September 2019

TOWN OF MIDDLETON–In another sign of the crumbling relationship between the Friends of Pope Farm Conservancy and the town board, the Friends group said it will withdraw from maintenance activities at the conservancy.

In an August 15 letter from the Friends to the Town of Middleton board, the volunteer group stated that:

“The Friends have had too many differences with the Town in recent years, and those differences have increased to a point where the Friends no longer wish to be involved with the physical maintenance of the property and the interaction with the Town that it requires.”

Instead, the Friends want to concentrate on the educational activities it has developed with the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District (MCPASD and the public at the 102-acre property on Old Sauk Rd.

After home games at Otto Breitenbach Stadium, most of Middleton’s football team heads down University Avenue to Middleton Sport Bowl to relax, chill, gobble down pizza and scroll through their social media feeds.

After giving up a program-record 61 points in a setback to rival Verona two weeks ago, senior defensive lineman Jake Wuebben and his friends were a little shell-shocked — as if a 61-35 drubbing wasn’t bad enough — when a tweet rolled through that they had just surrendered 734 yards in a program record for futility.

“I was sick in the stomach until Monday when we got back onto the field,” Wuebben said. “After that we just needed to get better and we did. We worked hard in practice and got a lot better.”

The Cardinals did get better — and we’re assuming the pizza tasted better, too — after they defeated visiting Madison West 23-12 in a Big Eight Conference game last Friday.

Middleton’s girls swimming and diving coach Lauren Cabalka tried to spin a negative into a positive.

She did her best to turn disappointment into opportunity.

But there’s no doubt, this one stung.

The Cardinals fell to Madison West, 89-81, in a dual meet last Friday night. That marked the first time in seven years that Middleton has lost a Big Eight Conference dual meet.

“Look, this was bound to happen at some point and it’s probably a good thing that it happened now,” Cabalka said. “The girls came back and crushed their practice on Saturday morning and I know they will have a new mindset moving forward. I have seen this team work through adversity many times — and they always, always come out stronger because of it.”

Middleton, which has won three straight WIAA Division 1 state championships, faced plenty of adversity from the upstart Regents.

West finished first in six of the 11 events and was also second in seven of the 11 races.

We rode our bikes as fast as we could, and when the whir of the chain and the wind reached their highest pitch, and the pedals began rotating faster than our legs, we’d slam our feet on the breaks to careen along the gravel road. After each run, we’d measure our skid marks and declare a winner. The longest mark won, and we played forever, or at least until we had to go home and have the pebbles plucked from our knees, watching with horror and fascination as the hydrogen peroxide bubbled and hissed and spat in our open wounds.

This was life before the Internet. A vast world where people were separated by untraversable geographical distance, where children in summer were compelled to engage in the somewhat biblical task of seeing what kind of mark they could leave upon the earth.