Geneva's top student gets a bit of recognition
Rob Tauscher was displaying his basketball skills, but it's his academic prowess that earned him a spot in a recent Joy of the Game basketball showcase.
And the Geneva High School junior also got some national notoriety when his name was front and center in the first paragraph of a USA Today story about the Deerfield event.
More than 100 student-athletes from 11 different states demonstrated their basketball skills to more than 30 coaches in attendance. These players also represented the cream of the academic crop at their schools.
"The showcase is for good students and it gives them a chance to show their basketball skills to coaches from Ivy League schools and higher-level Division III schools," said Georgia Tauscher, Rob's mother. "It's good because it just gets Rob a look in front of these coaches.
"He works very hard, but if he only had a little more athletic ability passed down from his parents ..." she added with a laugh.
Rob will try out for the Geneva basketball team again this year, but there is no doubt he works hard in the classroom, as evidenced by his 4.5 grade-point average on a 4.0 scale and his No. 1 class ranking.
"We're really happy with it," Tauscher said of her son's academic efforts. "It is really nice for the academic recognition."
Those first games: It was reader Bernie Schupbach of North Aurora who passed along the tip to me about Rob Tauscher, but Bernie and I came to realize we had something in common.
His e-mail address included the name of Nellie Fox, the former White Sox star second baseman from the late 1950s and early 1960s. I mentioned to Bernie the first professional game I ever saw was in the former Comiskey Park in 1959, but I had somehow become a long-suffering Cubs fan. Bernie wrote back, saying he too attended his first major-league game that year at Comiskey, but remained loyal to the White Sox. We were able to agree that Nellie Fox was one heck of a player.
Carts on command: Where were these things when I needed them? One of my first jobs was at a Jewel grocery store toiling as the cart roundup guy. During a light snow, I was trying to push about 20 carts up an incline and popped a muscle in my back, which still bothers me on occasion to this day.
So what did I see at Target the other day? A gizmo called Kwik Cart in which the young kid had a remote control in his hand to sort of steer the carts back into the store with what appeared to be little or no physical effort.
No more tacos: It's a bummer. I guess I just wasn't buying enough chicken tacos to help the folks at Burrito Shack on the east side of St. Charles keep their restaurant alive.
I hadn't stopped by in some time to get my usual order of two chicken tacos and nacho chips, so it was a bit of a surprise to see the "retail space for sale" sign in the window.
dheun@sbcglobal.net