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Rut-row, Shaggy; team has Scrappy volleyball bunch

By Shawn Linenberger - | Sep 12, 2001

Tonganoxie volleyball coach Tiffany Parker referred to her team as “scrappy” after defeating Atchison in three games at a quadrangular last Thursday in Bonner Springs.

The Chieftains lost the first game, 15-3, and trailed early in the other two, but came back with big runs and won the match. The win stretched their record to 2-1.

Scrappy is used profusely in sports to describe a team that just won’t go away. The word should not be confused with “scrappie,” a usually fatal disease of sheep and goats, marked by chronic itching, loss of muscular coordination and progressive degeneration of the central nervous system.

The American Heritage Dictionary describes “scrappy” in three ways. The first definition is: composed of scraps; fragmentary. Nope, this doesn’t really describe Parker’s team. They played pretty well as a unit.

Definition 2 reads: quarrelsome, contentious. The team might have gotten frustrated at times, but there weren’t major outbursts with the referees or with each other.

Ah, definition 3 reads: full of fighting spirit. We have a winner. The Chieftains have this characteristic. The team looks pretty hungry for victories after last year’s 9-24 campaign.

With all this talk of being scrappy, Parker should introduce a mascot to represent her team. Who better than Scrappy, the nephew of novice crime investigator Scooby Doo. Sure, he stands at about two feet in his bare paws, but he’s feisty. If the Chieftains continue to play as they did against Atchison in their third match of the season, this team should be quite scrappy when sub-State rolls around in late October.