Beulah travels to No. 1 Shanley

• Trevor Zacher

Press Photo by Dustin Monke Beulah seniors, left to right, Trevor Zacher, Mitchell Mattheis and Mark Muscha tackle Dickinson Trinity senior Brendin Steiner on Oct. 9 during a Class 2A footblal game at the Biesiot Activities Center. Freshman Josh Remmick assists on the play.

Talk about it

Beulah head football coach Jim Dooley isn’t going to lie, the Miners have a tough road ahead of them.

The No. 3-ranked Miners travel to No. 1-ranked Fargo Shanley for the Class 2A semifinal at 1:30 p.m. Saturday at Sid Cichy Stadium in Fargo.

“We not overly confident going in,” Dooley said. “It’s quite a task for us.”

Since moving down to Class 2A in 2009, the Deacons have reached the semifinal game every season. On top of that, Shanley is 6-0 in playoff games at Sid Cichy Stadium.

“Shanley is a tough team,” Beulah senior quarterback Trevor Zacher said. “They’ve been in the championship for many years. They won quite a few state championships and they know how to play in this game.”

The Miners are comfortable throwing or running the ball. Dooley said this team has changed the way he game plans. They don’t go in the set idea of establishing the pass or run.

“We’ve had games where we rushed for nearly 500 yards and other games we’ve throw for around 300,” Dooley said. “If you load up the box, we have Trevor at quarterback and some quality receivers Cody Nelson, Brett Koch and Patrick Becker, even Karson Hintz out of the backfield. We think we have a lot of alternatives.”

Sid Cichy Stadium has a turf field and Beulah is familiar with that terrain. The Miners have played at the Bismarck Community Bowl, the Biesiot Activities Center in Dickinson and their preseason game was on turf.

“You can cut and it seems like you are faster on turf, but that’s for them too,” Zacher said. “It doesn’t really matter for us. We can adapt and play no matter what the condition is.”

Dooley said Zacher, a 6-foot-4, 192-pound quarterback, is the best quarterback he has coached in his 20 plus years of being a head coach.

“For example, on Monday he was watching some film and texted me about some ideas and I was thinking the same thing,” Dooley said. “We were thinking along the same lines.”

The Miners have experience playing in adverse weather during the playoffs. During the quarterfinal 36-21 win against Wahpeton, there was heavy snowfall.

“If that happens again, it could be to our advantage,” Zacher said. “I don’t think they had to play through that and we already did it once. We know how that works. It’s not supposed to be like that, but this is North Dakota the weather can change.”

Dickinson swimmers ready for West Region meet

At the beginning of the season, Williston swimming and diving head coach Thomas Wheeling said it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for the Coyotes to be crowned West Region champions.

Dickinson, which co-ops with Williston, believes they have a chance to achieve that goal, but knows Minot and Bismarck Century are going to be a tough competitors at the West Region meet, which begins at 8 a.m. on Saturday in Bismarck.

“It would definitely be nice to win overall,” Dickinson Trinity junior Ketti Ringwall said. “Minot and Century are really tough this year. We just have to work together and get good times.”

One area Dickinson freshman Leah Grove looks to throughout the course of this season is the stability in times from the swimmers.

“I think our times have been pretty consistent,” Grove said. “I’m hoping we should drop time by WDA and get faster times.”

Though the swimmers have started to tapper a little bit, Grove said with the extra drag on during practice it doesn’t get any easier.

“During tapper people think it might be easy for us, but with all the drag on everything is much harder,” she said. “You feel slow during practice, but during meets you feel faster.”

Ringwall said a majority of the tapper will come the week before the state meet starting on Nov. 9 in Bismarck.

“We think of it as important, but we tapper much more for state than WDA,” Ringwall said. “This week we have our drag on, which we normally do. We’re hoping to take time off with the little tapper we are doing.”

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