With DuKane Conference title on the line, Keaton Reinke steps up for St. Charles North. ‘This is what I live for.'
He's definitely got all the tools. But it's his mentality that looms larger.
'This is what I live for,' Reinke said afterward. 'I want to be in these moments with my guys. I know they've got my back. That's just what I love and what I live for.'
Reinke, who just returned from a football visit to Stanford, lived up to the moment Friday.
Working 6 1/3 innings for the win, Reinke struck out four as the North Stars held on for a 4-3 victory over host Geneva that clinched the DuKane Conference title for St. Charles North.
Reinke reached his pitch count with one out in the bottom of the seventh inning for the North Stars (19-12, 14-7). He allowed three runs on seven hits and a pair of walks. Two pitches after Reinke exited, Josh Kobylinski induced a game-ending double play for the save.
Sophomore phenom Matt Ritchie was unavailable for the game, but St. Charles North coach Todd Genke didn't hesitate to tab Reinke with the assignment.
'You can't have somebody more important than a kid like him on the mound,' Genke said. 'I thought he took us on his back. That's just the kind of athlete he is and the kind of teammate he is.
'He had electric stuff. To hold that team to three runs is pretty impressive, especially here.'
Reinke also scored the first run of the game after legging out a dropped third strike. Charlie Major came up with a two-run single in the second to give the North Stars a 2-0 lead. Langdon Straub doubled and courtesy runner Cam Chickerneo scored what proved to be a pivotal insurance run.
Mason Bruesch, Ethan Gronberg and Nelson Wendell each had two hits for Geneva (23-11, 13-8), which scored twice in the bottom of the seventh to cut the deficit to one. Bruesch also stole two bases. Noah Hallahan pitched a complete game.
Reinke, a three-star recruit at wide receiver, is navigating that process while also trying to be the ace for the North Stars. Through it all, Genke said Reinke's commitment to the baseball program never wavered. His toughness also has permeated the entire roster.
'When you compete like he does, whether it's on the football field, baseball field, in the box, on the mound or in the outfield, special things happen,' Genke said. 'He's a special human.
'Regardless of all the other stuff going on in his life, he's here for his teammates and for our program and we're really lucky to have him.'
Reinke carried a 3-0 lead into the bottom of the sixth. Geneva broke through when Wendell singled and scored on Hallahan's sacrifice fly.
After St. Charles North added a run in the seventh, Reinke started to slow down and approach his pitch count. Four of the five batters he faced in the seventh reached base and two scored.
'It was heartbreaking to take him out there with as well as he'd pitched,' Genke said. 'But we have confidence in Koby.'
Geneva coach Brad Wendell thought another comeback, which has been a calling card this season of the Vikings, was about to occur.
'It did feel like it,' Wendell said. 'I still believed until the end. Our guys compete. In games like this, it's tough to get wins. We just talked about being competitive.'
Once Kobylinski secured the double play, the celebration was on, led by an exuberant Reinke.
'Just being able to celebrate with my guys is what I wanted,' Reinke said. 'It meant a lot. We have the guys. We proved it (Friday) that we're the top guys and we're going to be there for a while.'
