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Duuuval: Hope is a funny thing

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Photo by Kam Nedd/Courtesy of the Jacksonville Jaguars

Duuuval — This is how it’s supposed to be. 

The Jacksonville Jaguars are back in the NFL postseason. They host the Los Angeles Chargers in the wildcard round of the playoffs Saturday night, the team’s second primetime game in as many weeks. 

It’s a return to the promised land after such a promising season for the big cats in 2017. That team won the AFC South and made it all the way to the AFC Championship game, falling to Tom Brady’s New England Patriots. 

There proved to be no sustainable momentum. The Jags finished last in the AFC South in 2018 after going 5-11. Then they finished last again in 2019, won exactly one game in 2020, hired and fired Urban Meyer in 2021. The Urban Meyer experience, completely predictable, further cratered a team that had one winning season over a 15-year stretch. 

The legend of Chick Nowling, Nevada prep basketball and loose records

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Charles “Chick” Nowling enrolled as a sophomore at Tonopah High School in the fall of 1931. The new kid in Tonopah, Nevada was probably nervous, but he’d come to town to play prep basketball for coach Henry Couts, who just happened to be Chick’s uncle and acting guardian. 

An easy-going, handsome kid, Chick quickly fell in with the other students – having access to an automobile certainly didn’t hurt his prospects on the social scene. On the prep basketball court, Chick really excelled. Skillful with the ball and a natural leader on the floor, Chick’s gifts endeared him to his teammates, his school and his newfound state. 

Living with Couts, Chick was thriving. 

But here’s the first thing you need to know about Chick: he and Henry Couts were not related.

‘We should be in a better place’

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Georgia basketball

There have been highs, there have been lows. 

There were Sweet Sixteens and six-win seasons.

There have been first-round draft picks and postseason tournament bans. 

There has been Dominique Wilkins gliding through the air and Tony Cole showing off an illegally acquired TV on ESPN.

Welcome to the world of Georgia men’s basketball.

In its 117 seasons of play, Georgia is 1459-1367, good enough for a .516 win percentage all-time. That’s middle of the road by percentage, but it’s second-to-last in the Southeastern Conference (Ole Miss boasts a .499).

Speaking of Ole Miss, the Rebels are the only school in the SEC that the Bulldogs have beaten more times than they’ve lost. Every other SEC school has owned the Dawgs in their respective series.

One thing’s for sure: consistency from the University of Georgia basketball program has been hard to come by.

Parkview Panthers: A legacy of dominance

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Photo courtesy of Score ATL

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Parkview High School’s first state championship.

Buster Faulkner started under center for that title-winning team. 

Of course, at the end of the season.

Faulkner, who earned time at quarterback as a sophomore early in the season, was given the starting job after coaches decided to move junior quarterback Jeremy Muyres to wide receiver.

They made the right move.

The 1997 team captured the title, but Faulkner says those Panther teams from a few years earlier were the breakthrough for a Gwinnett County dynasty that would stretch out across the next decade.

Gymnastics in Georgia:’That day was different’

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Photo courtesy of NCAA.com

In the 1990s and 2000s, the University of Georgia established itself as the most dominant force in college gymnastics. The Gym Dogs have tallied the most team and individual national championships in NCAA history, producing a litany of All-Americans and Olympians throughout their 30-plus year run of success.

One of key contributors during the early days of that run was Karin Lichey-Usry, a heralded gymnast who was part of two national championship teams in the late 1990s. During her freshman season of 1995-1996, Lichey-Usry achieved what no other gymnast had done before – registering four perfect scores of 10 in a single competition. 

A Ball: Passing time on the diamond

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Photo courtesy of Thomas Ehlers

This series went longer than seven.

In the midst of the 2020 pandemic, our household was out of options.

No live sports. This led to us watching the reruns of the 2019 Women’s World Cup, some of the more interesting programming Fox Sports offered at the time. An active family of two teachers and three students, we were just sitting around in the middle of quarantine.

Until Major League Wiffle Ball was born.

