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Holiday wish: A safe winter sports season

By Tom King - Sports Writer | Dec 12, 2020

Telegraph Sports Reporter Tom KIng.

We’ve hit mid-December, there’s snow on the ground, temps earlier in the week were below freezing and sports practices are set to begin on Monday with just 12 shopping days before Christmas.

What’s on your list?

Here’s mine, and it contains just one item:

We want a safe high school winter sports season for all involved.

It starts, unless there were any late changes, on Monday with tryouts/practices. Basketball and hockey players will be wearing masks the entire time at a lot of schools, including Nashua. There will be all sorts of other safety protocols, thus it will be very different.

We made it through the fall with some bumps but crossed the finish line. The start of the winter season conjures up memories of the cancellations of the remainder of the 2020 winter tournament season last March when the pandemic first hit. Hockey ended right before the finals were supposed to have been played; girls hoop just before the semis and boys hoop basically just before the quarterfinals, depending on the division.

We’ll get a chance to start, and go from there, fingers crossed each and every single day.

Here are some other mid-December notes and observations:

First, congrats to Nashua’s Cam Parker, who after four years as the equipment manager of the South Carolina Sting Rays of the ECHL is going to join the NHL’s Washington Capitals as an equipment assistant. Any good hockey guy will tell you that the equipment guys are the lifeblood of a team. The Southern New Hampshire University grad also worked at Springfield of the AHL and also at Holy Cross.

And it looks like he’ll be working pretty quickly as the NHL was at mid-week closing in on returning to games in mid-January.

• Congrats also to UNH women’s basketball coach Kelsey Hogan, the Nashua North alum who earned her first career win as the Wildcats permanent mentor last Sunday. Hogan is simple entrenched in the UNH community, as she played and began her coaching career in Durham and has been a fixture there for the better part of a decade. This is definitely a special time for the former Titan who has a lot of fans in the basketball community, and it’s great she and her team are getting a season.

• What’s been the winningest pro sports team in the Boston area this fall? You might want to argue the New England Revolution, who fell 1-0 last Sunday in the Major League Soccer (MLS) Eastern Conference finals to the Columus Crew. Think about it: The Revs are run by a big-time coach/sporting director (the latter a soccer term for general manager) in Bruce Arena, and were a goal away from American pro soccer’s Super Bowl but made their run in relative anonimity.

Soccer has become such a popular community sport, the Revs should get more love, don’t you think?

• The saddest news in the last few months came with word of the passing of longtime sports scribe Mike Shalin. All you have to do is scroll his Facebook page to see just how popular Shalin was with everyone who got to know him. While a fixture at Fenway Park, Shalin was all over the Boston area writing for various media outlets.

You always left a conversation with him smarter than before it began because you learned something. And had a fun time doing it. Games at Gillette Stadium are different altogether this season, but once things eventually get back to normal they still won’t be the same without Shalin there for me to talk New York Rangers hockey and Yankee baseball with, or anything in general. RIP Mike.

• It’s not rosy everywhere for winter sports. The Governor Wentworth school board voted against winter athletics for Kingswood Regional High School. And it will be an interesting vote slated for Monday night in Manchester, impacting three public high schools. Keep an eye on that one.

Tom King may be reached at tking@nashuatelegraph.com, or on twitter at @Telegraph _TomK.

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