A little more than two minutes into their first basketball game in almost a year, the Spartans girls basketball team was staring a 7-0 deficit on the scoreboard in the face against visiting Villa Grove last Thursday. It looked as if St. Joseph-Ogden was going to have a dogfight on their hands.
Trailing 7-0, SJO's Ella Armstrong turned up the heat starting with a three-pointer from near the top of key to put a few digits on the SJO side of the scoreboard. Responsible for her team's first seven points of the season, the junior came off the bench to finish with a team-high 15 points to lead the Spartans to a 47-33 win over the Blue Devils.
Nearly midpoint in the first period, Armstrong drew a foul on an attempted 360-degree spin lay up after picking up a loose ball in Villa Grove territory and dribbling down the floor. Sinking both free throws, SJO trailed by two.
Several possessions later the Spartans tied up the contest at 7-all on an pass inside the paint from Taylor Wells to Armstrong.
Later, Wells goes to the free throw line and knocks down a pair to put the St. Joseph-Ogden up by two. With a perfect 3-for-3 performance from the charity stripe, the junior contributed five points in to first victory of the year.
After another eight minutes of play, the two teams entered their locker rooms with SJO enjoying 21-17 advantage.
The Spartans returned to the floor and dominated the floor in the third quarter. Five SJO players combined for 18 points while Villa Grove hit just three shots for a total of just eight points.
Villa Grove's Kayleigh Block led all scorers with 18 points. Teammates Vanessa Wright and Kaylee Arbuckler finished with nine and six points
respectively to complete the Blue Devil's scoring effort.
Behind Armstrong's team-high point production, fellow junior Payton Jacob finish the night with 10 points. Alyssa Hamilton and Wells chipped in five points apiece. Senior Atleigh Hamilton, like Wells, made 100% of her shots from the free throw line, was good for four points.
The Spartans are at home again on Thursday, when they host the Rantoul Eagles. The junior varsity contest is scheduled to begin at 5:30p and the varsity game at 7p.
Kimberly Capagalan [right] and Abriel Shipley, both from St. Joseph, race through a heavy downpour and flooded school parking lot on their way to their graduation ceremony at St. Joseph-Ogden High School. The two seniors and 104 other students made up the Class 2007 graduating on May 27, 2007.
by Caroline Chen, ProPublica
On Jan. 29, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was promoting "marital bliss" at a coronavirus news conference.
Announcing that indoor dining would reopen at 25% capacity in New York City on Valentine's Day, and wedding receptions could also resume with up to 150 people a month after, Cuomo suggested: "You propose on Valentine’s Day and then you can have the wedding ceremony March 15, up to 150 people. People will actually come to your wedding because you can tell them, with the testing, it will be safe. … No pressure, but it's just an idea."
Cuomo isn't alone in taking measures to loosen pandemic-related restrictions. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer allowed indoor dining to resume at 25% capacity starting Feb. 1. Idaho Gov. Brad Little increased limits on indoor gatherings from 10 to 50 people. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker is raising business capacity from 25% to 40%, including at restaurants and gyms. California Gov. Gavin Newsom lifted stay-at-home orders on Jan. 25.
To justify their reopening decisions, governors point to falling case counts. "We make decisions based on facts," Cuomo said. "New York City numbers are down."
But epidemiologists and public health experts say a crucial factor is missing from these calculations: the threat of new viral variants. One coronavirus variant, which originated in the United Kingdom and is now spreading in the U.S., is believed to be 50% more transmissible. The more cases there are, the faster new variants can spread. Because the baseline of case counts in the U.S. is already so high — we’re still averaging about 130,000 new cases a day — and because the spread of the virus grows exponentially, cases could easily climb past the 300,000-per-day peak we reached in early January if we underestimate the variants, experts said.
Furthermore, study after study has identified indoor spaces — particularly restaurants, where consistent masking is not possible — as some of the highest-risk locations for transmission to occur. Even with distanced tables, case studies have shown that droplets can travel long distances within dining establishments, sometimes helped along by air conditioning.
Let’s pretend that politicians wake up and don’t reopen restaurants and we avoid a big wave in March. Then we’re running downhill on the vaccines because the pipeline gets better and better. Then we can get our lives back.
