05-03-2025
Sending students to the Summit League Championships
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — A Sioux Falls orthodontist is helping put a smile on the faces of local students with tickets to the Summit League Basketball Championships.
It's not your average Tuesday for Ashley Kracke's fifth grade class at R.F. Pettigrew Elementary in Sioux Falls. The students are learning math using Summit League statistics.
'We're currently learning about comparing and ordering and adding decimals, and so we took some of the stats from their players and we're going to be doing some story problems,' Kracke said.
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The league is part of this week's lesson plan because these students are among the more than 800 fifth graders who will attend a Summit League Tournament game. The women's matchup between St. Thomas and North Dakota is doubling as a geography lesson.
'We've just really embraced getting to know where is North Dakota from us, where is Minnesota from us,' Kracke said.
The students will learn now and have fun come Friday.
'I'm looking forward to sitting with my friends and enjoying some good basketball,' 11-year-old student Brynn Dreke said.
'I'm really excited to watch basketball because I don't really get to watch basketball that much and I get to be with my friends while I get to watch it,' 11-year-old student Grace Samson said.
It's an opportunity made possible by Wermerson Orthodontics, which donated tickets to a number of area schools.
'There's so many other schools that he could have paid for but one of them was Pettigrew so I'm really happy that he picked us,' Samson said.
'It's just fun to make kids smile, get them out of the classroom a little bit, it's a good field trip,' Wermerson Orthodontics owner Chris Wermerson said.
And one story sums up why Chris Wermerson continues to donate tickets.
'Last year, one of the little kids, he's coming up the escalator, it was hilarious because he looks and me and goes 'this is the biggest building I've ever seen'. I mean, how can you not want to keep inviting kids back when they're so excited just going up an escalator,' Wermerson said.
The students will arrive at the Premier Center at 11:30 Friday morning, and will stay for a majority of the women's quarterfinal game between St. Thomas and North Dakota, which tips off at noon.
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