TWTW: Krauth gets his title; Vikings get rematches in the regionals
March moves at breakneck speed in the sports world.
Locally, we’ve got the Summit League tourney going on right now — I’ll be there today after being in Watertown for girls state basketball Thursday and Rochester for the NSIC tournament on Saturday.
I’ll be in Mankato on Saturday for the men’s Central Region tournament while the Augie women are in Topeka, Kan., for the women’s tournament. The Storm’s home opener is Sunday, the Stampede are still in the running for the Anderson Cup, the boys state tournaments are this weekend — there’s so much going on it’s almost hard to find time to completely ignore the World Baseball Classic.
The Augie teams found out Sunday night that they’ll both be playing conference foes in the NCAA tournament, with the sixth-seeded women taking on three-seed Concordia-St. Paul and the men getting a three-seed and a rematch with sixth-seed Upper Iowa.
That means the women’s NSIC regular season champion will be taking on the tournament champion, because, of course, the Vikings (as predicted by me) won the NSIC tourney to capture the first conference championship of any kind in their program’s history. Dave Krauth is closing in on 500 career wins and will be going to his 13th NCAA tournament, but in 24 years he’d never led the Vikings to a league crown, and in the last couple seasons, his players had become more and more vocal about wanting to give him one.
They failed to do that in the regular season, and I do mean failed, because with the way the season started, it was theirs for the taking. That may have ended up helping them in this tournament. The Vikings were motivated to win a title for their coach, yes, but they were equally motivated by the fact that the conference tournament represented a second chance.
Dave Krauth was the very first person I ever interviewed for the Argus Leader, and I’ve been covering his team since 2003, so it was easy for me to be happy for Dave and his team. They’ve had a lot of success over the years, but teams like UND, SDSU, NDSU and USD often stood in the way of them hanging a banner. I’ve seen them come close and suffer some heartbreaking losses, but now they can finally hang ‘champions’ from the Elmen Center rafters. Krauth certainly didn’t want to make it all about him afterwards, but I still think the whole thing meant a lot to him, and I’m sure lots of people inside and outside of the Augie program were happy to see him get his title.