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How to watch England vs Italy for FREE: TV channel and live stream for Euro 2025 semi-final today
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‘This new league would create confusion': EuroLeague CEO on NBA, expansion, NCAA and more
It is an interesting moment in European basketball. The EuroLeague has long been considered the second-best basketball league in the world, after the NBA. But the NBA has recently shown interest in forming a new league on the continent and may launch within the next few years as it continues to examine how and when it should do so. Advertisement That has left questions about what it would mean for the EuroLeague and its future, or if the two leagues can work together. The EuroLeague has also taken steps forward to grow. It has expanded to 20 teams, and had, for a time, considered taking an outside investment from a private equity firm. As for its relationship with the NBA, executives from the two leagues and FIBA sat down for a meeting in Geneva in May and have signaled an openness to work together. In The Athletic's continuing series of Executive Q&A sessions, EuroLeague CEO Paulius Motiejūnas spoke to The Athletic this week to discuss the league's future, its relationship with the NBA, his thoughts on the wave of European players leaving for NCAA schools and more. Note: This interview was edited for length and clarity. It seems like you and the NBA have been building your relationship over the last few months. I know things had not been well for a period of time there, but you had that meeting in Geneva. Where do things stand between the NBA and EuroLeague? Listen, it was a positive meeting. It was the first time out of many years that everybody was at the same table. And we need to thank FIBA for being in the middle and trying to put everybody on the same page. What we heard is the same as what is publicly known, that they're in the exploration mode, and they're trying to see how and what. We said to them, like we said publicly, we don't believe that the new league is something that would help the market. So we left with an open mind, saying that we're ready to collaborate. And the question is, how and when. We keep growing, and we keep doing our homework and maximizing the game of basketball in Europe. So I believe that only helps all the sides. And as a next step, I believe we'll have another meeting, I would say around September or during September to sit down again and hopefully get into a deeper discussion and analyzation of how we can work together. Advertisement Because I repeat it and I said it before: we don't need a new league. We are doing really good. The league is growing. We're happy to go and do it together with NBA and continuously use their power to grow the basketball in Europe. So we're open to that. What would collaboration with the NBA look like? They have a really strong image. They can help with TV deals. They can help with sponsorship. 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Yahoo
26-07-2025
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Capos, ‘soft hooligans' and a lot of noise – the rise of away fans in women's football
Even before Finland's group match against 2025 European Championship hosts Switzerland kicked off, Melissa Platt's voice is almost gone. She's acting as 'capo' for Finland's fans, leading their chants on the walk to the Stade de Geneve and then inside it, and has underestimated how loud it would be. 'Switzerland was expecting 10,000-12,000 fans for their fan walk. We were expecting 150 Finnish fans,' Platt, who moved to Finland from the United States almost 20 years ago, says. 'We were thinking, 'How are we going to create some kind of atmosphere? We're going to be totally drowned out'. Somehow that didn't happen.' As the procession made its way to the stadium south of central Geneva, Platt decided to take what she expected to be a short walk to the rear of the assembled group of Finland supporters. 'I just kept walking back and back and back. It felt like I was walking forever with these Finnish fans, and yelling, with my voice hoarse, but going, 'Louder! Suomi!' (the Finnish word for Finland). It was great. People were so responsive and hyped for it.' In the end, she gave up on reaching the back of the crowd. There were just too many people. This summer's tournament has made significant progress in attracting travelling supporters to Switzerland. UEFA, European football's governing body, said before the tournament kicked off that 35 per cent of the match tickets were bought by international customers. The record for the most away fans at a single women's Euros game was broken this month with 17,000 Germany supporters attending their win over Denmark in Basel, a city within walking distance of the Swiss-German border, in the group stage. The tournament-record crowd for a group match not involving the host country — 22,596 watching the Netherlands vs Switzerland at Sheffield United's Bramall Lane in 2022 — has been bettered on six occasions, with the 34,165 at that Germany-Denmark game the largest. It is not only fans of historically successful footballing nations who have travelled. Finland, who have not progressed past the Euros' group stage since 2009, and Wales, making their major tournament debut, each brought thousands of vocal supporters. The Football Association of Finland estimates at least 1,000 Finns attended each of their three group games, while the Football Association of Wales says around 7,000 Welsh fans travelled to Switzerland for their first taste of a major women's competition. Switzerland's central location within Europe and the travel arrangements put in place for Euro 2025 are partly behind this increase. Free return matchday travel to the stadium involved from anywhere in the host nation by public transport is included in the price of match tickets — a welcome concession in an otherwise expensive country. Germany used a similar scheme when it staged the men's version of this tournament last summer. The ticket pricing structure, ranging from 25 Swiss