A senior cheerleader at MMCRU (Marcus-Meriden-Cleghorn/Remsen-Union) died suddenly as she arrived at school last week. The cause of death was determined to be a blood clot in her lungs.
MMCRU’s Friday night football opponent, Okoboji, postponed the game to Monday and then collected more than $2000 for a scholarship in memory of Natalee Henke, the Sioux City Journal‘s Tim Gallagher writes. Other schools in northwest Iowa also made gestures of support, the Le Mars Sentinel reports.
The city of Waterloo will rebuild University Avenue (old IA 934, but most known as old US 218) from the Cedar Falls city limits east to Greenhill Road before the easternmost section to US 63, the Waterloo Courier reports.
Waterloo’s west University segment includes the vacant Kmart. (Want to spot major 1970s thoroughfares? Look for where the Kmarts were.) This segment abuts the part in Cedar Falls that is now infested with roundabouts past College Square. One of those roundabouts was the site of a cement-truck tipover last week.
Construction of a flyover ramp at the I-35/80 interchange with IA 141 may begin as early as Oct. 1, the Des Moines Register reported earlier this month.
The final plans were released two years ago and work won’t end until 2012. The flyover ramp will replace the northbound/eastbound exit loop to 141, which comes to a stoplight with Urbandale Drive.
The 100th Street exit nearby should be open by the end of the year, the second interchange on I-35/80 around Des Moines that wasn’t in the original construction (86th Street).
Today, new eastbound lanes of US 20 will open from east of Moville to County Road L25 west of Correctionville, according to an e-mail from the DOT. The 7½-mile segment is the first extension east from a segment that opened 59 years and 11 months ago. The new eastbound is more or less on top of the old two-lane. A segment running east from L25 opened last year, so this completes the expressway from Sioux City to the north side of Correctionville.
This is the piece that touches a four-mile segment that was the first rural four-lane 20 in Iowa, the only segment in Woodbury County that overlapped with the paving of the early 1920s.
At the end of 2016, my decision looked obvious: Schedule the vacation to run over the first weekend of October 2017. There will be no reason to watch football that Saturday, because Iowa State is playing at Oklahoma, and Bob Stoops’ Sooners will grind the Cyclones into a fine powder. It wasn’t until later that Stoops decided he didn’t want to play anymore.
So what happens? The Cyclones upend the world order with a 38-31 win en route to their second-best season in my lifetime, becoming the only team in the nation to beat Oklahoma in the 2017 regular season, and earning the first of two road wins over ranked opponents that year. (Which, ahem, is two more than Michigan has in a decade.) Frankly, it’s the most concrete evidence yet that God set SimUniverse on “haywire” mode.
Now, after some conference machinations, Iowa State and Oklahoma will play in September for only the second time ever (1966). And, after some machinations by Mother Nature, it will be only ISU’s second game of the season. As of this writing, ISU is judged to have the toughest schedule in the country.
But! While last year’s shocker has caused some rewriting of my meditation on the nature of suffering, not all is cleansed. Iowa State still hasn’t beaten Oklahoma at Jack Trice Stadium. Ever. Iowa State hasn’t beaten Oklahoma at home since 1960. The Sooners, again/still a top-10 team, might have a score to settle.
Through the 2025 season, Iowa will play Ohio State four times. Iowa State will play Oklahoma twice as many. If ISU managed to beat Oklahoma seven out of every eight years for the rest of the century … OU would still lead the series in the year 2100.
North Tama is in the running for two different items in KWWL’s “Friday Night Heroes”. That’s the link to the sports page, as the voting changes every week. NT vs. Wapsie Valley was last week’s GOTW, but let’s do it again!
First is the voting for tomorrow’s “Game of the Week”: NT against top-ranked Hudson. In 1997, a rainy 7-6 loss to the Pirates in the second-to-last game of the season kept the Redhawks out of the Class 1A playoffs. Now the two teams are back in the same district, and this game could determine the district champion if everything goes well.
Second is the “Play of the Week” from last week: “Skylar Staker (North Tama) 17 yard game-winning touchdown pass to Hale Hulme in final minute” against Wapsie Valley. What’s interesting is that WV has its own play from the same game in the voting, an 88-yard kickoff return. The game was played at Upper Iowa University in Fayette because of playing conditions at Wapsie, the Waterloo Courier reported.
Happy Homecoming and Go Redhawks!
The following is not to be taken seriously or literally.
Ames, Iowa — Iowa State has announced that it will play Deep State on Oct. 20, filling a need for a 12th regular-season football game.
Deep State has risen in prominence the past couple of years, making it an ideal opponent for the Cyclones after the season opener against South Dakota State was rained out. Deep State has a heavy East Coast presence, but is believed to have people everywhere.
Neither Deep State’s athletic director nor its football coach were available for comment.
Persistent rumors that ISU’s 2017 Kansas State and 2013 Texas games, and possibly others, were instead actually played against the Deep State Zebras have not been confirmed.
The State of Iowa City Development Board meeting tomorrow includes an annexation by the city of Johnston. Based on a notice from earlier this year, Johnston is making plans to bring a portion of the IA 141 corridor under its control. (Many links in this blog post are to PDFs.)
Currently, Johnston’s west edge is about NW 107th Street. This will take the city out to IA 141 in two places: Around the IA 415 interchange, and a mile-long segment north of but not touching Grimes. This is kind of atypical, because many city annexations of the past two decades or so have explicitly excluded/stopped at highway right-of-ways. Bondurant, at this same CDB meeting, is doing a mini-annexation beside the intersection of US 65 where NE 80th Street angles away, but not including the bit of 65 that’s right beside it.
This will give Johnston an even weirder city limits outline. Only part of Camp Dodge is officially inside Johnston. Much of the square mile northeast of the intersection of NW 86th Street and NW 70th Avenue isn’t included, for reasons that escape me. There’s also a railroad right-of-way notch. This annexation goes after the part of Camp Dodge west of 100th Street, because it is necessary to make the desired areas contiguous with the city. (There’s also a parcel owned by the … Department of the Navy?)
There’s one other super quirk here. With this annexation specifically pulling in the IA 415 interchange, part of the state highway system will be inside Johnston city limits for the first time since IA 401 was decommissioned. IA 401 kept Johnston connected after IA 141 was moved west from Beaver Drive and Merle Hay Road onto the four-lane that ends at Rider Corner.* The only state-maintained road inside the city limits until approval of this annexation is part of the ramp system in the northeast corner of the NW 86th Street interchange, which was built after the lines were set. Officially, Johnston does not touch the I-35/80 mainline.
*Urbandale doesn’t want us to call it that anymore. Good luck with that.
For those of you not familiar with WHO’s RVTV, where the sports staff (and Ed Wilson) travel across central Iowa before the Iowa-ISU game, here are some clips from the Labor Day stop in Diagonal. There was enough small-town/small-school goodness in here I felt it had to be blogged, even a week late.
(Missed a golden chance for a “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room” audio cue there.)
(The girls’ basketball coach married the boys’ basketball coach! And recently, too! So cliche yet so obvious!)
(Is this the most obvious answer? Yes. But abbreviated Hate Weeks always feel cheapened. The original story, in case you forgot.)
ISU officially hasn’t scored any touchdowns this season, but touchdowns are not necessarily required for winning.
