Kwik Star and football

Workers on the new Kwik Star convenience store going up across from King’s Pointe are busy as beavers, racing to complete it in time for a projected opening date of late November.

It is amazing how fast the fuel storage tanks were buried, the building erected and now the service islands installed. It won’t be long before the pavers will lay down the concrete and the whole place will be open.

Meanwhile, new water and sewer lines to service the area are being dug under and around Lakeshore Drive to service the area. Paving of Memorial Road won’t be far off.

There are more than 800 Kwik Star and Kwik Trip locations in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin. Headquarters are in La Crosse, Wis.

THE REALIGNMENT of college conferences is ruining traditional football rivalries.

This year the Big 10 has grown to 18 (last time I checked), the Big 12 has 16, Southeast Conference (which now includes teams from the southwest like Texas and Oklahoma) has ballooned to 16, and the Atlantic Coast Conference is up to 18, including Stanford, all the way from the Pacific Coast of California.

Stanford was in the Pac 12 forever until that conference disappeared this year when Southern California and UCLA fled to the Midwest’s Big 10.

Lost in all this are the traditional rivalries like Oklahoma-Nebraska and Stanford-Southern Cal. In the Big 10 it’s possible that Michigan-Ohio State, perhaps the most famous football rivalry in the nation, might go by the wayside in the future. Traditional non-conference rivalries like Iowa State-Iowa are in jeopardy. (And wasn’t that a great game between the Cyclones and Hawkeyes last Saturday in Iowa City?)

It’s all driven, of course, by money. Colleges are chasing the TV cash that goes to the biggest conferences like the Big 10 and SEC. Each school in the Big 10 receives about $60 million in TV money, regardless of whether you’re high-flying Michigan or lowly Rutgers. Big 12 schools receive about half that much from their TV deal.

CONFERENCE realignment is even hitting our local high schools. The Lakes Conference is most likely going out of business with the announcement a couple weeks ago that only Spencer and Storm Lake are left in the once-prestigious Northwest Iowa league that dates back to the 1940s. As their enrollments have shrunk, schools have left for other conferences in search of like-sized competitors. In the 1960s, Storm Lake and Cherokee were about the same population and the two schools were fierce rivals. Storm Lake has grown to nearly twice the size of our neighbors to the west.

Now Cherokee, along with other former Lakes Conference foes like Sibley, Estherville, Sheldon, Emmetsburg and Spirit Lake, have joined other conferences to even out the competition and reduce travel. Spencer and Storm Lake, the two largest schools in the area, are left to fend for themselves. Storm Lake must travel to exotic places like Boone, Saydel, Fort Dodge, Council Bluffs and Sioux City to find games.

By the way, I’m still having trouble with the loss of the old Iowa Conference, longtime home of the Buena Vista University Beavers. After the addition of Nebraska Wesleyan in 2016, it became the American Rivers Conference. I still think of it as the Iowa Conference.