasm for sledding, because there was a street light at the top of the hill and there were a few other families having fun sledding on the hill.

It was too dark to see a sign that normally reads “sled at your own risk.” I bought my daughters snow tubes for Christmas, so I thought I’d try them out myself. My first time going down the hill in Athens was not ideal, because I was stationed too far to the south. I had trouble stopping the snow tube from hitting the trees at the bottom of the hill. The snow tube even got punctured from hitting the trees.

Things were off to a bad start for me, so I moved further north atop the snow hill to provide me with more clearance at the bottom of the hill. The problem was it was too dark for me to see the ditch open at the bottom of the hill, where there is a gravel driveway.

I was moving so fast on the other snow tube down the hill that I ended up hitting the ditch, which I didn’t realize was there because I couldn’t see it in the dark from atop the hill. My head snapped down and I grinded my teeth upon hitting this ditch so hard, and my glasses also flew off and I could no longer see anything. Luckily, my girlfriend Amy somehow found my glasses and I didn’t get badly injured during this incident. I’d decided I was already done sledding for the night.

Because our area hasn’t received much snowfall this winter, the ditch before the driveway at the bottom of the hill wasn’t full of snow like it normally is each winter.

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On Thursday, I covered the Stratford wrestling team’s home match against Auburndale/Marathon for the newspaper. It’s interesting how things go full circle in a person’s life. I was chatting with Chandler Schmidt of Stratford about how fall baseball went for him at Division 2 Winona St. It just so happens Chandler is dating Rebecka Quaintance, who is the middle child of my former Marathon High School classmate Steffenie Small.

I grew up playing with Steffanie in my village of Marathon neighborhood, and we both graduated from Marathon High School in 1996. I then graduated in 1997 with a one-year technical diploma in welding from Northcentral Technical College in Wausau, where I was welding classmates with Rebecka’s father, Clint Quaintance.

Clint is a Marathon varsity wrestling assistant coach, and Clint and Steffenie’s son, Cale Quaintance, is a talented young wrestler coming up in the program.