Welcome to the 2013 Mule Fan Blog

Mule Fan "Back in Business" for 2013 Season

Retread Writing Staff Reassembled and Encouraged to "Try Again"

Former Co-Editor, Quiz Show Host and Writer’s Union Chief Bob Cohen said to be “Refreshed and Ready for Gig”; Contract Details Undisclosed

Graduation Imposed Three-Year Hiatus and Nasty Scrap with Management “All in the Past”

I’ve been sucked back into the vortex.  Willingly.  Blew the dust off the keyboard, turned the crank on the old computer, cracked a few knuckles, changed power on the readers, put some fresh batteries in the digital recorder and I’m ready to go.  To some of you, this Mule Fan space is all new.  But it has a history.  Born in the glorious state championship season in 2006, early editions were scrawled on a piece of butcher paper with a crayon and carried to La Fonda for a public reading on Tuesday nights.

Page views have continued to grow. By the looks of the counter below, team Bailey and Feste clearly added value through the years.   Passionate reporting, a nice new template and a fan base thirsty for more game week distraction and voila! People flat read this rag.  We know because subscription revenues have been on a northbound trajectory since those days of putting the first draft on papyrus.  The most recent board meeting produced some shocking figures.  “My how you’ve grown,” would have been an understatement.

A Bit of History

The original idea was that a dad of a varsity football player (usually a junior), who knew how to activate spell check and couldn’t run very fast, was usually forced, err “asked” to do the honors of writing to a fussy football audience with “entertain me” written all over their blue and gold kissers.   So back in the 2008 season, the job fell to your humble scribe, father of offensive tackle Matt Cohen and my partner in prose, Bobby Rosenthal father of the electrifying running back Red Rocket, Justin and recently graduated defensive back little bro Blake Rosenthal.  We had some fun, tried some new things and got just enough positive feedback to feed our fragile egos and got paid just enough to keep it interesting.  The free sausage wraps at halftime were just a bonus and didn’t affect our taxes.   Lulled into a semi-sense of accomplishment, we slept through the auto-renewal deadline without exercising the important termination clause, which resulted in an (at the time) unprecedented second year on the case, which just happened to coincide with the senior seasons of our oldest boys.  Following that riveting senior season, your humble scrivener put away his writing utensils and returned to football at AH Junior School with the “little one.”  Other willing dads came along by the name of Joey Feste and Jeff Bailey and carried on the tradition in a nearly unforgettable manner.  Feeling very full of itself after much acclaim and very little editing scrutiny, the Mule Fan writer’s union threw a “haymaker” to management by asking for recycled paper and jalepeño Kiolbassa sausages for the 2012 season.  As the story goes, this was a request so repulsive to the miserly Mule Fan management that an attempt was made to break the back of the Union and a full season passed with the weekly publication put in mothballs.   Clearly management underestimated the resolve of the Mule Fan Writer’s Union.  Even more clearly, the world spun on its axis and life carried on for Alamo Heights Mules football in 2012 without the Mule Fan which of course makes one wonder why the reinstated writing staff feels that there will be a single reader to this weekly scrawl.  Surely the fragile ego of your humble scribe will now be tested and pleas sent out to the Mule Nation to try and restart this once-purring engine of “fine journalism and quality reporting.”

Ready for a Ton o’ Fun!

To all of the newly minted varsity moms, dads, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and family veterinarians, and those like yours truly who are coming back for a second helping, we’re all going to have a blast and share great memories.   As one who has already soaked up one full delightful chunk of the varsity high school football experience I’d say my synapses are fully engaged and cranking like a hemi engine.  Yep.  Been there. LOVED that.  Of course, this reporter is a known certifiable nut-job when it comes to this stuff anyway.  But dozens of us witnessed mere mortal mommies turn into strange but delightful creatures that foamed at the mouth on Fridays and developed facial ticks after wrenching losses.  We have permission to get a little bit nuts for a few years.  It’s that much fun. Take it all in.  Every single bit of it.  When its over you have no choice but to behave like normal folks again.   It just happens.   Personally my preference was the mania.  My spouse appreciated the break.   But we knew we were just pressing pause for a few years until the youngest made his way up to the high school. For those of you saying, “this guy’s silly,” I can’t wait to wag my finger at you in a couple of years with the  “now, see” look on my face. 

To you veterans out there, thanks for indulging me to chronicle the experience again.  This reporter will step carefully back into the role and try to get to know all the players and coaches as quickly as possible.  If you are uncomfortable with some hand crafted sarcasm and good-natured humor and desire 100 percent pure X’s and O’s then this product will meet with your complete disapproval.   We plan on providing a carefully blended weekly concoction of whatever the heck pops into our heads.  But we promise it will be loosely based on Alamo Heights football 2013.