We’re just in the opening stage of the new variants’ arrival in the United States. Experts say we could speed viruses’ spread by providing them with superspreading playgrounds or slow them down by starving them of opportunities to replicate.
"We’re standing at an inflection point," said Sam Scarpino, assistant professor at Northeastern University and director of the school’s Emergent Epidemics Lab. Thanks to the arrival of vaccines, he said, "we finally have the chance right now to bring this back under control, but if we ease up now, we may end up wasting all the effort we put in."
Dr. Luciana Borio, an infectious disease physician who was a member of the Biden-Harris transition team’s COVID-19 advisory board, put it more bluntly at a
congressional hearing on Feb. 3. "Our worst days could be ahead of us," she said.
I interviewed 10 scientists for this story and was surprised by the vehemence of some of their language. "Are you sure it could be that bad?" I asked, over and over.
Once in a while, when a virus replicates, a mistake occurs, and a letter in the strand of RNA is copied inaccurately. That’s called a mutation.
They unanimously said they expected B.1.1.7, the variant first discovered in the U.K., to eventually become the dominant version of coronavirus in the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that B.1.1.7 will become dominant in March, using a model that presumes it’s 50% more transmissible than the original "wildtype" coronavirus. The model’s transmission rate was based on experience in the U.K., which first detected B.1.1.7 in September and saw an increase in cases that became apparent in December, straining hospitals despite stringent closures and stay-at-home orders. So while our country appears relatively B.1.1.7-free right now, the situation could look drastically different in a matter of months.
Experts are particularly concerned because we don’t have a handle on exactly how far B.1.1.7 has spread. Our current surveillance system sequences less than 1% of cases to see whether they are a variant.
Throwing an even more troubling wrench into the mix is that B.1.1.7 is continuing to morph. Just this week, scientists discovered that some B.1.1.7 coronaviruses in Britain had picked up a key change, known as the E484K mutation. That mutation had previously been found in the B.1.351 variant, which was first discovered in South Africa. Scientists have hypothesized that it’s the E484K mutation that has reduced the efficacy of some vaccines in South African trials, so this is incredibly worrying news.
"It’s really hard to thread this needle without sounding like a prophet of doom," said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. While vaccines bring hope, she said, governors who are moving to expand indoor dining are "completely reckless"; if they don’t course correct, "I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say the worst could be yet to come."
The choices that our federal and state leaders make right at this moment will determine if we can bend the curve once and for all and start ending the pandemic, or if we ride the rollercoaster into yet another surge, this one fueled by a viral enemy harder to fight than ever before.
All of us have agency in deciding this narrative, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, stressed. "Certainly you need to be prepared for the possibility that things might get worse in the light of the variants, but that is not inevitable because there are things that we can do to mitigate against it,” he said in an interview. “We're not helpless observers of our own fate."
Fauci urged states to "double down on your public health measures … to have virtually everybody wear masks, to have everyone maintain social distance, to have everybody avoid congregate settings, and to have everybody wash their hands very frequently."
And don’t wait until it’s too late, warned Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
"We are so good at pumping the brakes after we’ve wrapped the car around the tree," he said. The new variants aren’t being complacent. "There’s still a lot of human wood out there for this coronavirus to burn."
To understand the epidemiologists’ warnings, it helps to understand what variants are, how they have been behaving and our limitations in knowing exactly how far they have spread.
People have a bad habit of anthropomorphizing the coronavirus: ascribing human-like intentions to it, as if a microbe can discern that we finally have a vaccine and try to evade it. But viruses don’t really have any schemes; they just reproduce. "Coronaviruses are a single strand of RNA in a sac of fat," epidemiologist Larry Brilliant reminded me. "They’re preprogrammed to replicate and continue replicating. That’s their job."
Once in a while, when a virus replicates, a mistake occurs, and a letter in the strand of RNA is copied inaccurately. That’s called a mutation. Many times, those mutations are neutral. Sometimes they are detrimental to the virus, and that lineage will quickly die off. Other times, they’re beneficial to the virus in some way, such as by making it more transmissible. When a version of the virus becomes functionally different, that’s when scientists consider it a variant.
