There are two months of the year I hate. One of them is February — that time of the year when winter stops being festive and starts trying to kill you. The other one is April.

You know how it is. 3:30 p.m., 72 degrees outside, 128 degrees inside your car, birds are singing, everyone’s driving around with music playing loud, flowers are popping up, and you’re heading out to the local baseball or softball game. A splendid afternoon.

As you’re pulling on your shoes, you glimpse your jacket, lying over there on the floor where you tossed it three days ago. You immediately decide you won’t need it, that your friends will laugh at you for even bringing it.

“Duuuuuude, what’s with the jaaaaacket?” they’ll ask, implying that you’re a total lily, or worse, some kind of momma’s boy. As if they never spent a day of their lives in Illinois during the cruel, moody month of April.

Robert Frost knew:

“The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.”

By Robert Frost (”Two Tramps In Mud Time”).

April’s great for poets. It’s hell on sports writers. Until you’ve sat huddled on the end of some rural school’s idea of a ‘bleacher,’ during a 9-1 blowout, while a 40-mph wind from every direction rips at your notepad, turns your cheeks purple and makes you wish you were never born, you haven’t been truly miserable.

But then it gets worse.

You glance pathetically over at the brave souls sharing this local sports experience with you. They’re sitting on booster blankets, huddled in a group, all wearing parkas, gloves and knit caps while slurping hot chocolate. And one of them points at you and asks …

“Duuuuuude, where’s your jaaaaacket?”

This is why I hate April.

By the way, if you’d like to read more poems about the month of April, go here:
http://www.riverdeep.net/current/2000/04/front.140400.april.jhtml

Just don’t go telling everybody I gave you the link.

Got a call from Illinois College skipper Jay Eckhouse Tuesday night. He wanted to remind us that his baseball team will be playing the University of Illinois this week in Champaign. In case anyone would like to drive over and see the game.

Immediately, I start angling for the story.

“So how many runs you gonna beat ‘em by?” I ask Eckhouse.

“Excuse me?”

“How bad are you guys gonna beat the U of I?”

Eckhouse picks up on my angle, but doesn’t take the bait. “We’re gonna show up and play hard,” he says, chuckling.

“And in doing so, you’re gonna beat them by how many runs?” I ask again.

Seriously, though, the IC baseball squad is no laughingstock — especially not to Division III and Midwest Conference foes. The Blueboys currently sport a 12-5 overall record and sit atop the MWC’s South Division, at 3-1. They’re one run away from being undefeated in league play, after splitting a twin bill with arch-rival Monmouth on April 5, winning 4-3 and losing 9-8. This Saturday, IC will host the Fighting Scots for a pair of crucial nine-inning games.

Eckhouse and his troops would really like your support. And they do deserve it. Maybe you’re more a fan of the high school scene. That’s fine. Several of IC’s players, most notably Clint Wherley (Beardstown) and Jared Thoele (Springfield Sacred Heart-Griffin) were stars on the high school scene a short time ago. Now they’re part of a Blueboy program that’s stayed pretty solid under Eckhouse, but is still reaching for its first outright MWC title.

In other words, there’s plenty of room on this bandwagon, and the ride could be a lot of fun. Climb aboard.

I thought I’d get to spend more time blogging this past week.

But fate had other plans.

Finally, I’m here to lay down some thoughts on the big story that’s taken hold lately: Should Jacksonville High have rehired head volleyball coach Paula Stewart after all that’s come to light since Wednesday’s special District 117 board meeting?

Personally, I don’t know. I am not a reporter feigning objectivity on this. I honestly don’t know. But here are some things I have learned in 10 years of covering Jacksonville High athletics, and volleyball in particular:

1. The parents are out of control. Not just at JHS, but everywhere. The current Crimson volleyball parents probably have legitimate reasons to be concerned about Stewart’s coaching style — but the mothers and fathers of former players helped bring this on. They helped drive out Shanon Keller and Chris Bourn, and they were a formidable distraction to Julie Manker in her year as head coach. I understand this is a whole different parent group, a different coach, and a unique set of concerns. Still, from the outside, one starts to wonder if any coach is good enough for these parents. Maybe District 117 should have been as unified behind its coach in 2004 as it is now. Then maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.

2. Larry Sample is not coming back. The coach who oversaw the rise of the Crimson volleyball empire has been thwarted twice in his attempts to return and save it from collapse. Current board president Steve Todd tried to bring Sample back. Dr. Jim Bohan, another current board member, led the effort to keep Sample from returning, holding the then-athletic director to an unwritten directive that JHS administrators cannot be coaches. Now Sample is coaching at Chatham Glenwood, and last I heard, doing quite well.

