Raymond Johnson @ downclimb.com

I was saddened to hear that Brad Penrith had been fired from his duties as head wrestling coach at the University of Northern Iowa. When Don Briggs was fired after the 1996-1997 season, Penrith was my #1 pick. Fortunately for UNI, we got Mark Manning and Penrith came as an assistant. Manning is a class act, and Nebraska was wise to hire him away. I liked Penrith from day one and was happy to see him take over the job. I liked his humor, how he treated his athletes, and how he treated me. Under Penrith, UNI wrestling had a number of highly successful wrestlers, although team results against top-caliber competition were generally lacking. I was especially proud of UNI wrestling's academic successes, a sign Penrith was recruiting high-quality kids both on and off the mat. UNI did not wrestle well this year, but I understood that Penrith, in year one of a three-year contract, was redshirting some talent and bringing in a good class of recruits in the hopes of having a much stronger te...

How's this for an amusing trip down memory lane? Ten years ago, on the eve of the millennium, the big " Y2K ," I was reporting for work in the basement of Gilchrist Hall at the University of Northern Iowa . I was to staff the university's "Y2K Command Center," the strategic hub of UNI's efforts to thwart any disasters due to Y2K. As we now know, very little happened due to Y2K. The fear was that any digital device that recorded dates with only two digits wouldn't know how to properly handle a year "00" and would behave unpredictably. This was a valid concern, but not a surprise so almost all such problems were fixed months ahead of time. Midnight came and went, and things were pretty quiet around UNI. One of our maintenance staff discovered a ventilation fan not working properly (for non-Y2K reasons) and that was it. All the professional staff went home a couple hours after midnight, but Robert Shontz (great student, individual, and c...