Bart Tatum gave his former head coach the early scouting report on Missouri Southern. Northwest Missouri State’s Mel Tjeerdsma has to figure out the rest on his own.

And what Tjeerdsma has discovered by looking at film is that Southern has the potential to be a stubborn opponent on Saturday when the Lions invade Bearcat Stadium for their 1 p.m. MIAA tussle.

Tatum, Southern’s head coach for the past three years and a Tjeerdsma protege, told the Northwest coach earlier this year that the Lions have lost four or five starters on defense to injuries.

But Tjeerdsma has discovered that the Lions are pretty athletic.

“You don’t have to watch much film, and you can see they’ve got some good athletes,” Tjeerdsma said. “For them, I think it’s a matter of getting them on the same page. It’s been a transition because of all the injuries they’ve had.”

Tjeerdsma noted that although Southern has lost to Nebraska-Omaha and Pittsburg State the past two weeks, both of those setbacks were by only eight points.

And with the Tatum-Tjeerdsma history, the Northwest mentor has no doubt his pupil will give him all he can handle.

“They’ve played us really well the three years he’s been there,” Tjeerdsma said. “The first year he was there, in 2006, we went scoreless in the second half. And last year we were behind at halftime, 14-13. It’s been a struggle with them.”

Paddock out

with foot injury

Senior defensive end Sean Paddock is expected to miss Saturday’s game with a sprained foot, Tjeerdsma said Tuesday.

Tjeerdsma said the Bearcats are nursing several injuries, but at this point, only Paddock is definitely out for the game against Missouri Southern.

“Because of the swelling they haven’t been able to determine the total magnitude of the injury,” Tjeerdsma said. “He’s real tender there. It’s going to take a little time.”

Paddock is the career sacks leader at Northwest and a 2008 All-America selection.

Sportsmanship recognized

In connection with the NCAA Division II initiative on game environment, and a subcomponent on sportsmanship, Northwest will recognize the sportsmanship of the Maryville High School freshman football team in its recent involvement in a Benton special needs player’s now-famous touchdown run.

When Matt Ziesel of Benton scored the touchdown, ending the shutout in a lopsided game, it got national media attention and the video got thousands of youtube.com hits. It was the first touchdown ever for Ziesel, who has Down’s syndrome.

For their involvement in the play, the Maryville freshman team will be recognized at Saturday’s Northwest game against Missouri Southern.

Strong finishes

When Vigit Sehgal and Ryan Westerhof advanced to the semifinals and Filippe Gennari and Daniel Quesada reached the quarterfinals over the weekend in the ITA Regional Tennis Championships, it proved to coach Mark Rosewell that this season’s team has depth.

Rosewell said Northwest was the only team to put two doubles teams in the quarterfinals.

Meanwhile, Gennari finished second in the singles tournament to Washburn’s Ryan Ward after losing a 10-5 super tiebreaker in a tournament that most expect the southern conferences — the Lone Star and Heartland — to dominate.

“This is the second time in a row that an MIAA player has won singles,” Rosewell noted.

The tournament served as the final fall competitions for the Northwest team. Team competitions begin in February.

Under weather;

on top of game

Volleyball coach Anna Tool would have liked to have invited Sara Falcone to Tuesday’s media event on the Northwest campus to recognize her efforts in the Washburn tournament, but health matters took precedence.

Falcone, the Bearcats’ junior middle hitter, earned all-tournament honors for her play as Northwest went 2-2 in the event over the weekend. And that was despite battling a bout of what was ultimately diagnosed as tonsillitis.

“She was pretty under the weather on Saturday, but you couldn’t tell that in her performance,” Tool said. “She really stepped up her game and was as big of a factor for us on Saturday as she was on Friday.”

Tool was happy with the way her team played, coming from behind to beat Tarleton State. She said the losses to Southeast Oklahoma and West Texas A&M were not bad losses — the former was in five games and in the latter, the second and third games were back-and-forth affairs.

“We feel if we can keep playing the way we played on Saturday into (tonight’s) match against Nebraska-Omaha, we can be competitive with them,” Tool said.

Northwest (10-11, 1-4 MIAA) follows the match against 15th-ranked Omaha (15-4, 4-1 MIAA) with a match Friday at No. 5 Central Missouri (19-3, 6-1).

Women winners

at Emporia

The Northwest women won their first non-home cross country meet since 1997 over the weekend at the Emporia State Planet Sub Invitational.

Coach Scott Lorek said five of his top seven women posted their fastest 5-kilometer times ever, while the men accomplished the same feat on the 8K course. But the accomplishments of sophomore Angela Adams stood out.

Adams, the team’s No. 1 runner, took second with a time of 18:45.18, which was the ninth-fastest 5K time ever by a Northwest woman. Perhaps even more impressive than that was that her time made the top 25 list for the 30 years that records were kept on the Jones Park course in Emporia.

The teams compete at the Gibson Invitational this weekend, hosted by DePauw University in Terre Haute, Ind.