3. The athletes must take responsibility for their success, or lack of it. On Saturday night, I spoke on the phone with Manker, the former head coach and one-time all-state player. She told me, quite frankly, that the work ethic in the volleyball program isn’t what it used to be. “The girls and their parents are waiting around for a coach to come along and make them better, instead of working to make themselves better,” Manker said. Maybe — just maybe — if there were enough girls in the JHS program who were willing to do whatever it took to sharpen their skills (practicing at home, playing year-round at the YMCA, enrolling in more skills camps), it wouldn’t matter so much who the coach is.

Of course, it matters who the coach is if that person is abusing the athletes in any way. Having read all the letters, having heard the outraged parents and having seen the tears in the eyes of current players who say they will not return to JHS volleyball if Stewart does, I’m certain there’s been an irreparable split between the coach and her players. For me, the question is, did Stewart aggressively provoke these rifts? Or did she react too belligerently, too emotionally, to the same crap that prior parent groups (and players) have been subjecting past volleyball coaches to?

Either way, Stewart’s evidently got some growing to do as a coach, and it looks like District 117 is giving her the chance to do that. If this year’s players revolt, quit the team or transfer out, and the program hits rock bottom, so be it — if that’s the price the district is willing to pay to get rowdy parents back in line.

If that’s so, then the district is also taking quite a risk. Because if the complaints against Stewart continue, or escalate, this coming fall, it’s all going to blow up in somebody’s face. The administration’s and the district’s credibility will suffer, and then … well, then, good luck ever getting those parents to stay in the bleachers.

So long, hoops season.

It has stopped a bit suddenly for our area teams this year. I mean, it actually ended in February for Matt and Dennis and me. Last Friday (Feb. 22), this office was buzzing. The Routt Catholic girls were in Normal, playing in the Class 1A Final Four, several area boys teams were tipping off in regional championship games, and the Jacksonville High boys were finishing their regular season at Springfield Lanphier.

Only a week later: Nothing.

For the first time I can remember, there’ll be no March Madness in our sports department — unless the annual bloodletting that is our all-area meetings counts: There will be differences of opinion, impassioned arguments and rebuttals, rigorous rereads of minute statistics, yawning, raised voices, stale pizza, hurt feelings, tactless sarcasm and finally, finally, a consensus that the three of us can live with.

Only after that meeting can we finally put the long winter behind us and start focusing on spring.

But for now, we’re kind of shocked. It’s over? Basketball season is OVER? As in no more games? Not even one more holiday tournament? Nothing going on in Waverly? Why am I craving popcorn?

It’s five o’clock Saturday evening, Nov. 10, and already dark outside as I sit to write. All of this means something, especially since I had no football team or volleyball squad to go and watch today.

It means autumn sports are done. It means we now have a basketball tab to put out. A four-month stretch of cold, dark highways, brightly lit gymnasiums, irritating scoreboard buzzers and hospitality-room dinners now awaits me. I hope some surprising stories, thrilling games and some honest excitement are also coming my way. But I won’t know until we all turn the page.

Before we do, let me put a cap on our 2007 fall sports season with this hastily conceived, off-the-cuff summation of what we learned from August to November.

JACKSONVILLE HIGH FOOTBALL

In the end, this year’s football Crimsons did pretty much what I expected them to do. I thought back in August they could go 6-3 at best, and they were an overtime touchdown away from doing it.

I consider it head coach Mark Grounds’ most resourceful coaching performance. He installed a new spread offense which, I believe, wrung two more victories out of a young team consisting of 3-6 talent. The defense was atrocious. The running game, inconsistent. But Grounds shifted the weight onto two known playmakers (QB Blake Schnitker and LB/FB Jacob Mills) and along the way, found a couple more in WR/RB Kendall Phelps and WR Bryce Heaton. All of these guys, and a good number of others, will return next year. If the defense performs better, the Crimsons will easily be at least a 7-2 team in 2008.

ILLINOIS COLLEGE FOOTBALL

Considering the dizzyingly high expectations engendered by the most talented, most experienced group of returning players the hilltop has had in many years, the Blueboys’ 4-6 finish can only be considered a huge bust. Right?

Well, not so fast.

IC lost fourth-year starting quarterback Pete Jennings for good at midseason, lost HIS backup Mitch Niekamp two weeks later, and spent most of the fall trying to find a go-to running back to complement a stout offensive line and the Midwest Conference’s best corps of wide receivers. Injuries on defense, especially to firebrand linebacker Ricky Padilla, didn’t help, either, and the Blueboys went into a swoon in the middle portion of their schedule.