As of Feb. 4, according to the CDC, the U.S. has found 611 cases of B.1.1.7, the variant first discovered in the United Kingdom, five cases of B.1.351, first identified in South Africa, and two cases of P.1., first identified in Brazil. But that’s almost certainly an undercount.
Part of the reason why epidemiologists are advocating for us to stay hunkered down is because the U.S. doesn’t know exactly where all the variant cases are.
The term that public health uses is "surveillance." I like to think of it as having eyes on the virus. In order to have good eyes on where coronavirus infections are in general, all you need is the regular swab tests that we’re all familiar with. But in order to tell whether a positive case is the wildtype coronavirus or one of the more nasty variants, an additional step is needed: genomic sequencing. For that, the sample needs to be sent on to a lab that has specialized machinery capable of conducting sequencing.
Until recently, sequencing in the U.S. was a patchwork effort, conducted by a mix of academic and public health agency labs keen to track the evolution of the coronavirus. Though the CDC hosted a
weekly call where those scientists already conducting sequencing could compare notes, there was no dedicated federal funding or coordination to ensure that samples were routinely gathered from across the country.
Today, the U.S. sequences less than 1% of its total cases. This is a pittance compared to the U.K., which sequences around 8-10% of its positive test results. But volume alone isn’t the only thing that matters. Representation, meaning where the samples come from, is another crucial factor. Since most of the sequencing so far has come from voluntary efforts, the U.S. has suffered from uneven visibility, with a whole bunch of eyeballs in parts of the country that are biotechnology and academic hubs, like Boston, San Francisco and San Diego, and less in “surveillance deserts” like North and South Dakota. There, barely any samples have been sequenced at all, even when those states had explosions of COVID-19 cases.
Dr. Phil Febbo is chief medical officer at Illumina, one of the world’s biggest sequencing technology companies. Like so many parts of the coronavirus response, keeping a lookout for variants has suffered from a lack of federal leadership, Febbo said. As early as March of last year, Illumina representatives began meeting with federal agencies, advocating for a national genomic surveillance system.
"We talked to any three-lettered agency we could," Febbo said. "Those conversations were cordial: They said they heard what we were saying, but then they’d say, ‘But we need more tests, but can you do it in five minutes, can it be point-of-care?’" It wasn’t until Dec. 18, when B.1.1.7 was taking off in the United Kingdom, that Illumina finally got a call from the CDC offering to sign a contract with the company. (Since December, CDC has engaged Illumina to do surveillance work by signing twocontracts potentially worth up to $4.6 million.)
Today, Illumina sequences positive samples that are passed on from a diagnostic testing company, Helix. Each RNA strand of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has about 30,000 nucleotides, each represented by one of four letters. Illumina’s sequencers read through each sample’s code and compare each letter to a reference sequence, looking for significant changes. The data gets passed back to the CDC, which uses location data stripped of personal identifiers to map the spread of any variants that Illumina has picked up.
The CDC said it has contracted with several large commercial companies with the goal of sequencing up to 6,000 samples a week by mid-February. Through another program, called the National SARS-CoV-2 Strain Surveillance System, state public health labs are supposed to send a total of 1,500 samples to the agency every other week. This program went into effect on Jan. 25 and is still ramping up, according to a CDC spokesperson.
Febbo says more can be done to increase surveillance. He notes that the Biden administration, while clearly more invested in variant surveillance than the Trump administration, hasn’t set a public target in the same way it has for vaccinations with its "100 million shots" campaign. Illumina estimates that sequencing 5% of all samples would allow us to be confident that we are catching all variants of concern, and he would like the Biden administration to make that a public goal. It can be done, Febbo says: "It hasn’t been the lack of capacity, it’s been the lack of will."
Having clearer information about where variants are would give governors and local officials actual information with which to make decisions. Then they could say with confidence, "We can open indoor dining because we know that the variants aren’t circulating in our community." Absent that information, the only thing we can do is act like the variants are here.
