October 15, 2024 • 14 mins
Because it's not just about Benson. It's part of what's happening at several metro schools related to sports, socialization, and school pride.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Scott Vorgies. We talked about this issue yesterday. When I
say we, I mean I blabbed on and on about it,
and Lucy gave me a glassy eyed stare because I
was talking about sports ball. But this is so much
bigger than sports ball, and Lucy, you're a Benson running rabbit.
You should be concerned about this, even though you probably
(00:20):
never even went to a high school football game when
you were in high school.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Confirm or deny, I didn't go to Benson.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I thought you went to Benson. Where'd you go?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Denied?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Where'd you go?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I went to North North.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Why do I think you went to Benson?
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I don't know, because you don't pay attention to me.
Who said that you don't respect women. I couldn't even finish.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
That with I respect women a great deal, you though
you though I'm not. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.
Not whether I respect you is whether you're a woman.
But all right, but no either, Let's pretend you went
to Beds.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Okay, we can do that, all right.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
We talked about how yesterday. We talked about yesterday how
last Thursday there was a football game where Lincoln High
came to Millard South to play some football, and Millard
South basically treated that like a like a scrimmage against
a middle school girls team, no offense. It was sixty
(01:29):
three nothing at halftime. Millard South is right now the
top ranked Class A team in the state. Lincoln High
is not ranked. They don't have many guys out for football,
and they've been getting whooped. Miller South was administering the
aforementioned whooping, and at halftime, the coach for Lincoln High
(01:51):
went over to Millard South's locker room and said, yeah,
we're done. That's enough. Talked about this yesterday yesterday, this
just happened this last week in high school sports, and
we talked about how schools that have proud traditions being
tremendous sports schools like Benson, they can't get enough guys
(02:17):
out for football. Well, there's no one in the Benson
School district that can play some football. No, there absolutely is.
But the way high school sports operates right now is
you can pretty much go anywhere you want. The school boarders,
where you go to your neighborhood school. They're as wide
open as America's borders. And it's having the same effect,
(02:38):
not a good one. Now, it's having a great effect
for schools like whether it's Millard South, Gretna West Side,
there are some schools that are basically treating all of
the athletes in these smaller Benson's not a small school,
but treating some of these athletes saying, look, you want
(03:00):
to be a standout at Omaha Benson and lose every
game by all means, have at it. If you want
to come here and join our school, you're gonna have
top coaches, you're gonna be playing the best teams, you're
gonna have the most scouts looking at you, and you
could really set yourself up for a better future. Come
(03:21):
play here, be a part of this juggernaut we're creating
at this school. Now, put yourself in the cleats of
that kid. What's that kid? What do you think that
kid's gonna do? Yeah, I'll go to that school. This
is where I start arguing with myself in looking at
(03:42):
what's best for the individual athlete. There's no question these
individual athletes are being better served going to these programs
that are basically being run like a high quality college
football program. Because the college football programs and now being
run like professional sports programs, paying athletes and everything else. Also,
(04:07):
I can make the argument that there are some schools
like Creighton Prep, Omaha, Scutt and some of the private
schools have been able to do this for years. They
can recruit, they can try and build a program. They've
been doing this for years. But as I said yesterday,
there's something very special about growing up with these guys
(04:32):
and fighting with these guys, and you go to high
school and you're like, all right, we're getting towards our
senior year. We've been playing together for six, seven, eight,
nine years sometimes and this is our year. It's magical,
it's special. And am I saying that because that's what
I grew up with. Maybe there might be some nostalgia
(04:52):
bias here, but it seems to me that there was
a lot better parody in school. And I'm saying that
as some one who went to Ralston and we got
walloped just about every single week, but we went to
our neighborhood school. It was actually illegal up until just
a few years ago to transfer out of a school
(05:14):
district into a different school, and certainly if they found
that you were recruiting someone that was illegal, it'd be
sanctions against your school. Gretna had their state football championship
stripped away because some kid who barely played checked the
wrong boxes to which parent he was living with, and
the parent he was spending some time with lived outside
the school district. And that's Greta had to forfeit their
(05:37):
state championship. And now no one would even give a rip.