But give head coach Aaron Keen credit. Recent IC squads have absolutely tanked at the end of the season against MWC heavyweights Monmouth and St. Norbert. Not this team. The Blueboys lost both games, but despite all their injuries, took the Fighting Scots into overtime at Monmouth in a 26-23 loss; and nearly whipped playoff-bound St. Norbert 31-24 in their season finale at England Field.

It suggests that Keen has finally instilled some good old-fashioned grit into a program that has tried to overwhelm foes with its talented passing attack the past few years. There’s a lot of talent and experience graduating off this team, but IC can build next year upon the character of toughness it ended this season with.

THE WEAKENING WIVC

Face it, fans. The Western Illinois Valley Conference just isn’t what it used to be. This year’s Class 1A playoffs proved it. The league’s two undefeated teams, Routt (the North champion) and Greenfield-Northwestern (South champs) struggled in opening-round wins against middling squads from the Prairie State Conference, and both got taken out by an Arcola team that finished its regular season at 7-2, and had not even played a team with a better record than 7-2. Triopia lost only to Routt (22-20) in the regular season, but got flattened by Tuscola, 62-8, in this year’s second round. As recently as five years ago, the WIVC was still being referred to as one of the state’s toughest small-school football leagues. Right now, it looks like one of the weakest.

THE RISING WIVC

But then there’s volleyball, and this is where the WIVC is beginning to establish itself, as Routt, Greenfield and A-C Central/Virginia are now routinely putting strong teams on the floor. In the newfangled four-class system, both Routt and Greenfield reached the Class 1A Elite Eight this year, and both pushed traditional powerhouses through three games before bowing out.

Mount Pulaski, which needed three games to get past Routt on Monday, won the Class 1A state title, defeating both Deer Creek-Mackinaw and Rockford Keith School in two-game matches. Albion Edwards County needed a late push in game three to overcome Greenfield on Monday, but finished third in 1A.

THE REST

A final congratulations goes out to Jacksonville High cross country runners Sam Lee and Tyson Kinsley for reaching the state meet in Peoria. In a year when JHS volleyball bottomed out, when soccer merely whelmed instead of overwhelming us, and the golf team, despite a strong regular season, came up way short at its annual Central State Eight meet, Jacksonville’s boys’ cross country team picked up the slack and came very close to qualifying its entire squad for state.

“I wouldn’t want to be Jacksonville right now!” — an SHG fan.

“Please have mercy on our young Crimsons this week.” — a JHS fan.

This is sad, folks. I don’t know which is more odious: The SHG fans who deem Jacksonville High football their whipping boy, to take out the Cyclones’ frustrations after having a long winning streak snapped … or the JHS fan, meekly simpering up to the SHG crowd on the SHG Web site.

Oh, Crimson fans. Are ye not men too?

Yeah, yeah. SHG lost a game. Somebody has to pay for that. Whatever. I’ve no doubt that head coach Ken Leonard will have his boys prepared, hungry and focused this week. Not because SHG lost, but because he ALWAYS has them prepared, hungry and focused. That’s the stuff back-to-back state titles are made of.

Do you know what state titles AREN’T made of? “Oh, please have mercy on us …”

There’s a too-easy perception in high school sports that the fans speak for the players and coaches. It’s not true. Fans — and, OK, the media too — have the luxury of saying whatever they want, because they don’t have to get in the arena and fight for it. Nobody on the SHG football team is going to take Jacksonville lightly until victory is at hand. Nobody on the JHS squad or coaching staff is going to ask the Cyclones to “go easy” on them. In fact, they’d probably be mad as hell if anyone else did, on their behalf.

Three weeks ago, I ate lunch with a few of the Crimsons’ team leaders and we talked about the possibility that SHG could be 0-1 when the two teams play in Week Two. Do you know what the JHS players said? They hoped the Cyclones would beat Lombard Montini, not because they were worried about incurring SHG’s wrath, but because the Crimsons wanted the opportunity themselves to break the Cyclones’ long winning streaks, which stopped at 28 overall and 46 in the regular season.

As for that other comment, “I wouldn’t want to be Jacksonville right now,” that’s just fan talk, missing the whole point. I cannot speak for all the Crimson football players, but I know that head coach Mark Grounds LOVES to play SHG. Win or lose, Grounds counts on the SHG game to sharpen and toughen up his players. The earlier, the better.

He says it every year, “Whether we win or lose, we feel like we are a better football team after playing SHG than we were before playing them.”

One more thing: Jacksonville football doesn’t plan on losing to SHG, unless the Cyclones themselves impose that on the Crimsons. It’s called competition. SHG might be the class of the CS8, but JHS would like to be considered one of the programs in the league that makes sure the Cyclones keep earning that distinction.

