Being an athletics coach of any kind can be stressful for anyone. There’s so much to do when it comes to developing strategies, recruiting and retaining players, setting up effective practices, and looking for that sometimes fleeting win.
But it’s even tougher for Land O’ Lakes High School cross-country coach Kris Keppel, who is now starting his third decade in his job, however, doing it while battling pancreatic cancer.
His team, his coaches and his community believe in him, however, and are doing everything they can to make Keppel the top vote-getter in the 2014 Brooks Inspiring Coaches Award.
“He’s just one of the strongest men I’ve ever met,” Noah Thomas, 17, told reporter Michael Hinman. “All throughout this, he’s still been there for us, and he’s still pushing us hard, and we push back for him.”
Just for being a finalist, Keppel has won $5,000 in equipment and apparel for his team, but he’s aiming to get more for his runners when he heads to Seattle in August to learn who will win the grand prize.
Read more about the award and how he almost didn’t get nominated by picking up this week’s print edition of The Laker. Or you can read the story in our online e-edition for free, right now, by clicking here.
And if you haven’t already, consider voting for Keppel by clicking here.
Football players at Northwestern University made news last spring when they voted to unionize, demanding they deserve compensation for what they do through a system that makes billions of dollars annually based on the product they create.
But most people disagree athletes should be paid, according to a new national poll from Saint Leo University. That survey of 1,016 people had 66 percent agreeing with the statement that receiving a scholarship and a chance to earn a degree is fair compensation for playing in a college sport.
“It was definitely surprising,” Drew Gold, executive director of the Saint Leo Polling Institute, told reporter Michael Murillo. “I don’t think anybody expected it to be that overwhelmingly against paying the athletes.”
To read more about the survey, check out this week’s print edition of The Laker, or read the story in our free e-edition by clicking here.
We all remember what it was like to learn languages like Spanish and French while in school. But what about ancient Greek?
Hunter Rasmussen was just a sophomore at Berean Academy in Lutz when he first started learning biblical Greek. Now a 20-year-old student at Covenant College in Georgia, he’s made it his life work — work he has now taken to Thailand in a recent trip.
“I just loved it. I thought it was the most incredibly thing,” Rasmussen told reporter B.C. Manion. “That made me excited not just about biblical languages, but language in general. I just felt so convinced that this is what I am supposed to do.”
Rasmussen ended up in Thailand thanks to Wycliffe Bible Translators USA, which had visited his college looking for people just like him. It was a trip complete with many life lessons for Rasmussen.
“Part of the trip is leaning and realizing that language-learning and cultural-learning is not only foundational for Bible translations and foundational of ministry, but that language learning it itself a ministry,” he said.
Learn more about Rasmussen and the Thai village he visited in this week’s print edition of the Lutz News, or read our free online edition by clicking here.
All of these stories and more can be found in this week’s The Laker/Lutz News, available in newsstands throughout east and central Pasco County as well as northern Hillsborough County. Find out what has your community talking this week by getting your local news straight from the only source you need.
If The Laker/Lutz News is not coming to your door, call us to see where you can get your copy at (813) 909-2800, or read our free e-edition by clicking here.