And what's happening is the best athletes in school districts
like Lincoln High or Buena Vista or Benson, they're just
going to bigger schools. Burke is seen has been estimated
(06:00):
by this as well. A few years ago, Burke was
one of the top programs in the state. Benson was
one of the top programs when I was growing up.
In fact, I got an email yesterday as I was
talking about this from Joel sent to Scott at kfab
dot com and he said, I'm a proud Benson Mighty
(06:21):
Bunny class of nineteen eighty six. And he said, then
and now, I have a hard time believing that they
were a week football program in eighty six based on
how good they were in the nineties. But we routinely
got beat by fifty points. We were happy if we
got a touchdown. But I don't believe we ever forfeited.
(06:42):
I'm still proud to be a Bunny. I always checked
the scores on Friday night and look for whether or
not we got points. Joel was saying, I'm just proud
of these guys. There's like thirty guys out for football
at Benson, and they go out every week knowing they're
gonna get absolutely creamed, and they keep showing up and
they keep doing it. And this happened to the last year,
and a lot of them came back this year and said,
let's do it again. Amazing. So I got that email
(07:07):
yesterday morning from Joel, and then last night at seven
forty six he sent me a follow up email and said, oh,
never mind. And that was after the news broke that
Benson High School made the decision to end its football
season with two games left. So they forfeited this Friday's game.
(07:28):
Let's see, Nope, they're playing on Thursday. This with this
Thursday's game against Lincoln Southeast, and then next week they
were going to play number one ranked Millard South. They
probably weren't going to win that one. And Ops says,
the decision follows a thoughtful discussion between our coaching staff
and school administration. We know it's disappointing for our student athletes.
(07:51):
Their families are competitors in our school communities.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Wait, the team wanted to play.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
It kind of sounds like it, but they said low
participation numbers.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
But the whole team, well, I don't know most of it.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Someone decided to cancel and I doubt I doubt that
those especially those seniors, Yeah, who got whipped every Friday
night last week or last year as juniors and said
we're going to try again next year. They have pride.
They came back and were getting whipped every night this year,
and then someone made the decision they didn't in the
(08:26):
to add just an extra layer of filth to all
of this. This game Thursday night home game, Senior Night,
last home game of the season. The last home game
of the season is Senior Night, and the ovation. I
would go to that football game to cheer on those
seniors who have been going out there knowing they're going
(08:48):
to get destroyed, and someone quit on them. I don't
think that they quit. So what are you going to do?
They're going to recognize the senior football players during an
upcoming Winter Sports pep rally.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
That's really shockingly sad.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
This makes me sick.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, and all the money. There's got to be money
involved someplaces.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Well, what's going to happen is is you're going to
have a few high school football programs that will still
offer football, and schools like Benson and Lincoln High and
Buyenna Vista. Maybe I don't know, I could see this
happening to even a place like my beloved Ralston or Northwest.
You're going to have some of these schools say all right,
(09:30):
we're not going to offer football anymore. And I don't
know this is so much a money issue. I think
this is the people who for years have been trying
to get rid of football, toxic masculinity, injuries, We don't
need it. There's always too much emphasis put on football.
These football players think that they own the world. They
used to lock me in lockers when I was in
(09:52):
high school, and now I'm going to get back at
them by setting up a system to where these football
programs die school by school. And it's just not the
way it used to be now. I don't know if
that's money or just spite, but it seems like if
this is the way it's going, and the school districts
(10:13):
are watching it, happen, and the NSAA, the Nebraska Stores
Sports Athletics or Activities Association, if they're seeing this happen
on their watch and not doing anything about it, like
limiting when you can transfer and when you can start playing,
or open borders policies for who goes to what school.
If they all decide yep, this is just fine, We're
(10:36):
gonna let it happen, then this has got to be
exactly what they want to see happen. They want to
see these schools no longer offer. In some cases it'll
be football, in some cases it'll be sports.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Well, I'm sure glad I don't have kids.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
I don't and yeah, but you know what, you know,
who really doesn't care about this? Those kids who used
to go to their high school football or basketball games
or baseball games and cheer on their school. School spirit
in metro areas is largely dead. You go into small
town Nebraska and you see it as alive and well
(11:14):
as what would be you know in some nineteen eighties
movie where the whole town comes out to support their
team and cheer on Johnny football. And now the fans
can go to your average football game, most of them
can go there in the same Honda Accord. There's just
not very many of them. The student section is basically empty.