A hall of fame for the love of the game

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030905 – FAYETTEVILLE, GA — Sandy Creek receiver Calvin Johnson (#81), one of the AJC’s Super 11, gets away from Fayette County High’s Jamil Merchant (cq, #20) for a first down. (MARLENE KARAS/AJC staff)

It just came to him one day.

IJ Rosenberg, the president of the sports marketing firm Score Atlanta and former beat writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution among other sport-related titles, was the man behind the idea for a Georgia High School Football Hall of Fame. 

“One of the things I noticed was there wasn’t a hall of fame in Georgia that was specifically for high school football,” Rosenberg said. “You had a state hall of fame that had football players in it, but there was not one just for football. 

“And if you really look at Georgia, it’s right there with Florida, California and Texas as the biggest football states.”

A trip worth taking

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Photo courtesy of Relton McBurrows

The plot is simple, yet far-fetched.

There’s this freshman college student who heads off to the stereotypical party atmosphere that many of us might associate with our days on a university campus. He sees a familiar face in a young woman with whom he shares a few classes and, well, one thing leads to another and they share a blissful evening.

Of course, plots need twists, and this plot has plenty of those. For starters, this freshman foolishly videotapes the encounter and then, somehow, a videotape of this encounter is inexplicably dropped in the mail and destined to reach, of all people, his high school sweetheart at her college a few thousand miles away. 

What ensues is a race against time to intercept the delivery of the footage before the original girlfriend has a chance to see it. As you might expect, hijinks ensue.

That’s the story of Road Trip, a raucous and, at times, raunchy comedy set at a fictional college in upstate New York. To tell it, Dreamworks and The Montecito Picture Company looked south and turned to the small college town of Athens, Georgia

Betting on belief: The story of Georgia Tech’s wild win over No. 1 Virginia in 1990

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Photo courtesy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This is a guest feature article from Bill Chastain, a veteran sportswriter who worked for the Tampa Bay Tribune for several years covering everything from Major League Baseball to golf, before working for MLB.com to cover the Tampa Bay Rays. A freelance writer living in Atlanta, he also is the author of several books, including Peachtree Corvette Club and The Streak.

Georgia Tech’s football team flew to Charlottesville on November 2, 1990. They went straight to Scott Stadium for a light workout that Friday. A date with No. 1 Virginia awaited the following day.

Alice Ross watched while her husband, Tech coach Bobby Ross, took his team through its paces. Bill Millsaps spotted Alice and approached. The sports columnist and editor of the Richmond Times-Gazzette told her. “Virginia is going to whip up on ya’ll pretty good.”

“He was serious,” Bobby Ross said. “So she said, ‘No they’re not. You want to bet?’ He went along. They bet a box of Mounds candy bars.”

A reflection of place: The story of WNEG, part three

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Photo of WNEG studios courtesy of John Hart

This is Part Three of our look back at the history of NewsChannel 32, a television station that provided in-depth coverage of local news and sports for Northeast Georgia. In Part One, we took a look at the formation of the station and the work of its news department, and you can read it here. In Part Two, we explored the reputation and reach of its sports department, and you can read it here.

If you can name it, Michael Castengera has probably done it.

He’s been a reporter and an editor. 

He’s worked in print journalism and broadcast journalism.

He’s run a local radio station and served as a consultant to some of the biggest media companies in the country.

It was a breadth of professional experience that made him the natural fit to lead a new hybrid journalism project at the University of Georgia that mixed education and newsgathering as WNEG — long a fixture for Northeast Georgia — migrated its operations south.

“When they acquired the station, because I had been a general manager, they decided that I would be the logical one to take over when we do it,” Castengera said with a laugh. “Well, like an idiot, I agreed.”

The promise of the station under the control of the University of Georgia made sense in the abstract, pairing one of the nation’s premier journalism programs with a professional, commercial television station to help create a learning laboratory. It represented a significant shift from the original intent of WNEG, which functioned largely as a community asset that focused on the stories of the small communities throughout the region.