Dave Frederick

Championship Saturday - I woke up early on state championship Saturday, and I was in game-day mode. Cape field hockey was scheduled to play Smyrna at 4 p.m. for all the marbles, and no one has played marbles in 40 years. The Fred family starting...

Morgan's Message - Coach Kate Austin invited me to a Morgan's Message 45-minute assembly last week at the high school. Morgan’s Message is a program that strives to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health within the student-athlete community...

Jumping the shark - Most coaches are cautious and don’t want to be bitten by arrogance or overconfidence. “We play them one at a time and don’t want to look past anyone on the way to a big game, which may not be such a big game when we get there if...

Roll deep - Elijah Shockley-Taylor, a junior on the Cape football team, sat in a white Toyota Sienna van at the top of my hairpin driveway of sports memories. Coach Jack Fred was giving him a ride home from practice. I came out of garage door No. 3...

Connections: politics and sports - Susan and I were in the stands about 1992 at Maryland as the Terps were hosting UVA in a football game. My nephew Mike was a defensive end for the Wahoos. A parent behind me ordered drinks and hotdogs for his...

Sad Songs - “If you don’t know me by now you will never never know me.” – Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, 1972. Taylor Marshall was a composite character of her ancestry with the soulful goodness of Capt. Rowland Marshall, the acerbic wit of her...

Flash forward - Coach George Pepper and I ran a resource room together back in 1980 under the banner of special education. We had fun, and so did our students. One of them, Odie Davis, was on coach Pepper’s cross country team and on coach Fred’s...

Me too, me first - I was taking photos at the finish line at the Dam Mill 5K in Millsboro July 28. A young, fit guy battled a fluid, fit woman to the finish and neither was backing down. Luis Xavier Aguirre (20:29) got there first, winning by a...

Cape’s Champions Field Hockey Camp welcomed 44 players over four days July 15-18, with each day offering a slightly different clinical setting blended with full-field competition. There were canopies covering the benches and plenty of water breaks...

Fast and rock-hard humble - William Billbow Dunning died July 13, felled by a heart attack or stroke as he was leaving church. He was such a great person. We go back to my first days at Cape starting in August 1975. I wrote a post in 2019 after...