Nex-Tech Wireless Supporting Cast: Dale Leech

Kansas Pregame and Nex-Tech Wireless have joined forces to recognize the individuals behind the scenes who help area school athletic teams achieve success. Administrators, team managers, assistant coaches, media members and more. As we prepare to recognize a new spring supporting cast in our upcoming Spring Preview let's take a look back at some of the past supporting cast honorees.

Dale Leech, Minneapolis

For Minneapolis High School, in a time before results and highlights were readily available on social networks, Dale Leech was the videographer, voice, historian, and passion behind it’s sports media. 

In the Fall of 2000, Leech - a 1970 graduate of Minneapolis High School and lifelong resident - heard of an opportunity to help out his alma mater with video production, but couldn’t have expected the two decade time commitment that would follow.

“It was reported that the local technician for the cable television system was looking for someone to provide video of MHS games to put on the local cable channel for playback,” Leech said. “Having had some previous experience in shooting video of my son’s junior high football games, I volunteered to try it out. So, in that first football game of the season in 2000 vs. Marion, I sheepishly sat down in the home stands with my VHS Camcorder that only had an exterior microphone, and recorded the game with some commentary, trying not to speak too loudly as to draw attention to myself.”

It wasn’t long after that Leech gained some help from the Minneapolis Lion Backers and other MHS alumni.

“Within a few games, I had my first volunteer to help out with commentary – Trace Kreigh,” Leech said. “We would stand on the top bleacher and try to speak loud enough for the camera microphone to adequately pick up our voices. It wasn’t long after that the Lion Backers supplied a new VHS Camcorder, external microphones and VHS tapes. They have been great sponsors throughout the years, partnering in the broadcasts.” 

Roughly a half-dozen individual volunteers assisted Leech through the years to help take on the full spectrum of what he was trying to cover MHS and the enthusiasm of that group is something he cites as helping to grow his passion for the project. 

Aside from sports, they recorded footage of school concerts, Memorial Day ceremonies, festivals, parades, the Ottawa County Fair, races at the former Minneapolis Raceway, as well as church services and concerts.

Leech continued this with an evolving team through the 2000s and 2010s, and created a considerable repository of the town’s athletic records and other events, all of which were kept in his house. 

As the years progressed and technology changed, Leech didn’t allow himself to lag behind. 

“Video technology has changed over the years from using VHS Tapes to digital tapes, then recording to DVD, all set for playback over the local Cable Channel,” Leech said. “Viewership on the local channel lessened over time with many people ‘Cutting the cord’. The transformation process to an all-digital platform was on the way. I saw a few other communities becoming involved in live video broadcasts and after I did some research, I desired to become involved in the platform. I desired our school district to have this despite the fact that we didn’t have local radio or TV stations to provide the setup. I asked for the blessing of the school administration in doing this and was finally given the okay to proceed in November 2018 and began providing these live video broadcasts along with the cable channel replays.”

To go with the real-time recordings, Leech made the events available online for future viewers as well.

“Over the last 10-plus years I began to feel burdened by the hundreds of tapes and DVDs that I was archiving in my basement,” Leech said. “I decided that I should share these with the former MHS students and their families. I knew that I had always wished that film of my 1969 high school team had been preserved so that I just didn’t have a fleeting memory of what I remember having seen in film room study. So, I began the arduous process of uploading most of these to a digital platform on YouTube on the ‘Dale Leech’ channel. I also have these categorized on a Facebook page entitled ‘Minneapolis Kansas Video Channel.’”

Video records aren’t the only way that Leech is preserving Minneapolis history. Leech and his team often wondered how the current teams and players would stack up against those from days gone by, so they decided to try and find the answer.

“In regards to the collection of history of MHS Sports – from early on in the days of the broadcasts, we would wonder how what we were observing on the fields or courts of play compared to previous MHS Lions squads and outstanding players. I began the time-consuming process of researching school annuals, ‘Messenger,’ ‘Salina Journal’ and other newspaper archives and developed several spreadsheet databases to record this information,” Leech said. “I knew, and further discovered, that there wasn’t one common repository to draw upon for local sports history. Being a history buff and fully vested in the broadcasting aspect, I began to develop this and utilize it in our broadcasts as needed.”

In 2014 his stat collection found even more purpose when 1956 MHS alumnus Jack Larzalere - who had recently returned to Minneapolis after retirement - brought back with him a vision for a Minneapolis Sports Hall of Fame. After getting approval from the school, Larzalere had a tall task in researching the history of Minneapolis sports. Luckily, Leech had gotten that ball rolling long ago.

“(Minneapolis Athletic Director) Terry Moeckel approached me about the possibility of joining in the effort based on all of the sports research that I had done,” Leech said. “After giving it some consideration, I agreed to join with Jack Larzalere in this effort and have been involved with the process from the first Class of Inductees (2015) on through the most recent Class of 2021. I began a Minneapolis Kansas Sports Hall of Fame website www.mksportshof.com to record all of this data.”

After two decades of commitment, this past fall of 2021, Leech began attending games strictly as a fan, with a hope that someone else takes the baton and continues what he started. MHS has continued coverage of home games and local events to some degree, but as far as someone putting forth the dedication and time of Leech, that’s a tall order.

Despite no longer covering the games, old habits die hard.

“I joke with some people that when I go to a gym and sit down to watch games, I have to fight the temptation to start talking about the game,” Leech said. ”I have found that I believe that I have a need to be more self-analytical about the games, other than just watching and relying on what the scoreboard tells me. That was a major part of what we did in being able to do play-by-play and color commentary. So I have begun to take a stats page, pencil and clipboard to the basketball games, so that I can be more involved in knowing what’s going on for the individual players and the team for their stats as the game progresses.”

Leech has a trove of Minneapolis state tournament games and individual performances in his 21 years of broadcasting he won’t forget. After capturing moments, teams and players worthy of the Minneapolis Sports Hall of Fame, all that is left now is finding that replacement to film his own enshrinement into the very hall he was instrumental in creating.