Karl Lindholm: ‘Señor Coach’ — Panther Hall of Famer and renaissance man Sam Guarnaccia

It seemed Sam knew everybody. He was a visible presence on campus: a robust man physically, warm and expressive. He loved teaching, he loved coaching football, and above all, he loved working with students.

Next fall, a year from now, Middlebury Union High School will add a varsity sport and have a girls’ varsity volleyball team, not a club but a fully sanctioned team.

Every time I read a reference to “pickleball,” the next words are “the fastest growing sport in America.”

Richard Hawley, a Ripton resident, has been writing his “diary” for more than a decade — and he will no doubt get to a million words.

In 1972, Peter Gammons started writing baseball “notes” in the Sunday Boston Globe, a whole page of baseball news in which the baseball beat writer “empties out the notebook.” Over the years it has become a Globe staple, a must read. 

Paul Politano hardly played golf at all growing up in southern Vermont. “My dad never let me play,” he said in a conversation last week outside the golf shop at Middlebury’s Ralph Myhre Golf Course, where Paul has been the golf pro since 2017.

It could hardly have been more exciting: in the championship winner-take-all game at Centennial Field, the Vermont Lake Monsters, defending champs in the Future College Baseball League, were down by a run, 6-5, in the bottom of the ninth to the Nashua (N. … (read more)

William Clarence Matthews and I are very close, though he was born in Selma, Alabama, in 1877 and died in Washington, D.C., in 1928. My home is festooned with pictures of Matty, I have a vast collection of Matthewsiana, eBay treasures, displayed throughou … (read more)

I relate today, loyal readers, the story of the Demolition Derby on the campus of Middlebury College in the spring of 1972, at a time in the life of the country when college students were mostly out of their minds. 

Recently I wrote to a number of area coaches, both in the high schools and at the college, asking them to reflect on their experience coaching during the pandemic — “just a few sentences, off the top of your head.” I received a number of very thoughtful r … (read more)

In May, I helped my daughter Jane coach the Monkton Little League farm team — true beginners, five- to eight-year-olds.

Sammy Smith found out five minutes before the first pitch that he was in the starting line-up last Friday in the first game of the NCAA regional baseball tournament in Rochester.

I remember walking into Farrell’s Men’s Store in Middlebury my freshman year in college. Jimmy Farrell, the proprietor, shook my hand and asked my name. I told him and he immediately said, “You’re from Rutland.”

On Friday, April 15, the Middlebury College baseball team took on NESCAC archrival Williams in the first game of a big three-game weekend series. 

It’s a good thing the baseball bigwigs ended their bickering this spring when they did.