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Wood River Robotics Hoopla Draws Kids Head to LEGO meet Thousands Page 3
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Kisiel Explains how Pet Companionship Improves our Health Page 7
N o v e m b e r 2 , 2 0 1 1 • Vo l . 4 • N o . 4 4 • w w w.T h e W e e k l y S u n . c o m
Wolverine Greg Lindbloom Sets School Football Records PHOTO & STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK
G COURTESY PHOTO
Commencement in Hailey for One Day BY KAREN BOSSICK
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lay McLeod Chapman was horrified when an English major killed 32 of his fellow students and wounded 25 others before committing suicide at Virginia Tech on Chapman’s boyhood turf. As a writer who’s always scouring the newspapers for tiny details that he can work into a story, Chapman was particularly intrigued with a small story describing how someone had spray-painted a threat on the front door of the shooter’s parents’ home. With the shooter gone, some people were looking for somebody to blame and the easiest target was Seung-Hui Cho’s parents, he reasoned. Chapman took that idea and turned it into a one-woman play that approaches a high school shooting from the perspective of three people—the mother of the shooter, one of the shooter’s victims and the mother of that victim. He wrote the play with the help of Hailey’s Company of Fools, which had commissioned him to write a piece. And he’ll bring the play to the Wood River Valley for one public performance on Friday at The Liberty Theatre in Hailey. New York-based actress Hanna Cheek, who has been performing the play in the United States and Canada, will also present two free school matinees at The Liberty Theatre and The Community School Theatre. And she will appear in an invitation-only performance at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in conjunction with its multidisciplinary “Awkward Age: Adolescence and Identity� project. It’s a piece so powerful it “will leave you wringing your hands in helpless empathy,� said a reviewer for See Magazine. “Ripped me into little tiny shreds, but I would see it again and again,� wrote a reviewer for Time Out New York. “It’s fascinating to have one person give voice to each of these perspectives—among them, a victim whom we don’t know whether she’s dead or alive,� said Company of Fools Core Artist John Glenn, who provided input to Chapman as Chapman wrote the play. “It’s a very immediate piece with three very different voices talking right to you,� said Fools Core Artist Denise Simone, who also provided feedback for Chapman. “I’m amazed at the sheer artistry of it. Clay is topical and irreverent and exciting—it’s so exciting as an artist to watch another’ artist’s journey.�
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reg Lindbloom got to play in two football games during his freshman year. And, at 100 pounds, he thought that might be the summation of his high school career. But the kid from Woodside started weight training, packing an additional 65 pounds of muscle onto his 5-foot-9 frame. And last week he bulldozed his way into the record books as he helped carry Wood River High School to its first winning season in 11 years—no small feat for a team that loses many of the best high school athletes in the Valley to Sun Valley’s ski and snowboard teams. “One of the greatest feelings in the world is when you run through the middle of the line and break a tackle and sprint for the end zone and hear the cheers,� said Lindbloom, whose philosophy is simply to put his head down and get as many yards as he can. “To go to the playoffs felt really good because the team has come a long way from last year. Everybody bought into Coach (Kevin) Stilling’s philosophy that we can be a good team, even though we don’t have as many players as other teams,� added the senior, who also plays inside linebacker when his team’s on defense. Lindbloom, the son of Todd and Jeannie Tupper, began playing Optimist-type football when he was eight. He got to play one year early because his sister Alex was on the team. And on an unseasonably warm Oct. 21 night several years later, Lindbloom picked up 153 yards and four touchdowns in Wood River’s 42-9 win over Canyon Ridge. And he ran off the field with new single-season rushing and scoring records of 1,358 yards and 20 touchdowns, breaking the school’s career mark with 1,795 yards and helping the 6-3 Wood River to its first winning season for the first time since 2000 when it finished 5-4. Taking advantage of the school’s combination shift/power style, Lindbloom added another 61 yards rushing, along with a touchdown and a completed pass for 39 yards, in Wood River’s 41-13 loss to an undefeated Blackfoot in the playoffs last Friday. “I feel like I’m getting more attention than I deserve. I couldn’t have done it
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“One of the greatest feelings in the world is when you run through the middle of a tackle and sprint for the end zone and hear the cheers.�
without the rest of the team,� Lindbloom said, attempting to share his accolades with his 24 team members. The work ethic that helped Lindbloom become a rusher to be reckoned with will translate into snowmobile racing this winter and the Army Rangers come next summer. Following in the wake of his father, Todd Tupper—a snowmobile racer who’s sponsored by Arctic Cat, and his brother, Trace Tupper—Lindbloom pursued snocross snowmobile racing for two years, careening around tracks with tight turns, banked corners, steep jumps and other obstacles on courses in Wyoming, Nevada and Utah. Three years ago, he began hill climb racing, which features snowmobiles racing up steep slopes to see who can make it farthest without careening back down the mountain. “The course is like a ski slalom—only you’re going uphill,� said Lindbloom. “It’s tough physically—you’re on the throttle the whole time. Snowmobile racing is a lot harder than most people think—and weight training and football help with that.� Lindbloom enlisted in the Army last
summer and plans to report to basic training at Fort Benning, Ga., on July 3. He’ll learn to parachute out of planes and then he’ll report to Ranger training, which has been called “the toughest combat course in the world.� “I took a class called ‘War in the Modern World’ and we watched a couple of movies that showed the Rangers—the Army’s elite. And it described their brotherhood, how they would sacrifice anything for each other. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I want to be a part of,� he said. Lindbloom will carry the reminder of the brotherhood that he found on the football team with him—in particular, his team’s victory against Jerome High School during Wood River’s homecoming game. “We’d been beaten by Jerome every year I’ve been in high school so it felt good to beat them,� he said. “Everyone on the team stepped up a lot after last season, working out in the off-season, working out after school. Goes to show what you can do when everybody’s on the same page.� tws
DID YOU KNOW?
This is just the Wolverines’ sixth season with six or more wins in 45 years. The last time they won six games was 1975. They tripled the scoring output from three years ago when Stilling took over—averaging 29.8 points per game from 8.4—while allowing just 14.9 points per game, down from 31.1 in 2009.
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