francs (£23, $32, €27) for the cheapest group matches to 90 (£84, $114, €96) for the most expensive seats for the final, has helped, too. Twenty-two of 31 matches were sold out before the start of the competition and Germany's semi-final with Spain saw a tournament record set for cumulative attendance: 623,088. The final is a 34,250 sell-out. St Jakob-Park in Basel, the venue for that final, is Switzerland's largest football stadium, but Sunday's fixture cannot come close to breaking the Women's Euros final attendance record set at 90,000-capacity Wembley in London three years earlier, with 87,192 in the crowd that day as England beat Germany. Accessibility is important but, as Swedish fan Estrid Kjellman pointed out, it isn't everything: 'You don't want people to just go because it's easy or free; you want people to want to come and want to chant and sing for their team. You need to have passionate engagement.' When Kjellman attended her first major women's tournament, Euro 2017 in the Netherlands, she thought: 'Where is everyone?' 'It was just so silent, there were no Swedish people (at Sweden's games), there were no pre-match gatherings, there was nothing organised at all around the fans, except for the Dutch fans. I wanted to be loud, I wanted to be fun, I wanted to be engaging and interactive.' Kjellman decided to set up a fans' group called Soft Hooligans, so named because at the time their loud cheering was so unusual they were looked at 'like we were hooligans'. At Zurich's Stadion Letzigrund, for their team's eventual penalty shootout defeat by England in the quarter-finals, those in Sweden's luminous yellow shirts were outnumbered. It did not matter though, as Kjellman and company drowned out their English counterparts over three tense hours of football. There was bouncing, drumming, singing, even a call-and-response chant with another group of Swedish fans sitting in another part of the stadium in the second half. Their noise only dipped after the shootout was over — they had remained loud after England, from 2-0 down, scored twice in three minutes late on to force extra time. Even then, they were prepared, producing huge banners in tribute to the head coach, Peter Gerhardsson, whose time in charge of the team would end when their involvement in the tournament did. They read, 'You are the one shining' – a modification of lyrics from Gerhardsson's favourite musical artist, Joakim Thastrom — and 'Thank you so, so, so much Peter'. It was a far cry from the atmosphere Kjellman experienced eight years ago in the Netherlands. Speaking to The Athletic before the quarter-finals, she said the number of away fans at these Euros had been 'next level'. The next big tournament in women's football, the 2027 World Cup, will be out of reach for many European fans as it is being played in Brazil, but should attract supporters from across North and South America. That will be followed by Euro 2029, the host nation for which will be announced in December, and the 2035 World Cup, in the UK — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The question for all three of those tournaments is how they can build on the numbers and the noise seen and heard in Switzerland over these past few weeks. 'It's been really positive to see the atmosphere created,' says Deborah Dilworth, head of women's football at the UK's Football Supporters' Association. 'We have had a dedicated England section here — if I look back to the World Cup (in Australia and New Zealand in 2023), it was disjointed, and so the visibility of England fans and the capacity to make noise was strained. 'This time around, there's at least 2,000 in a block of fans that are all England fans, all singing. The administration has helped the atmosphere.' Dilworth says the organisation of fan walks, pre-match meetups and supporter embassies (which can help travellers with issues such as lost passports or broken phones) are positives, too: 'Fans are being supported as they travel, which is what will make people come back.' Platt emphasises the importance of tournament organisers and national associations working with fans to help create an atmosphere. '(Supporters) are going to want to do things like having a capo or a chant leader in the front,' she says. 'The Finnish association facilitated us being able to create the atmosphere there by making sure we knew what kind of certification we needed for our banners, making sure that we could bring in the drums. 'Having this kind of structured support is a critical way of growing the game.' Dilworth wants organisers to consult with fans about what helps them travel, and to consider the specific needs of a women's football audience. In Switzerland this summer, one debate has been over bringing water into stadiums. For some of the tournament's first matches, which took place as a heatwave hit the region, fans were able to take in their own drinks. However, Dilworth feels the rules could have been relaxed further to reflect the needs of crowds which could include menopausal women or families with small children — and that she thinks are also less likely to use those bottles as missiles than their equivalent at a tournament in the men's game. 'I know there's a logistical challenge sometimes, but I do think sometimes (the approach is), 'Well, it's football and it's a stadium', instead of thinking things through for the audience that you're welcoming in,' she says. The question is no longer whether people will turn out to watch international football competitions in the women's game, or travel to another country to do so. It is now what organisers are going to do to a) keep them coming back for future editions, and b) make the atmosphere better still. '(The support) is growing, but there's still a lot that can be done,' Kjellman said. 'A lot will change before the next World Cup and the next Euros,' she smiles. 'And I think it will become even louder.' This article originally appeared in The Athletic. England, Wales, Finland, Sweden, International Football, Women's Soccer, Culture, Women's Euros, Women's World Cup 2025 The Athletic Media Company