The good news is that so far, the vaccines that have been made available to the public appear to be reasonably effective against the coronavirus variants. They may be slightly less effective against B.1.351, the variant discovered in South Africa, but none of the variants are total "escapes," so a vaccine should offer you at least partial protection against any form of the coronavirus you encounter.
All of the available shots give your immune system some familiarity with the virus, allowing it to be more prepared to meet the bug in the wild, whether it’s the original strain or a variant. Having a savvier immune system, in turn, means that even if you do get infected, you’re less likely to need to be hospitalized, and less likely to die.
"Regardless of what’s happening with this variant, we’re much better with [people’s immune systems] seeing SARS-CoV-2 after seeing the vaccine than not," said Derek Cummings, a biology professor at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute.
However, we’re not very far along with vaccinations yet. As of Feb. 4, only 2.1% of the U.S. population had been reported to have received both doses of the vaccine; 8.5% had received one dose. That means we’re in a precarious moment right now where the vast majority of the U.S. hasn’t had a chance to get protected, and the variants have a window to multiply. (Of course, those who have already gotten sick with COVID-19 have natural immunity, but some scientists are concerned that those who develop only mild symptoms may not gain as much innate immunity as those who receive a vaccine.)
Of the scientists I talked to, Caitlin Rivers, a computational epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, was the most optimistic about a potential variant-fueled surge. "I do think that B.1.1.7 has the possibility to precipitate a wave, but it probably won’t be as bad as the last wave, because we have a lot of preexisting immunity and we are rolling out the vaccines," she said. Thanks to the vaccines, the U.S. will have more population immunity by March, when the CDC predicts B.1.1.7 will become dominant, than the U.K. did when the variant hit there late last year. "It’s a low likelihood that we will have a gigantic fourth wave, but not impossible," she said.
Still, Rivers said, "now is not the time to relax." She, too, was critical of state policies to loosen restrictions. "When you create the same conditions that allowed the last surge, you should expect the same results," she said. “Our main move should be to reduce transmission as much as possible while we vaccinate as much as possible."
Time is not on our side, as the morphing B.1.1.7 variant showed us when it picked up the E484K mutation. While we are lucky that our vaccines still work against the current variants, we have to keep in mind that in this race between vaccines and variants, the variants aren’t staying static.
The big fear is that eventually, a variant will come along that provides the virus with a complete immune escape, preventing our vaccines from working against it. Even though we can update our vaccines, that would take time. The only way to guarantee that the virus won’t mutate into a variant that our current vaccines don’t cover is to lower transmission significantly, said genomic epidemiologist Alli Black: “The virus will continue to mutate as it continues to spread. We’re not going to stop that biological fact unless transmission stops.” And vaccinating everyone quickly is one key way to make it harder for the coronavirus to get from person to person in the first place.
“We need to start responding like the variants are going to take over and they are one of the biggest threats,” said Cummings, “or we won’t have vaccinated enough people when this rolls through.”
Throughout this pandemic, the U.S. has often been in the fortunate position of not being first when it comes to novel viral encounters. We weren’t the country where SARS-CoV-2 originated. We weren’t the place where B.1.1.7 was spawned. We’ve had the opportunity to look to other countries and learn from them, if only we’d choose to.
Epidemiologist after epidemiologist pointed out that the U.K., Denmark and Portugal required drastic measures — the dreaded L word, “lockdown” — to get B.1.1.7 under control. "We’ve seen that multiple different countries in Europe have had to close schools after making it a policy that schools would be the last to close," Rivers, from Johns Hopkins, noted.
If we don’t want the same fate to befall the U.S., now is the time to act, the scientists urged.
Improving surveillance can help. Utah Public Health Laboratory has a robust state sequencing program, analyzing a random sample of cases sent by the state’s two largest hospital groups. Kelly Oakeson, its chief scientist for next generation sequencing and bioinformatics, has set a goal of sequencing 10% of all cases in the state; his lab is currently doing about 3%. They could do more, he said. The only problem is that they don’t have enough pipette tips due to a national shortage. Oakeson said he’s hoping that the Biden administration will leverage the Defense Production Act to produce more pipette tips so he can increase his state’s surveillance capabilities.
