Any time that there’s a change in management with a university sports activities crew, there can be loads of new faces to be taught, and loads of acquainted faces taking over new roles.
With Kansas Baseball getting a brand new coach after the retirement of Ritch Value, there are many new faces to be taught. Over the following few weeks as we ramp as much as the beginning of the season, we’ll check out the crew, class by class. Up first are the freshman.
Title
Place
B/T
Top
Weight
Hometown
Excessive College
Mitchell Birdsall
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C
R/R
6-2
185lbs
San Joe, California
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Valley Christian
Kodey Shojinaga
C/INF
R/R
5-10
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195lbs
Honolulu, Hawaii
Mid-Pacific Institute
Cooper Kelly
INF
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S/R
6-1
180lbs
Overland Park, KS
Blue Valley Southwest
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Jackson Kline
OF
L/L
6-0
190lbs
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Kansas Metropolis, MO
Park Hill
Ike Cobb
RHP
L/R
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6-5
260lbs
Lawrence, KS
Lawrence
Parker Grant
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RHP
R/R
6-0
190lbs
Honolulu, Hawaii
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Maryknoll
Toby Haarer
RHP
R/R
6-0
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190lbs
Scottsdale, Arizona
Desert Mountain
Karter Muck
RHP
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R/R
6-2
170lbs
Kansas Metropolis, MO
St. Pius X
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Luke Metzker
RHP
R/R
5-11
190lbs
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Reno, Nevada
Bishop Manogue Catholic
Mitchell Birdsall-Birdsall is from San Jose, California, the place he attended Valley Christian Faculties earlier than he signed with Kansas as a freshman. His main place is catcher, however he additionally confirmed the power to play third and first. One factor he presents is a fast switch and quick launch, that are traits you search for in catchers. He has a whole lot of potential not solely behind the plate however swinging the bat as properly. I anticipate Birdsall to be taught from the upperclassman and can proceed to develop his skillset within the 2023 season.
Kodey Shojinaga-Shojinaga signed to play baseball at Kansas from Honolulu, Hawaii, the place he performed highschool baseball at Mid Pacific Institue. His main place is catcher, however he exhibits his versatility as he additionally performs first base and third base and might pitch. Head coach Fitzgerald stated this about Shojinaga, “Kodey was very spectacular this fall and acclimated shortly to enjoying a number of positions. He has a easy swing and an important perspective. He’ll think about instantly”.
Cooper Kelly-Kelly,a neighborhood product from Blue Valley Southwest highschool, selected to signal with the Kansas Jayhawks as a freshman. Kelly supplies head coach Dan Fitzgerald with some versatility, ” Cooper offers us nice choices as he can play all 4 infield spots. His switch-hitting capability additionally offers us some matchup choices offensively.” Kelly sports activities a powerful athletic construct which is seen on the plate. He additionally demonstrates his clean basic footwork within the area paired with good arm energy to throw runners out. As he beneficial properties expertise, he’ll turn into a great school baseball participant.
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Jackson Klein- Klein, one other native product who attended Park Hill Excessive College in Kansas Metropolis, Missouri, signed with Kansas as a freshman. Head coach Fitzgerald stated this about Klein, “Jackson fought via accidents this fall and got here on robust as soon as he was cleared. He is obtained an important left-handed swing and a really mature strategy.”
Ike Cobb-Cobb,who grew up down the road from the college, signed with the Jayhawks out of Lawrence Excessive College. The RHP has a whole lot of potential, particularly together with his dimension 6″5′, 260lbs. The massive righty instructions his fastball at 82-84 mph paired with a slider.
Parker Grant-Grant, like Kodey Shojinaga, involves Kansas from Honolulu, Hawaii as a freshman, the place he attended Maryknoll highschool. Grant is a right-handed pitcher with a fastball sitting at 85-87 mph, and this pitch is paired with a changeup and a slider. The changeup velocity sits round 72-76 mph, and the slider is 74-76 mph.
