SPORTS
College basketball Krzyzewski’s Blue Devils beat Division II Cal Poly Pomona in exhibition/3B
SALISBURY POST
Ronnie Gallagher, Sports Editor, 704-797-4287 rgallagher@salisburypost.com
Associated Press
CHARLOTTE — Steve Smith never had a chance to celebrate his 600th career catch. He was too busy feeling dejected and small. It’s been a bizarre and frustrating 2010 for Smith, the Carolina Panthers’ four-time Pro Bowl receiver. From breaking his arm playing flag football to watching his quarterbacks struggle amid mounting losses to being sidelined for a game with a sprained ankle, Smith is short on wins and numbers this year. Sunday’s loss to St. Louis was the low point despite his milestone. Smith’s fourth-quarter fumble in Carolina territory set up the Rams’ clinching score in their 20-10 win. Smith also had two drops, one being particularly embarrassing.
N.C. Shrine Bowl roster includes 3 area players
“When I came across the middle and I was stumbling a little and the ball hit my facemask, man, that was horrible,” Smith said. “I’m 5-9, I SMITH probably felt like I was 3-foot-2. I wanted to crawl into a hole.” It overshadowed his nine catches for 85 yards, the last of which was the 600th of his 10-year career. “I was made aware that was my 600th catch, but it such a crummy game it was bad,” Smith said. “I’ve got nine more games to change that. We’ve got nine more games to change the way, if we win or lose, how people will see the Carolina Panthers.”
See SMITH, 6B
1B
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Smith feeling small BY MIKE CRANSTON
FRIDAY November 5, 2010
BY BRET STRELOW bstrelow@salisburypost.com
jon c. lakey/SALISBURY POST
WEST’S CHARLES HOLLOWAY
A pair of West Rowan players earned special recognition at last year’s Shrine Bowl. Two more Falcons have been picked to participate this year. Defensive back Domonique Noble and offensive lineman Charles Holloway, along with A.L. Brown offensive lineman Sheldon Saddler, are on the North Carolina roster that was released Thursday. The N.C. all-stars will face South Carolina on Dec. 18 at Wofford’s Gibbs Stadium in Spartanburg, S.C. West graduates K.P. Parks (offense) and Chris Smith (defense) collected MVP awards last year after helping lead North Carolina to a 24-14 victory.
NOBLE
SADDLER
“It’s a program-wide honor and program-wide selection because those players are really, really good and deserve everything, but I think our success has a lot to do with it,” West Rowan head coach Scott Young said.
See SHRINE BOWL, 6B
FRIDAY FOOTBALL FEVER
Friday Night
‘Mighty Mites’ amazed Linder fter the 1959 football season was in the books, Rowan County Coach of the Year Lope Linder gave his China Grove team the ultimate compliment. “They played football the way it was supposed to be played,” Linder told MIKE LONDON the Salisbury Post. The Red Devils didn’t win the South Piedmont Conference title. They were a third-place team with an 8-2 record, but for a 21-man squad with light running backs and slightly bigger linemen who played both LINDER ways, they did as much with as little as any team ever has. “Some of us wouldn’t have been second-team or third-team on some of the teams that we beat,” said Don Safrit, who started at guard on offense and nose tackle on defense despite weighing only 160 pounds. “But when you play as a unit, you can accomplish a lot. That year was the epitome of a team effort.” Halfback Robbie Kluttz turned in an amazing sea-
A jon c. lakey/SALISBURY POST
East Rowan defender Jordan Hopper (7) chases North Iredell quarterback Jacob Queen. East visits South Rowan tonight.