“We can’t get transmission down through vaccination alone,” said Rasmussen, the Georgetown virologist. “We need to be encouraging leadership, both at the state and federal levels, to protect people, to have paid sick leave for people if they become symptomatic.”
A restaurant server in New York City, who was laid off early in the pandemic from a high-end steakhouse, told me he understood what the epidemiologists were saying from a scientific point of view. But, he asked, “if you want to shut everything down, who’s going to pay the bills?”
He continued, "In order to do what the epidemiologists want to get done, you can only do that with policies to support the people and make it worth their while to do it." He’s job hunting, and he said that if he was offered a position that put him indoors on Valentine’s Day, “I would have to take it.” He’d put on a double mask and go to work.
Whenever we have options, though, individual decisions can make a difference. Black, the genomic epidemiologist, encouraged everyone to limit travel as much as possible: "It just really facilitates introductions of these circulating variants."
Hang in there, urged Scarpino, the Northeastern professor, painting a hopeful picture: "Cases are coming down, vaccines are going up. Let’s pretend that politicians wake up and don’t reopen restaurants and we avoid a big wave in March. Then we’re running downhill on the vaccines because the pipeline gets better and better. Then we can get our lives back."
That sounded so tantalizing. Dream-worthy. Just a matter of good science-based public policy and collective compliance driving down the case counts until those little mindless RNA-filled fat sacs have nowhere to go, no one to infect, no way to replicate, no chances to mutate. I imagine them bumping around, lost without crowded indoor spaces to breed in, thwarted by vaccine-boosted immune cells, unable to find a host, dwindling, going, gone.
I grew up in Martin county, Kentucky. We were considered one of the poorest counties in the United States. In April, 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson and his entourage of staff, secret service, media and other politicians swarmed into the county seat of Inez during his war on poverty campaign tour.
Johnson and the entourage rode through our town waving and then proceeded on down route 3, which was less than three miles north of my homeplace. He walked onto the porch of a local family where he did a photo session that would be shown on every media source around the world. I just watched it on YouTube.
He then returned to his Cadillac, came back through Inez and shook a few hands at the courthouse before he boarded his helicopter and left us. He had what he needed which were real pictures of real poverty and a story of real poverty from the hills of East, Kentucky.
There was nothing about Johnson's visit that communicated anything about the white privilege of East, Kentucky. We had never heard of white privilege. We hadn't thought much about privilege or poverty either. I don't think too many of us thought we were poor. We didn't know the difference really. We didn't have anybody telling us that we should be demanding equity with others in the country.
After Johnson flew out, we resumed our normal lifestyles. The family pictured in the photo op continued to have a very difficult life of poverty. Even though they had the President of the United States on their front porch it wasn't enough to save them from lives of poverty and difficult times. President Johnson's intentions were good. He led Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act in August, 1964 which was part of his war on poverty effort.
It was a nice gesture.
Unfortunately, families throughout Martin county and East, Kentucky still grappled with poverty after the government money and new programs were approved.
Going to the bathroom meant going outside to a tiny little building built over a hole in the ground. In the winter, trudging snow to go to the bathroom at any hour of the day was cruel.
Common life continued to be living without indoor plumbing. For many people this meant a very difficult life of finding alternative ways to access water. Some people had outdoor wells. They would drop a bailer bucket into a well and "draw" up a bucket of water. Several of my family members had wells of this nature and I remember their water tasting pretty good.
This also meant many families did not have indoor bathrooms. Going to the bathroom meant going outside to a tiny little building built over a hole in the ground. In the winter, trudging snow to go to the bathroom at any hour of the day was cruel.
This also meant taking a bath by collecting water from the well and carrying it into the house which involved a lot of carrying if you were going to take a bath. The same process occurred when washing clothes. Enough water had to be collected to wash and then rinse the clothes. This was a massive job. Does this sound like white privilege?
By the time I was born, my family had indoor plumbing and we had one bathroom. We still had an outdoor toilet that sat out from the house in the back yard. I tore it down a couple of years back. Actually, it was hard to tear it down because I knew it symbolized a very different era of life which too many of us Appalachian people are all too familiar.