Toby Haarer-Haarer signed with the Jayhawks as a freshman from Scottsdale, Arizona, the place he attended highschool at Desert Moutain. He’s a right-handed pitcher with a fastball sitting within the 87-88 mph vary topping out at 89 mph. He additionally throws two secondary pitches, a slider, and a changeup. The slider sits constantly round 76 mph, and the changeup is 80 mph.
Karter Muck-Muck signed with the Jayhawks as a freshman after attending St. Pius X Excessive College in Kansas Metropolis, Missouri. Muck is a right-handed pitcher with a fastball sitting round 87-91 mph and a changeup clocking in at 82-83 mph. His third pitch is a curveball that has a velocity of 73-75 mph. Head coach Fitzgerald stated, “Karter has a plus fastball and is a very good athlete. He is a tough employee and an important teammate. Karter goes to be an important Jayhawk.”
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Luke Metzker-Metzker signed with the Jayhawks as a freshman from Reno, Nevada, the place he attended Bishop Manogue Catholic highschool. The correct-handed pitcher throws a fastball round 88 mph with two secondary pitches, a changeup, and a curveball. His changeup has a velocity between 70-79 mph and the curveball 68-72 mph.
Women Are Roasting The Kansas City Chiefs On Instagram
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On May 11th, Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker gave a commencement address to graduates from Benedictine College. During his speech to the private Catholic liberal arts college in Kansas, he suggested Pride Month was a “deadly sin,” condemned abortion rights, and informed women that they had “the most diabolical lies” told to them (after he quoted a Taylor Swift song earlier in his speech, of course).
He went on to speak about his wife, Isabelle, claiming she would be the first to say that “her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother” and that he was able to be the man who he is because his wife embraced one of the most important titles of all: being a homemaker.
After Harrison gave his speech, it not only garnered a direct response from the NFL stating that Harrison’s views were not those of the NFL as an organization but also widespread backlash from people across the country. But while a lot of people have vocalized their disgust about the commencement address on their own personal social media accounts, women have begun to leave sarcastic comments about their “abilities as a woman” directly on the Kansas City Chiefs’s Instagram account — and they’re brutal in the best way possible.
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1.
Here are some of the top comments that were left on multiple Chief’s Instagram posts, like this woman who’s sad she won’t be able to attend any more games because of her “true vocation.”
2.
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Or this woman who said her life hasn’t begun because she’s not married to a man yet.
3.
It seems like snack time is vital for this couple.
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4.
This commentor also wants some clarification.
5.
A woman watching men on TV? Not in this household.
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6.
Sorry, gotta skip the game, the kitchen is calling.
7.
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Maybe this person’s husband is nice enough to give permission. Fingers crossed.
8.
Who needs thoughts when you have a husband, am I right?
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9.
Shoot, I bet our 84 cents to the dollar won’t even be worth anything.
10.
I would be concerned, too.
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11.
This woman doesn’t even believe she’s considered to be “alive” before marriage.
12.
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Even the men are wondering what they can do with their wives now.
13.
At least this man is honest about his wife’s “abilities.”
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14.
It’s a valid question.
15.
Finally, does anyone know the answer to this question?
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Do you have any thoughts about Harrison Butker’s commencement speech? Tell us in the comments below.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) – Friday is the 70th anniversary of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case that ruled segregation in schools unconstitutional. It forever changed the face of public education and Kansas schools say today the work continues to make students of all races feel equally supported.
“When I think about it being only 70 years, that’s not a long time,” said former Shawnee Mission Public Schools DEI coordinator Dr. Tyrone Bates.
As local educational leaders throughout the Kansas City area explain, progress toward racial equality in schools hasn’t always been linear.
“The Supreme Court justice’s opinion was not that schools should be segregated because it was the right thing to do but rather African Americans were inept, they were not qualified to teach students of color,” said Bates.
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Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools officials say looking back at the past 70 years, its schools have become more diverse. Currently, its student population is 60 percent Hispanic, 30 percent black, and multiracial.
“I believe that all of our students need access to dual language programs, multilingual resources, resources outside of their community to help support the community,” said KCKPS diversity, equity, and inclusion executive director Dr. Canise Salinas-Willich.
