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The Morning Stake | 2020.05.11

The Morning Stake
Seth C

The Morning Stake | 2020.05.11

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I hope all of the mom’s had a great mother’s day yesterday. I’m very thankful for my wife, the mother of my children, and I’m also always thank for for the biological mother of my children. That’s a difficult one to wrap my head around sometimes, how to feel about that, but I don’t have the honor and privilege of raising my boys without them.

This story from The Guardian was fanstastic, a real life Lord of the Flies, six boys shipwrecked for 15 months off the coast of Tonga. As you may remember, the book, Lord of the Flies, ends up with three of the characters dead (remember, The Lord of the Flies is fiction), while this story is completely different (and actually real).

I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? I wrote an article on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summer camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies. After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip … Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”

The article did not provide any sources. But sometimes all it takes is a stroke of luck. Sifting through a newspaper archive one day, I typed a year incorrectly and there it was. The reference to 1977 turned out to have been a typo. In the 6 October 1966 edition of Australian newspaper The Age, a headline jumped out at me: “Sunday showing for Tongan castaways”. The story concerned six boys who had been found three weeks earlier on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of ‘Ata for more than a year. According to the article, the captain had even got a television station to film a re-enactment of the boys’ adventure.

Via NBC Sports, NCAA president Mark Emmert says that the coronavirus will likely mean that all NCAA teams will not start at the same time:

“All the various (NCAA) member committees and the conferences are all talking about: What does it mean if we have that sort of scenario where we’ve got different opening times or different opening models,” Emmert said.

“What does it mean if you look at a conference, for example, if a conference has some schools open and some not?” he added. “You can’t run a regular schedule if you’ve got that scenario. How do you adjust all the rules to provide as much flexibility as you possibly can to let student-athletes have a good experience in that season?”

Real glad that I’m not in charge of figuring that out.

Emmert also said that if you don’t have students on campus, then you can’t have student-athletes on campus so no sports. I dunno, part of me thinks that the NCAA is simply doing the members’ bidding, so if they want to do something, the NCAA will acquiesce because they don’t have a choice.

Avalanche Journal’s Don Williams writes about Lori Smith, wife of Texas Tech running back coach DeAndre Smith and mother to incoming freshman quarterback Donovan Smith. Just clicking on that photo is great, Donovan is 6″ to 8″ taller than his parents. Lori lives in Las Vegas and there’s a lot of commuting:

“Once the kids started to high school,” DeAndre Smith said, “our thought was it would be better to keep them in one place and not bouncing around. And she loves Las Vegas, too, so it kind of worked out great.”

Lori Smith never would have dreamed this scenario in 2009 when they first came to Las Vegas.

“Kicking and screaming,” she said. “I’m just like any other person, not knowing a lot. I mean, we had visited Las Vegas in the past, but I told DeAndre, ‘I’m not moving my boys to Las Vegas. I’m not going to raise my boys there.’

“But when we got here, the community that we connected with, everybody was so nice and we (became) lifelong friends and we’re still here.”

Donovan attended Bishop Gorman his freshman through junior years. When DeAndre followed Matt Wells from Utah State to Tech after the 2018 season, Donovan followed his dad to Lubbock.

RedRaiderSports’ Ben Golan has his Q&A with incoming freshman defensive tackle Philip Blidi.

Here are some tweets.

[This needs a bit of explanation, volleyball’s former Allison White married men’s tennis Justin Bloss over the weekend. Congrats to the new Red Raider couple!]

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