We had terrible water as a kid. It was really bad to drink and terrible for washing clothes. The sulfur in the water would ruin our clothes. This meant my mother was always catching rain water in large tubs outside the house. In dry weather when I was a child we would walk to the creek and carry water back to the house one bucket at a time. That always embarrassed me as a kid. I don't know why. Most of the people up and down the creek where I lived had to do the same thing plus many of these people did not have indoor plumbing either. Does this sound like white privilege?
When school was in session at my elementary called Tomahawk, I sat with classmates every day who came to school hungry. The free school lunch program was the only decent meal they ever got to eat. Several boys in our school who did not have indoor plumbing came to school dirty but would often stand in the school bathroom washing their hands and faces before class. I'm sure some girls did the same thing Our little elementary school bathroom was a luxury to them. Does this sound like white privilege?
I hear all this talk about white privilege. Growing up in an inner-city dwelling is surely filled with hardships but these dwellers at least have access to a real kitchen, running water, an indoor bathroom and even television and radio reception. These are luxuries that many Appalachian kids did not have growing up.
Even today, in too many places in East, Kentucky and throughout Appalachia there are still families growing up without indoor bathrooms, access to water and surviving daily hunger. Internet cannot be found in too many Appalachian areas. These are the scenarios that have become ignored by media, government and employers. Thank God it's not even close to what it once was but I've been in the hollers of the mountains and seen enough to know poverty is still real and a cruel existence.
Today, 14 of the 50 poorest counties in the United States are all from the same East Kentucky region that Johnson visited in 1964.
For Martin county, "The per capita income is just over $18,000," according to the 2019 Census reporter. Twenty-six (26.3) percent of the county is still at the poverty level according to Data USA with a median household income of $35,125. The county is 99 percent white. Does this sound like a place of white privilege?
McCreary county is located in the Daniel Boone National Forest in southern Kentucky along the Tennessee state border. The only county nationwide where most households earn less than $20,000 a year, McCreary is the poorest county in both Kentucky and the United States. The life expectancy is just 73 according to USA Today. Does this sound like white privilege?
The Washington Post reported that the life expectancy for the 5thdistrict in Eastern, Kentucky is under 73 making it the shortest life span expectancy in the United States. Owsley County Kentucky's life span expectancy has been reported to be 67.3 years while in San Jose, California the life expectancy is 83.
The white privilege I enjoyed as a kid was that I was fortunate to be raised around hard-working people.
My dad spent four hours a day driving to and from Holden, West Virginia to work in an underground coal mine. He spent over 30 years stooped over, on his knees or on his back in a dark coal mine. He made a living until at the age of 55 his health started failing him and he had to quit.
He and my mother kept food on the table. We raised a garden. We had livestock. My family worked hard. My uncles and aunts farmed and worked whatever jobs they could find to make ends meet. My grandfather and grandmother Hinkle worked in a very small grocery store six days a week until he was 83 and she was 80. They worked hard until they died.
No one had unemployment checks rolling in. No one had Social Security Disability checks. No one was receiving stimulus checks. There weren't food stamps or other federal or state money available to help anyone out. Our family had a mindset to work because that was our only means of surviving.
I have never experienced anything like what some of my American friends have experienced growing up. Or, what some still experience.
I'm certainly not intending to belittle your experiences or trying to "one up you" on who was poorer or had it harder. Just be aware that Appalachia is still filled with hurting, poverty-stricken people of different colors.
Poverty never comes with privilege, regardless of color.
Dr. Glenn Mollette is a syndicated American columnist and author of American Issues, Every American Has An Opinion and ten other books. He is read in all 50 states. The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily representative of any other group or organization.
After long, dramatic hiatus due to the state's attempt to keep the number of positive cases at manageable level for hospitals around the state, the Unity boys basketball program was finally back in action last week and the squad has a few moving parts to oil.
Despite their best effort, the Rockets dropped the road contest against Maroa-Forsyth in unsatisfying 58-36 loss.
"We did not shoot well last night," said head coach Matt Reed after the game. The Rockets were just made just seven of their 20 attempts from the free throw line. "Our top three offensive weapons, coming into the season, went a combined 5-29 from the field. Tough to win on the road with that kind of shooting."