So here we go.  Let’s get rockin’ and bloggin’. Go Mules!!

This Week

The lid-lifter on the Mules home season and the first of three consecutive home games as Alamo Heights dials up another opponent from district 27-5A and the non-district annual rival Clark Cougars who finished 4-7 in 2012 and fourth in the district standings. Clark snagged the last playoff position in their district and extended their season with its first playoff appearance in two seasons.  They were eliminated by East Central in the Class 5A Division I bidistrict tilt. The Cougars are coming off an opening weekend 35-20 Gucci Bowl loss to Churchill.   Kickoff is at 7:30 at Harry B. Orem stadium. 

If you are a season ticket holder and have not yet picked up your tickets, plan on doing so at the AH Athletic Office this week or risk spousal ridicule or the inevitable “do I have to do everything??” comment.   It will be Football Parent Night where we will be introduced to the parents of our senior Mules as they parade to the center of the field arm in arm with their sons during pregame for a photo with Mary Candee.

Another Alamo Heights First Down

The full throated Rick Shaw returns for his 74^th consecutive season at the public address mic at Orem Stadium standing in vivid contrast to our opening week Farris Stadium public address announcer who was on loan from his day job as the official voice of “Lullaby Hour” at National Public Radio. It was the first time this reporter seriously desired a smart phone app that did public address subtitles.

Mules on the Air

Follow the Mules all season on KBUC Radio 92.5/93.3 FM That’s right - a two-station simulcast. What’s really cool is to lay on the floor with a radio aimed at your left ear at 92.5 and one on the other side blaring into the right ear at 93.3.  Dude…

You can also fire it up online at www.TSRNsports.com.   Caution:  None of these activities should be conducted in a bathtub.  There are easier ways to get a perm.

Former Mule Drew Allen in the Stat Sheet in Syracuse Debut

Former Mules QB and Oklahoma grad Drew Allen made his first college start over the weekend for the Syracuse Orangemen beginning his final year of eligibility in a nationally televised 23-17 loss to Penn State from the Met Life Stadium in the Meadowlands, New Jersey.  Drew went 16 for 37 for 189 yards and two interceptions.  

Cliché Corner

The Mule Fan strives to educate as well as entertain and inform.  So occasionally we'll engage in some good old fashion learnin'.  It is important to know the proper terminology for "fan speak" so rather than have you stumble we'll take you through some rigorous training.  To some of you, this will just be review.  

Which is a proper football cliché?  A. "Want to"  B. "Riboflavin"
Answer:  A It was a trick question.  Ex: "To win in this league our players have to have a lot of "want to."

“His Inside Voice” 

A weekly discussion with Mules Head Coach Mike Norment

The Mules dropped their opener to the O’Connor Panthers 41-28 at Farris Stadium.  Alamo Hieghts faced a tough 5A opponent with a lot of weapons.  Let’s examine the thoughts of second year Mules head coach Mike Norment on last week’s loss, hear a bit more about the team and look ahead to the home opener.

Mule Fan:  The first game is under your belt and there has been some time to review film and also reflect on the key takeaways for the Mules first action against an opponent for 2013.  What are the headline takeaways from your perspective?

Coach Norment: Looking at the positives, at times our defense played very, very well and stopped a very explosive offense.  At times our offense moved the ball against a very good defense.  And we had a great special teams play blocking a field goal and returning it for a touchdown.  So those are the positives.  When you’re playing a really good team, and O’Connor is a very good team that is going to win a lot of games, you can’t make more mistakes than they do.  And that’s what we did.  We were in the game but we didn’t give ourselves a chance to win the game because we made too many mistakes.  The good news is that all the mistakes we made are correctable.  We were fighting at the end.  We could have easily laid down and we didn’t.  The kids had a great attitude afterwards. They realized they needed to work harder.  So those were the positives. 

Mule Fan:  Alamo Heights fans had their first look at a new “no huddle” offense.  Tell us a little about the philosophy of this approach and what is different about this from what you’ve run in years past, how it works and how the guys did with it on Friday.

Coach Norment:  At times we did really good.   We’ve still got to get faster.  For a first game it worked pretty well.  Basically it is the same plays that we’ve always run here at Alamo Heights.  We just won’t huddle.  We’ve run that in the past but a lot of times we’d sit there and wait for the defense to line up and then we’d call a play.  Now we don’t really care what the defense does.  We’re going to try to up the tempo.  And that puts pressure on the defense. They can’t do as many things as they want because they don’t have a chance.  For example, O’Connor like to flip their team.  Well they couldn’t flip all their people and be where they wanted to be because we were about to snap the ball when the ball was blown live or pretty soon after that.  So it puts pressure on the defense for them not to be able to do what they want to do.  I think that gives us an advantage.  It’s the same plays but just at a much faster pace.  At times we were really clicking against O’Connor.  We need to go faster.