The district’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion department works with other departments to create programs and policies that are inclusive for all students. Students have also been given the chance to share their personal experiences and give feedback that can create real change in the district.
“Our investment in our students is evident as we invest in their voices and we invest in making sure that we bring quality education, quality work into the classroom,” said Salinas-Willich.
Meanwhile, Dr. Bates now works in consulting but during his tenure with SMSD, he established equity practitioners. These are staff members who learn how to support each building in the district. He also established employee resource groups that support staff members who are part of marginalized groups.
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“I’m proud of the fact that many administrators were doing whatever they could to break down barriers and bridges between students of different backgrounds,” said Bates.
Last year, a black student at Shawnee Mission East High School was called a racial slur by another student and attacked. Bates explains how this is an example of how racism still exists in schools and communities.
“There’s still work to be done around understanding racial equity, understanding racial justice. There’s a tremendous difference between the two. Racial equity is about improving outcomes. Racial justice is about breaking down hierarchies so we don’t have glass ceilings for people who are not in economic power,” he said.
Bee farmer Jimmy Lunsford handles a hive at Ioway Bee Farm, the largest tribal apiary in North America. Credit: Mark Birnbaum Productions / American Heart Association
When one of the elders in the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska asked if he could keep bees on the reservation, Tim Rhodd’s answer was straightforward: “Absolutely.”
Soon, the bees started buzzing in the alfalfa fields. Then they started pollinating.
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Then they all died.
“Once we started looking into it, we found there was a chemical (class) called neonicotinoid that caused the death of these bees,” said Rhodd, the tribe’s chairperson. “That was the very, very first part of what I had seen that we were doing things wrong.”
Facing the reality that their soil was contaminated—and the realization that the same harmful insecticides that killed the bees would be bad for them, too—the Ioway started questioning their farming practices.
After receiving a grant in 2019, the tribe switched its farming operations from monocropping—growing one plant in the same soil, year after year—to regenerative agriculture, a process designed to promote biodiversity and soil health by minimizing disturbances and maintaining living roots as much as possible.
By caring for a rotation of diverse crops throughout the year—rather than controlling the soil year-round for just one seasonal crop—farmers eliminate the need for herbicides and pesticides.
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Moving away from monocropping is as much a challenge to standard practice as it is a physical feat. The so-called Green Revolution in the 1960s changed industrial farming to address food shortages by ushering in the extensive use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Working to improve the yield of a single crop became the norm, thanks in part to profitability and operational efficiency.
But monocropping has been shown to damage soil health, and farmers’ reliance on pesticides and herbicides can harm pollinators and water supplies while insects and weeds rapidly develop resistance to the chemicals.
“Just monocropping, eventually you use up all of your nutrients,” said Olivia Brien, tribe member and its director of communications. “And what happens is that you run out of the nutrients to grow good food, so then you’d have a desert. It becomes a desert.”
The tribe’s Ioway Farms operation has implemented regenerative practices and indigenous methods across 2,400 acres of row crop production and 2,500 acres of pastureland in rural northeast Kansas, near White Cloud. The tribe runs Ioway Farms along with several other ventures—including a bee farm, a seed company, a hemp farm and an orchard that includes pears, peaches, plums and apples.
The farm generates vital revenue for the tribe and helps the Ioway, also known as the Báxoje, reconnect with their culture—and the land. The tribe found historical evidence that diverse irrigation processes mimicking a more natural system had been in place on the land within the past 200 years.
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Lance Foster, tribal historic preservation officer and former vice chair for the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, stands atop a burial mound site dating from 1200 to 1400. Credit: Walter Johnson Jr./American Heart Association
“Holism is about everything being parts of the whole,” said Lance Foster, tribal historic preservation officer and former vice chair of the tribe. “You cannot have health without the land. You cannot have good food without the land. The Ioway don’t have a word for wilderness, because to us, it wasn’t wild. It was our home.”
