Sports

In search of its first victory of the young 2022 season, the Kee football team made the long trip to Springville for an Eight-Player District 5 battle against an Oriole squad also in search of its first win this fall. After fighting through a first half battle that played out nearly evenly on the scoreboard, the upperhand the Hawks truly held in the ballgame was much more evident in the second half as the Kee grid squad broke the game open with 28 unanswered second half points on the way to a 52-23 victory.

“We played pretty solid football minus a few first half breakdowns that kept the game closer than it should’ve been early,” Kee football coach Chad Winters said of his team’s first victory of the season. “We were well balanced on the night offensively as we had three backs that ran for good yardage and were able to throw for three touchdowns as well.”

Battling back from an early two-touchdown deficit for the second consecutive game, the Waukon football team nearly pulled off that recovery in hosting Decorah to open the Tribe’s home schedule for the 2022 season Friday, September 2. Trailing by a 14-0 result just over four minutes into the contest and by as much as a 27-6 tally midway through the second quarter, the Indians rallied with 18 unanswered points and a second half shut-out by their defense but could not quite avoid the 27-24 defeat.

The Indians are next scheduled to remain at home to face yet another Northeast Iowa Conference foe when they host Crestwood this Friday, September 9. The Cadets opened the season with a 26-14 road win at Decorah before being shut-out by Waverly-Shell Rock, 35-0, this past Friday.

For more complete coverage, pick up this week's print edition or subscribe to our e-edition by clicking here.

The competition schedule for the Waukon volleyball team began to expand this past week, as the net Tribe opened and closed the week with multi-team events and put three of those five matches in the win column. The volleyball Indians opened the week with a home triangular event Monday, August 29 that saw them sweep both Riceville and Kee in two straight sets each, the Tribe first disposing of the Wildcats by scores of 25-21 and 25-20 before also taking care of the visiting Hawks by wider margins of 25-7 and 25-13.

Home, sweet home turned out to be not so sweet for the Kee football team as the grid Hawks played their first game at “The Pit” in Lansing Friday, September 2. Hosting a Central City squad that returned pretty much all of its young leadership from a 3-7 season last fall that included a 64-8 throttling handed to them by Kee early in that season, this fall’s young Hawks came up shy of finding the end zone in the contest but played the Wildcats to a fairly strong defensive effort in the first half, only to have that resistance wear down as the game wore on to a 48-0 Kee defeat.

The Hawks will make the long trip to Springville to continue District 5 play this Friday, September 9. The Orioles are also looking to rebound from a 0-2 start to their season this fall, coming off a 52-7 loss at Edgewood-Colesburg this past Friday after opening the season with another road loss, 57-22, at WACO of Wayland in Week 1 of this season.

In what turned out to be its only competition of the week, the Kee volleyball team got its 2022 season underway with a pair of non-conference matches at a triangular event in Waukon Monday, August 29 against two teams that already had at least one match under their belts. Playing in back-to-back best-of-three matches to wrap up the event, the Kee netters first fell to Riceville by scores of 25-7 and 25-13 before suffering a similar fate against the host Indians by final results of 25-13 and 25-8.

Kee’s netters were also scheduled to play in the Midland Tournament Saturday, September 3 but did not make that trip. The Hawks were next scheduled to play in the Crestwood Tournament Saturday, September 10. They will then play at Decorah Monday, September 12 against the host Vikings and South Winneshiek before competing in the Waukon Tournament Saturday, September 17.

The 2022 Iowa high school football season is underway, and with it begins another year of The Standard’s Halfback Harry contest. The first week of the contest included nothing but Iowa high school football games on its schedule, as the NCAA and NFL schedules were yet to get into full swing.

Getting the season started on a victorious note was Jan Kreitzer of Cresco, as she missed just two of this week’s 18 games. West Central’s victory over Kee and Dubuque Wahlert’s win over West Delaware were the only two contests to trip Kreitzer up in this season’s opening round of the contest.

Game of the Week honors went to Mark Goeke for the opening round of the contest, as he was one of just three entries to choose West Central to defeat Kee in that ballgame. Jeremy Hogan of Waukon and Wayne Kreitzer of Cresco were the only other entries this week to predict that Blue Devil win over the Hawks, forcing a winning score tie-breaker to determine a winner.

The start to the 2022 Waukon football season began with a rather large first step, as the gridiron Tribe traveled to the home of Class 4A top-five rated Waverly-Shell Rock Friday, August 26. Having been dealt a 45-6 loss in last year’s season-opener, and with the host Go-Hawks returning much more of their offensive firepower from that game than what the Indians were, the football Tribe ended up on the short end of a 42-14 final result.

With last year’s game finding the Indians in as much as a 28-0 early hole, there is a reason why the same people who have Waverly-Shell Rock ranked so high also have the grid Tribe ranked within the top five of Class 2A’s elite. That reason saw the Indians bounce back from what started as a 14-0 early deficit Friday to remain within just a one-touchdown deficit for some of the first half before allowing 21 unanswered points over the game’s remainder.

The Kee football team battled its West Central host to an actual draw in total yardage in its season opener Friday, August 26. However, one could say that the host Blue Devils still had a bit more “Cushion” and an added advantage of already having played one game this season, a week earlier, prior to dealing the Hawks a 46-32 defeat.

“We must play much cleaner football to beat good teams,” Kee football coach Chad Winters said. “The penalties and turnovers really hampered us throughout the night, along with some missed tackles that led to big plays for them.”

The 2022 Waukon football team will be looking to continue a recent trend of program success that has found the grid Tribe in the Class 2A State Play-Offs in eight of the past 10 seasons, including the past five seasons in a row that have not seen the Indians suffer more than two losses in a season. Bolstering that effort of victorious tradition will be a collection of 10 starters from a squad last season that played to a 10-2 season record and a fifth consecutive trip not only to the Class 2A State Play-Offs but deep enough into that play-off run to end up as one of Class 2A’s final four teams in the UNI-Dome once again before falling to the eventual State Champion.

Nine of those 10 returning starters make up a large senior class of 23 players headlining this season’s campaign. Those nine seniors represent experience in nearly every aspect of the game and lead an overall group of approximately 65 boys reporting for early season duty in the freshman through senior classes.

Having played to its best-ever season in its Eight-Player history last fall, the Kee football team enters its 2022 campaign returning seven letterwinners from last year’s 9-2 season result that took the grid Hawks to the quarterfinals of the Eight-Player State Play-Offs. Those two Kee losses last season came to an Easton Valley team that played its way to a State Runner-Up finish on the way to ending Kee’s grid campaign, with those River Hawks still remaining within the Hawks’ Eight-Player District 5 this season.