East, South resume rivalry Roaming the county getting ready for tonight ... here are some games that really mean something to Rowan County football fans. Three titles are on the line. If West Rowan beats North Iredell, it’s the outright NPC champ. If Salisbury wins on the road at East Davidson, it’s the RONNIE outright CCC GALLAGHER champ. • If North Rowan wins on the road at South Davidson, it’s the outright YVC champ. And then there’s the matchup in Landis between East Rowan (1-9) and South Rowan (2-8). Nothing on the line? Both coaches know bet-
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ter. They’ll tell you it means just as much as the others. “It’s a game, isn’t it?” South’s Jason Rollins ROLLINS exclaimed. “It always means something.” East coach Chad Tedder agreed, saying, “It means a lot to us. No. 1, it’s a county rival. Depending on what East Rowan person you ask, South Rowan is our biggest rival.” One reason to visit Landis is to see what could be Mark McDaniel’s last game in Raider red. The South senior is one of the county’s most versatile players, but he’s banged up. He left last week’s loss at Statesville midway through the second quarter with a bad ankle and has
Games at 7:30 P.M.
North Iredell at West Rowan East Rowan at South Rowan Salisbury at East Davidson North Rowan at South Davidson North Davidson at Davie County AL Brown at Concord been getting treatment all week. “It’s sore,” Rollins said. Banged up or not, expect McDaniel to play. If he plays, that’s a problem for the Mustangs. “He’s a good athlete,” Tedder said. “We just have to keep him contained. He’s going to get the ball. But we
really don’t look at stopping one person. We make sure our defensive alignment is right and balanced. We do our responsibilities, and one person isn’t going to kill us.” Stay tuned.
South and East are both in rebuilding years after ninewin seasons. A win tonight could be a giant step toward 2011. “We’re taking it as kind of a building block into next year,” Rollins said. It was a rough first year as a head coach for Tedder, but not a negative one. “Any first head (coaching) position is always tough on you mentally and physically,” he said. “The wins and losses were tough. I expected us to be a little better than our record shows.
See GALLAGHER, 4B
son and was picked for the Shrine Bowl. “I weighed 140 pounds, and we went up against a few giants,” Kluttz said. “But we just loved to play football. That’s all it was, really. We loved to play.” The Red Devils earned the nickname “Mighty Mites” because the largest Devils were 174-pound junior tackles Jerry Poole and Clint Eudy, who would start for North Carolina in the early 1960s. “Some teams lifted weights,” halfback Phil Wise said. “We didn’t. All we had was farmboys who bundled hay and cut wheat. But we had a will and a drive.” There were eight seniors — Kluttz, Wise, Safrit, linemen Charles Lentz, Larry Hampton and Donnie Sechler, fullback Robert Rudisell and quarterback Fritz Slough, the ace pitcher for the Kannapolis American Legion team. It was the season China Grove beat A.L. Brown and Concord back-to-back, two of the more satisfying wins in Linder’s long career. Ask a “Mighty Mite” about that game at Kannapolis’ Memorial Stadium against the Wonders and he’ll get emotional. It was one of the most memorable nights of their lives. Safrit recalls there were 27 Red Devils when the season started, but dropouts and injuries eventually pared the squad to 21.
See LONDON, 5B
Common Sense delves into picks, postseason pods n the 1956 science-fiction classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” regular humans — well, as regular as any Californians can be — start disappearing. They are being cleverly replaced by impostors, perfect duplicates being grown from giant, plant-like pods that have invaded our planet. In less time than it takes Romar Morris to run 80 yards, these Pod People are well on their way to replacing the entire human race. Common Sense will not reveal the
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fate of humanity in case you haven’t seen the original film or the remake, but the movie is worth mentioning today because we will be dealing with pods and pod people again very soon. The NCHSAA has tried its best to tweak a playoff system that had East Rowan venturing nearly as far last fall as the body-snatching pod people traveled to Earth from outer space. You probably recall that East’s reward for winning a first-round
home game was a four-hour, secondround trip to Havelock, which is near Morehead City. That had to be expensive. The new system is expected to save thousands of travel miles, hours and dollars. The playoff process will start once again with determining the 64 playoff qualifiers in each classification. We’ll still have eight classes and eight trophies — 1A, 1AA, 2A, 2AA, 3A, 3AA, 4A and 4AA.
Next, the average daily membership (ADM) figures will determine which 32 schools are large (AA) and which 32 are small (A) in each class. GPS systems will be activated, and each group of 32 will be divided into the 16 easternmost and 16 westernmost schools. The next step will be to seed teams 1 through 16 based on conference standings and overall records.
See COMMON, 4B