By Carter Crane –
High School practices in football and boys and girls golf started Monday with the rest of the sports’ practices to begin Wednesday. Golf meets will begin Thursday, Aug. 9. First football games will be no sooner than Friday, Aug. 24 and this season should be interesting in many ways.
• High school athletes in all sports should have paid close attention to the way Brian Urlacher, retired middle linebacker of the Chicago Bears, approached his profession and game for 13 years. He retired five years ago at age 35. All athletes should have absorbed something from Urlacher’s speech at the National Football Hall of Fame Saturday in Canton, Ohio. Modesty, humility, genuinely, were accurate descriptions of his 18-minute speech. There was something to be learned from his speech and from the way he played the game.
• The West Aurora High School District 129 School Board meeting Monday devoted approximately 45 minutes to the discussion of the school’s invitation to join the Southwest Prairie Conference in the 2019-2020 school year. Yorkville received an invitation for the same school year and if each accepts, it would bring two divisions of six teams in each. Discussions included mileage comparisons of the SPC to the 10-team Upstate Eight Conference for West Aurora. Informed sources revealed that school representatives are expected to leave West Aurora at 3 p.m. on a designated day and drive to many of the schools, which include four Plainfield schools, two Oswego schools, two Joliet schools, Romeoville, and the most distant, Minooka, which has two campuses and plays boys basketball and boys volleyball in the southern campus.
Jason Crane/The Voice
The West Aurora School Board will meet again Monday, Aug. 20 and again Tuesday, Sept. 4 with a likely vote in the latter meeting. The Yorkville School Board will meet for the first time Monday, Aug. 20.