The Bear Facts

September 21, 2024

Good morning! I’m Thadd Kollasch!

I’m Drew Muller!

And I’m Daniel Meis! Welcome once again to the “Bear Facts”, the weekly radio show from Bishop Garrigan High School.

Homecoming 2024 is just a few weeks away. This year’s Homecoming theme is “The Bishop Garrigan Olympics”, and the festivities will be October 7th through 11th. Back at the start of the year the senior class nominated this year’s Homecoming royalty, and the whole school voted for King and Queen earlier this week. The Homecoming queen candidates are Hanna Merron, Zoe Montag, Molly Peterson, and Isabella Waechter.

The Homecoming king candidates for 2024 are Trayton Cink, Andrew Lichter, Daniel Meis, and Nick Thul. The overall winners will be announced in a special assembly at the start of Homecoming week, on Monday, October 7. Congratulations to all our Homecoming royalty!

The Golden Bear cheerleaders have a special promotion this fall that coincides with the football team’s success. Each time the Bears score in a game, the cheerleaders do jumping jacks to reflect the score. For instance, after the final touchdown in last week’s win over North Iowa, the girls did 56 jumping jacks. The total after week 3 of the football season was 597 jumping jacks.

To help earn money for expenses like new uniforms, the cheerleaders have been asking fans to pledge for each jumping jack they do. For instance, someone who pledged a nickel for each jumping jack would owe $29.85 so far. Some people have pledged for every game, while others are just supporting home games. If you’d like to join the fun, you can contact Mrs. Jean Kuper with your pledge to help out our cheerleaders.

A couple of other Garrigan fundraisers have also been going very well. By the middle of this week we were about two-thirds of the way to our goal for the Walk and Pray fundraiser, and the development office expects we should meet the entire goal by the end of this coming week. The actual Walk and Pray event will be held Monday, September 30 on the Garrigan track.

Another big fall fundraiser helps support DARTS. The name of this group originally stood for “drama, art, and speech”, but its purpose has expanded to include all the non-sports activities at Garrigan. DARTS helps out band, choir, DECA, publications, quiz bowl, and the student website; and they’ve even bought equipment to help us out with the “Bear Facts”. DARTS members receive complimentary tickets to events like plays, musicals, and pops concert. If you’d like to be a DARTS member, contact Mrs. Christina Rahm.

This year ten Garrigan students are auditioning to be part of the All-State Choir. Girls trying out for all-state include Izzy Waechter, Shiloh Trainer, Cora Deardueff, Kylie Capesius, and Lilly Wickman. The boys who will be auditioning are Tate Foertsch, Amaury Thomas, Matt Besch, Marshall Bormann, and Aidan Deitering. Good luck to all these singers and to choir director Antonia Rupert as they prepare for all-state auditions next month.

A couple of times each year we try to have our student masses at the different churches in towns around the area. This past week our school mass was held over in Wesley. The name of the church in Wesley is St. Joseph, and Fr. Zach talked about why St. Joseph is the patron saint of sleep. It was an interesting change from our regular weekly masses.

This past week the Bishop Garrigan senior class finalized their graduation plans. The class chose the white rose as their class flower, and they used the school colors of black and gold for their class colors. The class motto for 2025 is “The best view comes after the hardest climb”. The Class of 2025 is currently the smallest class in the Bishop Garrigan system, with just 19 boys and 8 girls. They’ll be graduating on Sunday, May 7, 2025.

Our Senior Spotlight this week shines on Brady Galligan. Here to tell you about him is Molly Peterson.

Brady Galligan has taken over as the starting kicker for the Golden Bear football team, and he’s quickly shown his talents in both kickoffs and extra point attempts. Brady is a year-round athlete. He’s run at state in track, he did well as both a pitcher and infielder in baseball, and he’s also played basketball all through school. We know Brady will have a great senior year, and we also wish him well after high school.

Thanks, Molly. On our Golden Bear calendar this week, today the volleyball team is welcoming teams from all over northwest Iowa for the annual CYO tournament. The action begins at 9am in both the new gym and in Friedmann Auditorium.

There’s a JV volleyball tournament at Algona High this morning, and the girls swim team is in action down in Fort Dodge. Monday there’s cross-country at Humboldt, and the JV football team will travel to Ruthven to play GTRA.

Tuesday the volleyball team plays at North Iowa. There’s also a swim meet that night in Spencer. We’ll have mass Wednesday morning, and Thursday night there’s a freshman football game, with the Bears hosting Estherville Lincoln Central.

The girls swim team will be in Perry Thursday night. Friday is the final turn-in day for Walk and Pray. Also on Friday all the freshmen and many other art students will be traveling to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival.

The football team is at home next Friday to take on Rockford. Finally next Saturday the volleyball team will host their home tournament.

That’s the “Bear Facts” for this week. Thanks for joining us, and be sure to catch the show again next week for more news from Bishop Garrigan High School.