MONTICELLO — It’s been a wild roller-coaster ride for the Anamosa boys golf team this spring as coach Brad Mangler looks for consistency from his young group on the course.
Monday, May 5, during a challenging 18-hole tournament in Monticello, Mangler may have found what he has been looking for all season to this point.
“I’ve been wanting to see some consistent scores come in and I’ve also been hoping for some lower scores to come in when we play 18-hole tournaments, and we got it all here in Monticello Monday afternoon.”
While Anamosa was 23 strokes off the winning team pace set by Monticello Invitational champion Marion, the Raiders’ 333 team-score was Anamosa’s best 18-hole tournament score yet this spring and gives Mangler hope for even better things to come this week with huge 18-hole WaMaC Conference and class 3A sectional tournaments looming.
“That is my hope that we’re peaking right now,” said Mangler as his team even played the Monticello tournament without No. 1 golfer Colten Kelly who took part at the WaMaC Conference track meet Monday in Dyersville.

ANAMOSA— It was all Anamosa all the time Saturday, May 3, as the Raider girls soccer team out-shot Cono Christian by a mind-boggling 35-4 count during game-two action from Anamosa’s own round-robin tournament.
“You would think with that kind of shot disparity, we would have won the game and won the game pretty handily,” said Raider girls soccer coach Jim Conklin who has seen his club gradually improve each game this spring. “But that just wasn’t the case. We had plenty of shots, and plenty of good shots too, just not enough of them were hard enough hits to get past their goalie however and we had to settle for a very frustrating tie. Though I am very happy with the way the girls played and with the way we attacked and basically kept the ball on their defensive side of the field almost the entire time.”
Anamosa (0-6-1) not only ripped the amazing 35 shots at the beleaguered Cono Christian goalie, but also held the visitors to a mere four shots of their own in what ended as a tough 2-2 tie.
“Cono Christian put their better goalie in for the second half and we had a much harder time putting shots past here than we did the goalie in the first half,” said Conklin. “For the most part though, we were able to do just about anything we wanted in regards to taking care of the ball. If Cono Christian had the ball, we’d just run in and take it back and attack their goal. We did it all game long, but even with the ball in our offensive end almost the whole game, we had to settle for the tie instead of the win we deserved with the way we dominated offensively.”
Anamosa led 2-1 at the half as Bethany Kula scored twice for the hosts.
“Obviously we had plenty of chances to score in the second half too but just couldn’t quite pull out the needed goals to win,” said Conklin. “What also made me happy was seeing the confidence in the girls that they could win. It’s been a rough season and we’ve gone through a lot, but we are improving and this was just another case to that fact.”
Kula and Brittany Hubler led the Raider offense each firing a whopping 10 shots at the Cono Christian goal. Katie Grassi added four more while Ashton Darrow and Amanda Thurm each chipped in with three. Jackie Engelbart and Ellie Dusheck came through with two shots each while Kandis Bieber added a shot and an assist to a Kula goal. Hubler also tallied an assist for the hosts.
Grassi played the first half tending the Anamosa goal and made one save while Alea Baftiri also made one save during her tour of duty as goalie in the second half of action.
The Raider girls opened their tournament with a 6-0 setback against Center Point-Urbana.
Anamosa trailed 3-0 at the half against the Pointers but did manage an impressive 14 shots against the talented CP-U team.
“We had just played this team on Tuesday and this one, even though the score didn’t show it, was much better than the first time we met,” said Conklin. “We played more aggressive soccer and didn’t back down from their challenge of very physical play.”