Stewartville

I-

Like Gus said, the girls are all barking at us when we were running in Stewartville-

Sure.

Good, good

That's super fun.

All right.

So then you guys ran into Stewartville.

That is a really good volleyball team.

Yep

... and then Stewartville, I mean, they got a chip on their shoulder, but man, I mean, without Cheddar? I mean-

Well, we'll get to that.

Let's get to your games.

Well, I am going to head on over back to...

Let's just start with the big one here, Byron and Stewi.

So, uh, we got Byron in Stewartville.

We're coming into this game.

Okay.

Cannon Falls is the last triple A team to beat Stewartville in the regular season.

Is that right?

Did you know that? [laughs]

Yep.

That sounds right.

And then you know who beat Stewartville in the section playoffs? Well, if we can call it that, 'cause everybody played one section playoff game.

Uh-huh.

And you remember I did it on TV 10 years before I got on the radio.

So we were pioneering that, us and Chatfield, and I think Stewartville did it.

We were like the only ones that I knew of that put the games on TV and and you know chatfield they have the was it c c c c tv they're they're kind of the gold standard for production with that but they were but you know we had we just had cable access so sure you had to have the quote-unquote school channel to catch me back in the day

did you hear whispers of natalie bramer before she made it to seventh grade you know because like

Is that one of them? Okay.

And then there was...

There was a wild run there where it looked like when Natalie was about a ninth grader, it looked like Stewartville was just going to own the area, and then that team fell off hard.

Okay.

Um, but I was also a SNAP kid, right? And, and we were a Medicaid family, and I wouldn't have gone to college if it wasn't for Pell Grants and subsidized Stafford loans.

Um, so I went to college, got my teaching degree, married my wife Molly, who also grew up in southern Minnesota in Stewartville, same town.

Um, we moved back to southern Minnesota and, and I started teaching, and I taught for 20 years.

Uh, my wife is a paraprofessional.

Pick all the tomatoes you can, you can carry." And we did, and we would bring it back, and we would can it so that we would have, um, you know, chili, spaghetti sauce for the winters.

And so the...

It was just, it was just this sense, I was so proud of, of growing up where I did and how I did, and the fact that, yes, we, we took care of each other, but we also felt like we were part of a community in, in Stewartville, a small town in southern Minnesota, where everybody knew us, and everybody, everybody helped us make it.

And now, again, we were, we were lower, lower class.