In some cases. These teams make state basketball and the
(11:38):
students that travel to Lincoln to watch it from metro schools,
they could all go together in the same car. It's
sad now the small schools they go out there. You
make it from anywhere, from like South Sioux City or
Crete or even Scott's Bluff, Sydney. They all come. Turn
the lights off when you leave. We're all going to
(11:58):
state football, basketball, whatever. But in the Omaha Lincoln metro
areas really really sad to see. So, you know, if
the football team dries up and we don't have football
and basketball and all that anymore, students aren't going to care.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I think it's just another aspect of the decline of
big cities, and Omaha is part of that. When you
talk about the social aspect of big cities, they're just
they're all in decline.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Well, it's certainly something that's different from when we grew up.
And here's the funny part about that is I look
at how things are now compared to when I was
in school, and I think we had it best and
today's kids thirty years from now are going to look
back at how things were when they were in school
(12:50):
compared to how things are in three decades and go, oh,
we had it so much better than they did today,
Like they're going to long for a return to these days.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Because they don't know any better. We don't know any
better of how how much better going to the school
in the seventies was.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, And maybe you know, if we had the ability
to just put on headphones and smartphones and hang out
with our friends in a virtual reality of our own making,
whether it's social media or video games or whatever, maybe
we wouldn't have gone to the football and basketball games either.
Maybe that online world in which we lived better suited
what we would have thought were our needs. I don't know,
(13:28):
but I know that's what's happening now. And you've got
more kids right now with very serious concerns when it
comes to depression, anxiety, mental health concerns.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
And you've got the people who did go through this
school before all of the electronics. They did, and they
understand what kids really do need. They need that socialization,
They need to have face to face conversations, and they're
not having that.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
I know is it better now? Is it better that
I don't know? I know that if I'd gone to
my football coach back in the day and said, Coach,
I don't know if I can play Friday night. I'm
having some mental health issues, I probably would have been
called a gaywad and been told to get out there
and play. Scott Boys Mornings nine to eleven, our news
radio eleven ten KFAB
Scott Vorgies. We talked about this issue yesterday. When I
say we, I mean I blabbed on and on about it,
and Lucy gave me a glassy eyed stare because I
was talking about sports ball. But this is so much
bigger than sports ball, and Lucy, you're a Benson running rabbit.
You should be concerned about this, even though you probably
(00:20):
never even went to a high school football game when
you were in high school.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Confirm or deny, I didn't go to Benson.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I thought you went to Benson. Where'd you go?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Denied?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Where'd you go?
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I went to North North.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Why do I think you went to Benson?
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I don't know, because you don't pay attention to me.
Who said that you don't respect women. I couldn't even finish.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
That with I respect women a great deal, you though
you though I'm not. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.
Not whether I respect you is whether you're a woman.
But all right, but no either, Let's pretend you went
to Beds.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Okay, we can do that, all right.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
We talked about how yesterday. We talked about yesterday how
last Thursday there was a football game where Lincoln High
came to Millard South to play some football, and Millard
South basically treated that like a like a scrimmage against
a middle school girls team, no offense. It was sixty
(01:29):
three nothing at halftime. Millard South is right now the
top ranked Class A team in the state. Lincoln High
is not ranked. They don't have many guys out for football,
and they've been getting whooped. Miller South was administering the
aforementioned whooping, and at halftime, the coach for Lincoln High
(01:51):
went over to Millard South's locker room and said, yeah,
we're done. That's enough. Talked about this yesterday yesterday, this
just happened this last week in high school sports, and
we talked about how schools that have proud traditions being
tremendous sports schools like Benson, they can't get enough guys
(02:17):
out for football. Well, there's no one in the Benson
School district that can play some football. No, there absolutely is.