It doesn’t come with the uniform.

It’s 8:45 p.m. on a Tuesday in late August. I am bored. Normally, this would irritate me. But not tonight. I’m listening to the faint drone of equally bored Apple eMacs in a mostly empty office. Only the tick-tick-tickety-click of my fingers on this keyboard interrupts the quiet.

The quiet before the storm, that is.

As I said, it is Tuesday. This is the last uneventful Tuesday I’ll get to enjoy for a while. On Friday, the Crimsons will kick off their 2007 football campaign against Jerseyville. Earlier that day, the JHS soccer squad will travel to Charleston for its annual season-opening tournament. Then next week, local sports will be at full gallop: volleyball, cross country and girls’ swimming will get going. Soccer and football will not only keep going, they’ll speed up.

Illinois College will kick off its gridiron season a week from Saturday at Millikin. That’s an afternoon game in Decatur. That same evening, Jacksonville High will battle Sacred Heart-Griffin in Springfield. Yeah, I plan to see and write about both games. I drink Red Bull. I am hardcore.

You didn’t ask, but my summer’s been great. I got my butt in shape (more on that some other time), took many days of vacation and, for the most part, steered well clear of deadlines. Meanwhile, we all got pretty ambitous around here about the sports seasons to come.

If you haven’t heard yet, something truly eventful is going to happen this Friday. Sure, the release of the annual football tab is big, but there’s more: We’ll be launching a new Web site totally dedicated to local sports: MyJournalCourierVarsity. I’ll leave it to our sports editor to tell you all more about it, when he’s ready, but I can tell you this: It is intended to bring readers and fans even closer to the sports, athletes and coaches we follow. We hope that’s a good thing.

I got so caught up in my last post that I forgot to tell you how Jacksonville’s offseason has been going.

Apparently, it’s going fine.

Just fine — if you’re talking about the important stuff, like participation in the weight room and in seven-on-seven scrimmages. What I hoped to hear — but didn’t hear — was head coach Mark Grounds, or any of his assistants, really talking up a kid or two. Every year at this time, there’s at least one potential difference-maker that the staff is excited about. But this year, all I got was …

“Our kids have the best kind of ability, which is dependability,” said Grounds.

That’s great. Can we depend on them to win six or seven games this year? To beat Springfield High? To hold onto the ball?

Of course, Grounds hopes so, as much as we all do.

I want to emphasize that I don’t think the Crimsons lack confidence. I do think that they’re keeping it to themselves, though. It reminds me of the summer of 2003, when Grounds and his staff hardly made a peep in the offseason. Two years before, they’d started off 3-1 but finished 4-5, narrowly missing the playoffs, then spent all of the next offseason practically guaranteeing they’d complete their “unfinished business” in 2002. But by the middle of that campaign, the Crimsons were 0-4, dealing with a spate of injuries, and had replaced their senior quarterback with a promising sophomore. They missed the playoffs, but won three of their last four games.

Kind of sounds like more recent history, doesn’t it?

Like 2003, this year’s Crimsons will come into the season expecting more from themselves than anyone expects of them. Like 2003, this team will be junior-dominated. And, I have a hunch that coach Grounds is getting back to the style of football that launched JHS to success that year — that bruising, physical personality that so characterized the 2003 squad, embodied best by the running and tackling of then-senior Brent McAdams.

I don’t think we’re going to see much of the wing-T this year. I really don’t. Running backs Jacob Mills (a junior) and Martez Turner (a senior) are back this year, which means you can stop dreaming about 60-yard touchdown runs right now. Grounds wants to get back to making opposing defenses feel every yard of his team’s march down the field.

“We’ve always been more powerful than fast,” says Grounds, though he insists that Tez Turner, for all his girth and bulk, can run a 4.8-second 40-yard dash.

Other strengths the Crimsons already know they have, as camp gets under way, are at quarterback, where junior Blake Schnitker is the undisputed starter after a strong second half in 2006.

“He’s going to be a very dependable quarterback for us,” said Grounds, referring to Schnitker’s relative cool under pressure, good decision-making and accurate passing, assuming he’ll have somebody to throw to this season.

JHS is also strong defensively, particularly at linebacker, where Mills and senior Todd Linear will line up. There’s also just enough experience coming back in the secondary, in Quinton Leetham, Braxton Stewart, J.T. Rowe and Zach Meyer. Unfortunately, the Crimsons are currently unsettled on the defensive line.

With the exception of returning senior Darren Hoots, Jacksonville’s got a lot of holes to fill on the offensive line, too, though there’s no shortage of large young men to try out in the trenches. Grounds would like to be more sure of his linemen, but the IHSA changed some of its rules regarding summer football participation, so the Crimsons didn’t get to test their line play against actual foes at their annual team camp at McKendree College.