Maroa-Forsyth led 19-8 after the first quarter and allowed Unity just six second quarter points to close out the first half with a comfortable 32-14 lead. The Trojans kept their foot on the gas until the final quarter behind the efforts of Riley Jackson and Egan Franzen, both who were in double figures at the half to pace their program's victory last Tuesday.
Unity was led by sophomore Austin Langendorf with 8 points. Junior guard Blake Kimball had seven, Brady Porter scored six and Dillon Rutledge finished with five points.
Only five of the Rockets' 30 shots from beyond the arc found their way through the hoop.
Normally, the program would be preparing for a deep playoff run in the IHSA postseason but this season's pandemic restricted six-week schedule Reed said he has a different focus.
"We are looking to continue to develop our players for next season, while also giving the seniors the best possible basketball experience they can have."
Unity (0-2), after a loss to Paris on three days ago, will host two home games this week in search of their first pair of wins this season.
Tomorrow night, Illinois Valley Central (1-1) will ride into town. Last week the Grey Ghost knocked off Peoria Christian 67-62 with impressive point productions from seniors Holt Geltmaker, a University of Illinois baseball commit, with 17 points and Kam Wollard, who contributed another 14 points.
At the end of the week on Friday, the Rockets invited Pontiac to the Rocket Center for their second Illini Prairie matchup this week. Varsity tipoff is scheduled for 7pm.
Stress-free Thanksgiving tips for those short on time this holiday season
While gathering for Thanksgiving is intended to be a joyous occasion, everyone who has hosted the feast knows it can also come with a lot of stress, and expenses.
The good news is that whether you’re a Gen Z-er hosting your first Friendsgiving on a budget or you’re a busy family preparing for guests, there is a lot to be thankful for this year.
Recent study suggests childhood trauma could haunt Illinois adults for life
New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed 75% of U.S. high school students said they have had at least one adverse childhood experience, or ACE.
Research has shown ACEs can alter a child's brain chemistry and produce a prolonged toxic stress response. Experiencing at least one ACE as a child is linked to having alcohol and substance use problems in adulthood, and chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity.
Tipped wage system isn't working, removing taxes won't save it
Both major presidential candidates have called for eliminating taxes on tips. But that won’t help most restaurant workers.
What will? Replacing the subminimum wages that tipped workers make with one fair wage nationwide.
The federal minimum wage for most workers is just $7.25. But for workers who get tips, employers are allowed to pay them $2.13 an hour. If tips don’t raise your hourly pay to at least the ...
Lavender Zarraga, APRN, a behavioral health provider at OSF HealthCare, says it’s not uncommon for her patients to ask for a medication that isn’t the right fit.
The culprit? She says symptoms of common mental health issues like depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bipolar disorder can overlap. So, it’s important to stay in contact with your provider to make ...
One for the record book, Unity nearly pulls off underdog victory over Althoff
TOLONO - Unity head football coach Scott Hamilton said Althoff Catholic (4-0) was the best team he has coached against in his career.
Hamilton told the team after the game that, having coached over 400 games, there has only been a handful in which he thought every player on the field would have to play at their absolute best to even have a chance of winning. Friday night's game against Althoff, which brought three Division I recruits to town, was one of those occasions.
![Kimberly Capagalan [right] and Abriel Shipley brave a downpour to get to their graduation ceremony in 2007.](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_KBYO-6SXUaT3Q606eZVXoCbVxigOD8DHHOgfvVUrTpE-ag6oCGDmzm-8IsVjNPFBdf36TfGRqu6llBFDsWjSWWmutUodwOrbDA8cPNZ_MX4Gvy6PpTo85CD9DPBBXW24_j-Rx8wQbG8/s0/07sjograd022.jpg)
I hear a lot about white privilege.
After long, dramatic hiatus due to the state's attempt to keep the number of positive cases at manageable level for hospitals around the state, the Unity boys basketball program was finally back in action last week and the squad has a few moving parts to oil.
While gathering for Thanksgiving is intended to be a joyous occasion, everyone who has hosted the feast knows it can also come with a lot of stress, and expenses.
