M*A*S*H Patient or Millard North Walk-On?

High school football season is several months away, but I can’t wait that long to tell you about Millard North, a Nebraska school whose players wrap athletic tape around their helmets. The look dates back to the mid-1980s, when the upper flap of a player’s chinstrap kept coming loose and officials insisted that it be secured. The coaching staff wrapped some tape around it, and the look caught on from there. Cool story, but it kinda looks like the entire team is being treated for head wounds.

While we’re at it, Dan Rogers just checked in with news of another high school football oddity: Groton, a Massachusetts prep school whose horizontal stripes look endearingly weird. I was hoping that the rest of the school’s teams would have a similar motif, but unfortunately they all look relatively normal.

Schoolmarm corner: Okay, so those spelling bee kids looked pretty dorky, but let’s cut ’em some slack, since they’re all gonna get beaten up as soon as they return to their hometowns. And speaking of spelling, here’s something that’s been bugging me: Now, Uni Watch is obviously a very detail-oriented project, and I’d like to think it attracts detail-oriented readers. So why do so many of you out there seem to have trouble with the name Uni Watch? Among the terms people have used when e-mailing me: uniwatch, Uniwatch, UniWatch, uni-watch, Uni-watch, Uni-Watch. Look, it’s two words, both capitalized, no hyphen: Uni Watch. Simple.

Uni Watch News Ticker: The Bucks have announced that they’ll unveil an updated logo (which can’t help but be an improvement over their current one) with a new color scheme (word on the street is that the purple theme is being replaced by red) on June 28th, with new unis to follow in September. If only we could get them to go back to using this. … Latest news about MLB’s Cool Base jerseys comes from an anonymous source in the Astros’ clubhouse, who writes: “Found out today that we’ll be wearing the red-brick away Cool Base jerseys. Evidently there’s a problem with getting gray ones, because there are too many shades of gray. I saw the Cool Base and it is EXACTLY the same material as the batting practice jersey. It even has that screened-on jogtag like the BP jersey. You’re going to be able to see the difference if you pay enough attention to the gussets and the material — the red one I saw was pretty obvious. The clubhouse personnel were dreading cleaning them, because scrubbing the material is evidently a nightmare.” Yup, sounds like another real winner from MLB. … Our recent coverage of players with messages and nicknames written on their undervisors prompted a communiquà© from longtime Uni Watch contributor Bryan Redemske, who works for a fine midwestern newspaper that was recently doing a photo shoot with two U. of Nebraska pitchers. As you can see, the guy on the left, whose name is Zach Herr, had something scribbled under his brim, so they enlarged the photo and found this: “Get Wehrle and Opitz the fuckin ball!” What’s it all mean? Redamske explains: “Herr is a setup man, and a freshman at that. Ryan Wehrle’s the shortstop, Jake Opitz is the second baseman — one of them must have told Herr rather emphatically at some point to induce a double-play ball. The photo almost ran like that, but we Photoshopped it out at the last minute.” Hmmm, not quite as good as the classic Billy Ripken “Fuck Face” card, but still pretty good. (And the “TG” inscription on the side of Herr’s cap? Redamske says, “That’s for Terry Gerch, who died of cancer in April. His kid, Andy, is an outfielder.”) … You don’t often see blood on a baseball uni, but Detroit’s Justin Verlander had either a popped blister or a cut on his hand last night, resulting in some visible splattering (trust me, it was plenty red on TV).