The tribe also started practicing adaptive multi-paddock grazing, a system of managing livestock to mimic the constantly moving herds that once roamed the prairies so that their grazing patterns encourage more biodiversity in the soil.
“Once we have our healthy soils, we’ll be able to have healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy humans,” Rhodd said.
That includes the bees. A 2019 study in the journal Global Change Biology found the United States is among the countries where the increasing number of pollinator-dependent crops—such as soybean—has far outpaced the diversity of crops that bloom at different times, giving bees a year-round habitat.
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Credit: American Heart Association
At Ioway Farms, flowering plants line the border of crops.
“Nature hates one crop; it hates a monoculture,” said Eric Fuchs, a consultant with Understanding Ag, a regenerative agriculture consulting company that works with the tribe to implement regenerative practices.
“So, we want to see diversity. A lot of the fields, we’ll have pollinator strips around the edge, and we’ll have multi-species cover crops planted. There is living root in the soil at all times. There will always be something when you come to the Iowa tribe that will be green.”
The decision to move away from monocropping was an easy one, tribal leaders say, even if the work involved has been difficult. The Ioway believe making their land more diverse and productive year-round is the key to solving challenges from sustainability to food security to soil health.
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“There are a lot of different definitions of regenerative,” Fuchs said. “From my perspective, it’s leaving things better than they started out. A lot of things in agriculture over the last 100 years or more, it seems like it’s a ‘take, take, take’ agriculture. We do things … that actually improve the soil for future generations.”
They’re seeing signs of success already. Improvements in the quality of the tribe’s soybean yield have paved the way for valuable business with tofu producers, for example.
“We’re actually developing new markets that we’ve never had before,” Rhodd said. “I’m very proud to say that the farm team has had 100% food production across all of our acres. That’s been one of our goals, and we met that goal.”
In the fall, Ioway farmers harvest the crop they planted the previous year and follow directly behind the combine harvester with a seeder, planting cover crops such as rye, along with turnip or radish. The cover crops grow through the winter, and in the spring, the Ioway flatten them to keep the ground temperature lower, control weeds and provide nutrients for the next layer of soybean or corn.
“It makes you feel pretty good when you’re driving around in December and stuff is green—not dead,” said Kyle Rhodd, the manager of Ioway Farms and brother of the tribe’s chairperson. “It’s pretty amazing to see.”
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Kyle said the move to regenerative agriculture has been transformational for the tribe. And it’s changed the way he sees the soil.
“I honestly didn’t look at the soil as a living thing,” Kyle said. “I just looked at it as dirt. Going along on this journey, it makes you realize there is so much more than just dirt on the ground. … There are living organisms down there that are getting taken away from all the chemicals being used.
“With a biology in the soil, making that all mesh—it’s already there. Why do that synthetically when you can let nature take its course?”
The Ioway have seen the benefits of caring for the soil in the quality of their produce.
“After one year of regenerative principles, the Ioway came back and said their tofu beans had a better, nuttier flavor and yielded better,” Fuchs said.
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“What we’re seeing is what’s happening in the soil—healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy food. … We have seen changes that impact all over the country. The way we grow food—the health of our food, the nutrient density of our food—it’s a broken system.
“This type of agriculture is a learning curve, but it can be done.”
A review of research, published in 2017 in the journal Nutrition Reviews, found diversifying crops may improve diets and nutrition outcomes in people living in low- and middle-income countries.
The Ioway believe that’s what regenerative agriculture will do for them. They say providing fresh, nutrient-rich produce for local tribal members and neighbors in their rural area of northeast Kansas—where access to healthy food is limited—will help them take ownership of their own health and reconnect to their land.
“All of us are indigenous to somewhere,” Brien said. “All of our ancestors understood that you have to live in balance, and we aren’t currently living in balance. That change is going to be difficult, but it’s for the best. It’s wonderful. It’s a beautiful thing.”
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Provided by
American Heart Association
Citation:
To save their soil, Kansas tribe shifts to regenerative agriculture—and transforms their farms (2024, May 17)
retrieved 17 May 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-05-soil-kansas-tribe-shifts-regenerative.html
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