But the way high school sports operates right now is
you can pretty much go anywhere you want. The school boarders,
where you go to your neighborhood school. They're as wide
open as America's borders. And it's having the same effect,
(02:38):
not a good one. Now, it's having a great effect
for schools like whether it's Millard South, Gretna West Side,
there are some schools that are basically treating all of
the athletes in these smaller Benson's not a small school,
but treating some of these athletes saying, look, you want
(03:00):
to be a standout at Omaha Benson and lose every
game by all means, have at it. If you want
to come here and join our school, you're gonna have
top coaches, you're gonna be playing the best teams, you're
gonna have the most scouts looking at you, and you
could really set yourself up for a better future. Come
(03:21):
play here, be a part of this juggernaut we're creating
at this school. Now, put yourself in the cleats of
that kid. What's that kid? What do you think that
kid's gonna do? Yeah, I'll go to that school. This
is where I start arguing with myself in looking at
(03:42):
what's best for the individual athlete. There's no question these
individual athletes are being better served going to these programs
that are basically being run like a high quality college
football program. Because the college football programs and now being
run like professional sports programs, paying athletes and everything else. Also,
(04:07):
I can make the argument that there are some schools
like Creighton Prep, Omaha, Scutt and some of the private
schools have been able to do this for years. They
can recruit, they can try and build a program. They've
been doing this for years. But as I said yesterday,
there's something very special about growing up with these guys
(04:32):
and fighting with these guys, and you go to high
school and you're like, all right, we're getting towards our
senior year. We've been playing together for six, seven, eight,
nine years sometimes and this is our year. It's magical,
it's special. And am I saying that because that's what
I grew up with. Maybe there might be some nostalgia
(04:52):
bias here, but it seems to me that there was
a lot better parody in school. And I'm saying that
as some one who went to Ralston and we got
walloped just about every single week, but we went to
our neighborhood school. It was actually illegal up until just
a few years ago to transfer out of a school
(05:14):
district into a different school, and certainly if they found
that you were recruiting someone that was illegal, it'd be
sanctions against your school. Gretna had their state football championship
stripped away because some kid who barely played checked the
wrong boxes to which parent he was living with, and
the parent he was spending some time with lived outside
the school district. And that's Greta had to forfeit their
(05:37):
state championship. And now no one would even give a rip.
And what's happening is the best athletes in school districts
like Lincoln High or Buena Vista or Benson, they're just
going to bigger schools. Burke is seen has been estimated
(06:00):
by this as well. A few years ago, Burke was
one of the top programs in the state. Benson was
one of the top programs when I was growing up.
In fact, I got an email yesterday as I was
talking about this from Joel sent to Scott at kfab
dot com and he said, I'm a proud Benson Mighty
(06:21):
Bunny class of nineteen eighty six. And he said, then
and now, I have a hard time believing that they
were a week football program in eighty six based on
how good they were in the nineties. But we routinely
got beat by fifty points. We were happy if we
got a touchdown. But I don't believe we ever forfeited.
(06:42):
I'm still proud to be a Bunny. I always checked
the scores on Friday night and look for whether or
not we got points. Joel was saying, I'm just proud
of these guys. There's like thirty guys out for football
at Benson, and they go out every week knowing they're
gonna get absolutely creamed, and they keep showing up and
they keep doing it. And this happened to the last year,
and a lot of them came back this year and said,
let's do it again. Amazing. So I got that email
(07:07):
yesterday morning from Joel, and then last night at seven
forty six he sent me a follow up email and said, oh,
never mind. And that was after the news broke that
Benson High School made the decision to end its football
season with two games left. So they forfeited this Friday's game.
(07:28):
Let's see, Nope, they're playing on Thursday. This with this
Thursday's game against Lincoln Southeast, and then next week they
were going to play number one ranked Millard South. They
probably weren't going to win that one. And Ops says,
the decision follows a thoughtful discussion between our coaching staff
and school administration. We know it's disappointing for our student athletes.
(07:51):
Their families are competitors in our school communities.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Wait, the team wanted to play.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
It kind of sounds like it, but they said low
participation numbers.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
But the whole team, well, I don't know most of it.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Someone decided to cancel and I doubt I doubt that
those especially those seniors, Yeah, who got whipped every Friday
night last week or last year as juniors and said
we're going to try again next year. They have pride.
They came back and were getting whipped every night this year,
and then someone made the decision they didn't in the
(08:26):
to add just an extra layer of filth to all
of this. This game Thursday night home game, Senior Night,
last home game of the season. The last home game
of the season is Senior Night, and the ovation. I
would go to that football game to cheer on those
seniors who have been going out there knowing they're going
(08:48):
to get destroyed, and someone quit on them. I don't
think that they quit. So what are you going to do?
