Jeff St. Onge, senior operations manager at Revolve Labs, said Thursday the company has gone to great lengths to prevent noise pollution at the proposed Windom location. The company plans to install 12-foot-tall berms along the property and an alarm system where residents can monitor decibels levels coming from the fans. He said the closest residents will experience sound levels of 41 decibels, similar to current levels there.

St. Onge said the facility would not affect energy prices for Windom residents and that the company chose the area due to its cool weather, good energy rates and proximity to wind farms.

Most of the 100 residents at Thursday’s public hearing appeared skeptical about the company’s claims. The most common concern was noise.

“I like the quiet out there,” said Jay B Kipfer, who lives across the street from the site of the proposed facility. “I go out there at night, I hear the coyotes, I hear all the crickets. You guys come in there, I won’t hear that anymore. It’ll be a totally different life out there, for me and everybody else, and that sound is gonna resonate across Cottonwood Lake.”

Others spoke of the effect on home values, with some speakers questioning whether crypto mining benefits society.

The volume of the murmuring crowd at times reached a decibel level of about 70, according to Tiffany Lamb, Windom’s development director. At one point, Cottonwood County Commissioner Norm Holmen said he couldn’t hear a question because of a box fan blowing behind him.

While the game looked every bit like the first of the season, with its requisite mistakes and misplays, it was clear from the outset that Camden was the more focused bunch.

The Patriots — the school retained the nickname it had when it was Patrick Henry — moved the ball well, with senior quarterback Jadis Hartman scoring on a 14-yard run in the first quarter.

Hartman’s score was noted pridefully by announcer Marques Zackary as the “first touchdown in Camden history,” bringing cheers from the fans.

Hartman, playing quarterback for the first time in his career, added a 14-yard scoring pass to junior receiver Patrick Mix in the second quarter, giving Camden a 12-0 lead.

A safety — one of the few mistakes the Patriots made all evening — made the score 12-2 at halftime.

Richfield, mistake-prone before halftime, settled in the third quarter and started to make inroads on the Camden defense. But Hartman, playing with confidence and poise, daggered Richfield’s hopes for a comeback when he ran 71 yards down the left side for a touchdown early in the fourth quarter, making the score 18-2.

MINNESOTA UNITED | ANALYSIS

Striker is soccer’s glamour position. It’s the forwards who score the goals and sell the jerseys, and it takes something pretty special for players at any other position to break through to that level of fan popularity.

Minnesota United played two strikers last week against Seattle, with a three-man midfield behind them. As the Loons travel to San Jose on Saturday to take on the last-place Earthquakes, it’s easy to focus on the glamour up front. It’s just not where the Loons themselves are necessarily focused.

New signing Kelvin Yeboah scored twice against Seattle. Breakout star and leading goal-scorer Tani Oluwaseyi will return from injury. The Loons still have veteran star Teemu Pukki, ready and willing to bang in a few more goals. It’s natural to ask: If they play more often with two forwards, which striker partnership might look the best, score the most and provide the most star power?

It’s instructive, though, that when you ask coach Eric Ramsay about playing with two strikers, he can’t help but end up talking about defense.

“The difficulty sometimes with playing with the two forwards is how you defend, and we’ve made a really big point about making sure that we get real aggression from how the wingbacks defend,” Ramsay said. “We don’t want the wingbacks defending as if they’re fullbacks in a flat back five, and we certainly don’t want them attacking in that way.”

Having three midfielders instead of two seems like it should be more defensive, not less. The positioning of the players, though, means the problem becomes the width of the field.

When the Loons play with three up front, the two widest forwards — Ramsay refers to them as “number 10s,” the designation usually used for attacking midfielders — can naturally drop back on either side to defend on the outside, across the midfield area. This means the wingbacks, whose natural spot on defense would be in a back line of five players, don’t have as much responsibility to bolt out of the back five and defend the opposition’s wide players in midfield.