For your ears only

Sultans one win away from MJBL three-peat

A small delay due to lightning didn’t slow down the Carillon Sultans as they stormed into Koskie Field and defeated the Elmwood Giants 12-0 Sunday to take a 2-0 series lead in the Manitoba Junior Baseball League final.

Across the first two games of the best-of-five series, Carillon has a 27-5 run advantage after a similar offensive output during Game 1 in Steinbach on Friday. The Giants and Sultans have played in the finals the past three seasons, with Carillon winning both previous years.

The Sultans offence was quick to strike, plating eight runs in the top of the second inning. Anders Meilleur cleared the bases with a three-run double to start the barrage, with Dayton Christensen crushing a three-run home run to left-centre to cap off the inning.

“If we get on a roll in an inning, it’s contagious,” head coach Don Meilleur said. “We don’t hurt teams by getting one or two runs an inning, we hurt teams because we put up a crooked number most of the time and today was the perfect example… Anybody on that bench and anybody in the lineup can hurt another team. We just always find ways to get somebody to be a hero.”

Up to the challenge

There may not be another restaurant in Manitoba that can say it has welcomed visitors from as many communities across the province and beyond as the Somerset Food Bar & Lounge has this summer.

In just over a two week span, visitors from more than 100 towns have come out to the family-owned restaurant tucked away in Somerset, a community of roughly 450 people in the Pembina Valley 130 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg.

It started as a challenge, “60 Towns in 60 Days,” where the restaurant wanted to document how many different places they could reach, as it often sees people travelling across Canada stop at the restaurant. The goal was also to encourage people to make a drive they normally wouldn’t.

“The more we started sharing, the more people really started getting behind it, and it turned into this really big thing fairly quickly,” said Jay Friesen, restaurant manager.

Today’s horoscope

MOON ALERT: After 9 a.m. today there are no restrictions to shopping or important decisions. The moon is in Capricorn.

ARIES (March 21-April 19)

You are direct, proactive and quick to act. You shouldn’t second-guess anything, especially instructions or orders from authority figures — bosses, parents, teachers, VIPs and even the police. You might misread their intentions? Postpone important decisions.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)

Men cycling across Canada for charity have bikes stolen in Winnipeg

Thomas Clark and Valentin Duquenne were devastated after their bikes went missing outside CBC Manitoba’s headquarters, but uplifted by the outpouring of support from Manitobans afterward.

Dropping the gloves to make the point

In hockey parlance, it’s called “shedding,” the moment in a game when you are forced to deal with an instigator by dropping (shedding) your gloves for an all-out brawl.

That term is a deep cut from hockey culture that Prime Minister Mark Carney — he of the “elbows up” phenomenon — may need to not only embrace but practise more often in the face of yet another round of overly punitive tariffs imposed by United States President Donald Trump.

To be fair, under Carney’s leadership, Canada has not exactly rolled over in the face of Trump’s bully-boy tactics.

Yes, Canada has made concessions to placate Trump to further a new continental trade agreement: investing more money to combat the cross-border flow of fentanyl that isn’t actually happening, stalling efforts to tax streaming companies as most European countries already do, and — most recently — giving Trump a cut of profits from the Canadian-made, Canadian-paid Gordie Howe bridge between Windsor and Detroit.

Selfie part of investigation into Grant Park football coach

A selfie of a high school football coach grinning beside a Free Press front-page story about the investigation into his professional conduct has become part of the case.

Doug Kovacs, a resource teacher at Grant Park High School who runs the Pirates football program, was put on leave in the spring.

The Winnipeg School Division employee is the subject of an investigation into allegations that athletes on his AAAA varsity team engaged in hazing that led to at least one player getting injured last year.

The Free Press has learned that on July 8 — the day it was revealed in print that Manitoba’s teacher commissioner had launched a third-party probe — a photo of Kovacs posing with a newspaper began circulating in the football community.