They're going to recognize the senior football players during an
upcoming Winter Sports pep rally.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
That's really shockingly sad.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
This makes me sick.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, and all the money. There's got to be money
involved someplaces.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Well, what's going to happen is is you're going to
have a few high school football programs that will still
offer football, and schools like Benson and Lincoln High and
Buyenna Vista. Maybe I don't know, I could see this
happening to even a place like my beloved Ralston or Northwest.
You're going to have some of these schools say all right,
(09:30):
we're not going to offer football anymore. And I don't
know this is so much a money issue. I think
this is the people who for years have been trying
to get rid of football, toxic masculinity, injuries, We don't
need it. There's always too much emphasis put on football.
These football players think that they own the world. They
used to lock me in lockers when I was in
(09:52):
high school, and now I'm going to get back at
them by setting up a system to where these football
programs die school by school. And it's just not the
way it used to be now. I don't know if
that's money or just spite, but it seems like if
this is the way it's going, and the school districts
(10:13):
are watching it, happen, and the NSAA, the Nebraska Stores
Sports Athletics or Activities Association, if they're seeing this happen
on their watch and not doing anything about it, like
limiting when you can transfer and when you can start playing,
or open borders policies for who goes to what school.
If they all decide yep, this is just fine, We're
(10:36):
gonna let it happen, then this has got to be
exactly what they want to see happen. They want to
see these schools no longer offer. In some cases it'll
be football, in some cases it'll be sports.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Well, I'm sure glad I don't have kids.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
I don't and yeah, but you know what, you know,
who really doesn't care about this? Those kids who used
to go to their high school football or basketball games
or baseball games and cheer on their school. School spirit
in metro areas is largely dead. You go into small
town Nebraska and you see it as alive and well
(11:14):
as what would be you know in some nineteen eighties
movie where the whole town comes out to support their
team and cheer on Johnny football. And now the fans
can go to your average football game, most of them
can go there in the same Honda Accord. There's just
not very many of them. The student section is basically empty.
In some cases. These teams make state basketball and the
(11:38):
students that travel to Lincoln to watch it from metro schools,
they could all go together in the same car. It's
sad now the small schools they go out there. You
make it from anywhere, from like South Sioux City or
Crete or even Scott's Bluff, Sydney. They all come. Turn
the lights off when you leave. We're all going to
(11:58):
state football, basketball, whatever. But in the Omaha Lincoln metro
areas really really sad to see. So, you know, if
the football team dries up and we don't have football
and basketball and all that anymore, students aren't going to care.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I think it's just another aspect of the decline of
big cities, and Omaha is part of that. When you
talk about the social aspect of big cities, they're just
they're all in decline.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Well, it's certainly something that's different from when we grew up.
And here's the funny part about that is I look
at how things are now compared to when I was
in school, and I think we had it best and
today's kids thirty years from now are going to look
back at how things were when they were in school
(12:50):
compared to how things are in three decades and go, oh,
we had it so much better than they did today,
Like they're going to long for a return to these days.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Because they don't know any better. We don't know any
better of how how much better going to the school
in the seventies was.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, And maybe you know, if we had the ability
to just put on headphones and smartphones and hang out
with our friends in a virtual reality of our own making,
whether it's social media or video games or whatever, maybe
we wouldn't have gone to the football and basketball games either.
Maybe that online world in which we lived better suited
what we would have thought were our needs. I don't know,
(13:28):
but I know that's what's happening now. And you've got
more kids right now with very serious concerns when it
comes to depression, anxiety, mental health concerns.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
And you've got the people who did go through this
school before all of the electronics. They did, and they
understand what kids really do need. They need that socialization,
They need to have face to face conversations, and they're
not having that.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
I know is it better now? Is it better that
I don't know? I know that if I'd gone to
my football coach back in the day and said, Coach,
I don't know if I can play Friday night. I'm
having some mental health issues, I probably would have been
called a gaywad and been told to get out there
and play. Scott Boys Mornings nine to eleven, our news
radio eleven ten KFAB
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