In other words, the offensive linemen (whoever they’ll be) won’t see their first real action together until week one, against Jerseyville.

So, anyway, this is how much I know about JHS football right now. In the coming weeks, I’m going to find out a lot more. That’s my job. Whenever I know something, or have a new opinion about the team, you’ll either see it in our sports section, or here at my blog.

So, what happens when your local high school football team misses the playoffs for the first time in four years?

If your team is the Jacksonville Crimsons, a whole lot of NOTHING is what happens. Things have been too quiet around the JHS football program this offseason. Where once there was buzz, there’s now silence.

But if you listen closely — very closely — you can hear the indignation and old pride beginning to stir itself up, just in time for helmets and pads.

“We’re an afterthought,” said JHS head coach Mark Grounds last week, when I called him to ask what’s up. “Everybody has put us down as an afterthought, and that’s fine with us.”

I hardly believe it’s FINE with the Crimsons to log on at various Web sites and see that nobody is talking about them. But I know that Grounds will use this to his team’s advantage. The silent treatment Jacksonville’s been getting at sites like Illinois High School Sports (.com), KHQA and even the de-facto Central State Eight football site, SHGfootball.com, suggests that JHS’ regular and potential opponents aren’t worried about this year’s Crimsons.

Of course, it’s still only mid-July. There’s a lot of football fans who haven’t yet stirred themselves up. So all of this indignation might be a bit premature.

Still, to folks outside of Jacksonville, last year’s 4-5 record might have signaled a reassuring “return to form” for the once-uppity program. In a CS8 where Sacred Heart-Griffin, Chatham Glenwood and Taylorville are generally accepted as the entrenched powers, there’s just no room for anyone else, except for maybe one more “city” school — we’re talking Lanphier, Southeast and Springfield High.

Gosh, nothing would put mist in the eyes of Capital City gridiron fans like seeing Springfield High back in the playoffs. Wouldn’t it be great, come early November, if Crimson fans could stand up and say, “Sorry, Springfield. You’re all gonna have to settle for Jacksonville again.”

But that wouldn’t be the last laugh. No … come late November, after Sacred Heart-Griffin wins its third consecutive state title, all of Springfield can stand up and say, “Sorry, Illinois. Sorry, Chicago. Guess you’re all gonna have to settle for the Cyclones again.”

Now we have to start blogging.

It started as an office rumor, grew into an eventuality — a matter of ‘when’ instead of ‘if’ — and then it was “OK, really … WHEN?”

At the behest of my editors, I doodled out some blog posts in April, but the new site wasn’t ready yet. For a while, we weren’t sure when it would be up and running. It’s not as easy as going to blogger.com, registering a kick-butt handle and getting all emo on the world. While our tech wizards laid a foundation, the JJC blog thing went back to being something we’d eventually do, but maybe not so soon.

Maybe August, they told us.

I relaxed. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy blogging, but I didn’t want the task of logging daily local sports content through June and July, when there’s too little of it going on. Here’s a sample of what I’d be reduced to writing about:

“The sprinkler system at the Jacksonville High football field seems to be working alright. I drove by the place this afternoon, and got to watch the water come on a few times. I kind of wanted to strip down to my shorts and go jumping through the sprinklers for a while. But thought better of it. Wouldn’t be professional. Wouldn’t be any fun explaining myself to coach Grounds if he caught me. Tomorrow, I’ll drive over to the JHS Bowl and check out all the available parking spaces.”

I definitely think blogging is the way forward, but I welcomed a summer reprieve.

So much for that. Suddenly, the new site’s up and our editors want blogs. They want blogs now. Do the readers want blogs? I hope so. Anyway, I’m giving myself a head start — just in case I need it.

“It doesn’t have to be much, Brian,” my sports editor Dennis Mathes once told me. “But try to write a few paragraphs every now and then. Anything you want — as long as it’s about local sports.”

As long as it is about LOCAL sports? The same stuff I write about in the newspaper for 10 months of the year? It’s not enough that I eat and sleep local sports? Now I have to start breathing it too? Fine. But I’m doing this my way.

So help me, this is not going to be your typical good-ol’-boy/sportswriter blog. No sir. I shall not come on every day and illuminate the world with pithy observations like, “Yeeeap, Pittsfield’s sure got some big ol’ boys this year,” or “Wow, that new gymnasium at North Greene sure can hold a lot of people.”

No, no, no.

What will I write? I’ve no idea. Yet.

But I betcha’ I’m gonna have one tomorrow.