Bob Smeins lives on the hillside overlooking Iowa's other field of dreams. On Friday nights in the fall Smeins has always liked to sit on his deck and watch the Aplington-Parkersburg High Falcons play football. The rest of the year, he liked to sit on his deck and watch a legend tend to the grass. It has been called the Carpet, the Sacred Acre and, officially, Ed Thomas Field, after the 58-year-old coach who laid down the sod. Thomas walked that field every morning, yanking weeds, killing dandelions, fertilizing the soil, kneeling down to study blades of grass for dreaded brown spots—the surest sign of chemical imbalance.

I will be posting thoughts and observations about high school football, boys hoops, and maybe a few other subjects at Twitter.com.

Follow my thoughts here

Canton- Are the other seven football teams in the Junior World Championship that bad or is the United States just that good? We will find out Sunday at 1 p.m. That's when Canada and the United States - the No. 1 and No. 2 seeded teams, respectively, in the inaugural event for players 19 and under - will play for the gold medal in Fawcett Stadium. The title game will end the nine-day, eight-nation tournament.

North Canton- It might have been the first time in his 26 seasons as a head football coach that Chuck Kyle has ever practiced against a prospective opponent. Team USA and Team Sweden, part of the inaugural Junior World Championship, held a joint practice at Walsh University on Monday, even though they could end up meeting in the second round of the eight-team international tournament that gets under way with four games Saturday.

CLEVELAND — Chuck Kyle remembers the phone calls his father took at 5 a.m. It was the steel mill calling. The job didn't start for another hour or so. "He had to find out before he would go in the car what kind of tonnage they got the night before, or if there were any problems," Kyle said. "He couldn't wait to get there.