Mule Fan:  At the same time, it does put a premium on your team’s fitness especially on a night like Friday when the defense had to be on the field so much.

Coach Norment:  When you go three and out that’s not good because 30 seconds have gone off the game clock possibly and so it does make the defense have go possibly longer.  For Coach Moody’s defense, he says stop the offense and we won’t be out here very long.  So it is sort of a combination.  If you’re going fast on offense, we have to be in shape.  At the same time, the defense has to be in shape.  If you noticed, O’Connor started to go more up tempo also.  That’s a thing that starts causing problems for the defense.  We talked about doing it last year. At first we didn’t feel all that comfortable doing it.  We started looking at it in the spring and overall I think we’re in great shape putting in the “no huddle.”

Mule Fan:  Graduation affects every team differently each year.  On balance where did you lose experience from last year and where do you have it coming back?

Coach Norment:  We lost a lot of leadership on defense.  We had some great players. Two got scholarships (Klumpp and Uretsky) and they were leaders.  And so defense was probably hit a little bit harder than the offense experience-wise.  Offense was hit on the offensive line.  But that’s one of the great things about being a high school coach.  You see this turnover.  You get the kids that you get and you see them grow from their freshman year to their senior year.  We’ve talked about that. We want a lot of senior leadership and we’ve had a lot of seniors step up and become leaders.  That’s the great thing about high school.  Every year you’re going to see that.  This senior class has come together especially just recently.  I think they’re dedicated themselves.  We have a large senior class.  We have 41 guys that made it through four years and football is not easy.  That’s a testament to them and also the program.

Mule Fan:  You’ve been in this game a long time. Now that you’ve had that first year as a head coach what can you say was the biggest thing you learned as a first year head coach?

Coach Norment:  When you’re a position coach, you get to know a small group of kids very, very well.  You’re with them all the time.  The bad part is that I don’t get to spend that much time with a small group of kids like I did.  But I know more people better because I know everybody on the team now better than I did when I was a position coach.  I knew who they were and would talk to them but I didn’t know them as much as I did my guys.  So that’s different.  You also have to step back.  I’m an O-Line coach and keep on looking at the offensive line.  But now I’ve got to look at the quarterback, receivers, kicking game, the defense and things like that.  You have to look at the big picture much more.  That’s probably been the biggest change.

Mule Fan:  We have had a long series with Clark, another 5A school. They went back to the playoffs last year after two years away from them.  What should we expect this week?

Coach Norment:  I went to the Gucci Bowl vs. Churchill on Thursday night.  They’re a well-coached team.  They’re athletic on offense and defense.  They have big offensive linemen like they’re always had.  On offense they will either spread out or they will get back into a two tight end set and pound the ball. They had two quarterbacks that played in the game.  One is a little bit more of an athlete and one looks like he might be a bit better thrower but they both can throw the ball.  They have a big tight end that will split out.  So we have to prepare for a lot of different things.  We have to prepare for the spread offense and for the traditional Clark “two tight end, tackle over, pound the ball”.  On defense they run a 3-4 similar to us.  They’re very athletic and they run to the ball probably better than they have in the past.  So it is going to be a good game.  It’ll be a big challenge for us.  They suffered a loss.  We’re both looking for our first wins.  So it should be a good game.

Feedback

If you've made it this far this week, bless you.  Now here's the bargain we need to strike up.  At the moment, no deal has been struck with any co-writers.  By now we should have had our headhunters scraping through applications after a comprehensive global search.  In the meantime, we need your feedback and suggestions on what you'd like to see in future Mule Fan issues.  Do you want more of this or that?  More cartoons with witty captions or satellite photos of proper spacing on the 3-4 defense?     We'll take any ideas you want to put forward.  If anyone has a good muffin recipe, we may consider chunking that in there too.  No promises but we just might use it.  Handing us a note at a game written on a gum wrapper is not acceptable.  But tell us what you think!  We need this kind of feedback to keep the miserly thugs they call management around here off of our aching backs.   If you want to give us public feedback well just look down below and throw one in there.  If you'd rather just keep it between us, you can e-mail the editor at bobcohen@sbcglobal.net.  I'll make sure that our staff is briefed in our weekly meeting.  Thanks in advance!