Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
The end of the winter season is upon us. Boy’s swimming ended last weekend with Lander winning an unprecedented 29th consecutive state championship. The Tigers easily outdistanced second-place Buffalo by 101 points, 355 to 254.
You have to go back a long way to find a Class 3-A state meet not dominated by the Lander Tigers. In 1996, they finished second to Rawlins but since then, it’s been a wave of Green at pools across Wyoming in February.
The late Bruce Gresly built a juggernaut and current head coach Shawn Morgan has just added fuel to the fire.
The Tiger’s secret, isn’t really a secret at all. Most of the kids hit the pool as toddlers and continue through to graduation. Not everyone is a star, but they all give a star effort when it’s time to compete.
The Tigers had four individual titles with senior Finn Richards winning the 50 and 100 free style events, and fellow senior Colby Blackburn taking the 100 butterfly and 100-meter backstroke. They both swam legs on a pair of gold medal Lander relays as well.
That’s not the secret. Richards and Blackburn each took home four gold medals, but it was Lander’s depth that won the state title. It always is.
The Tigers get a huge turnout for swimming every year, and this year’s roster was a big one once again. That’s how you win titles, with athletes gutting out third, fourth, and fifth places while setting personal records.
It’s something that many other sports can learn from.
Contact sports like football and wrestling have reduced participation. Basketball and volleyball are select sports with just a few of the best able to represent their schools. Track and field is in such decline that at times, I don’t even recognize it, even though it remains my favorite sport.
When a region with 10 schools doesn’t field enough high hurdlers for a semi-final, that’s a decline. When you see 150 kids in the 100, 150 in the long jump, and 150 in the shot, but only six running the 3200, that’s a decline.
Participation is great. Getting kids outdoors in the sun is never a bad thing, I just miss the competition.
Why the competitive interest in one sport, but not the other?
Soccer is holding its own, but it’s never going to be “America’s” sport despite all the hype we see on national broadcasts, broadcasts that take a beating with viewer ratings.
More youngsters play soccer than any other sport, but the interest wanes as they get older.
We live in a participation trophy world thanks to snowplow parents who can’t accept their child being anything less than a superstar. Newsflash, they’re not. Not many athletes are, but the lessons learned in competition, being part of something greater than yourself, and in the discipline a sport requires, make all these kids superstars in life if their parents would just get out of the way.
I’m against expanded competition. What purpose did Wind River have making the football playoffs last fall with a 2-6 record just so they could get pummeled for a second time by Lingle-Ft. Laramie, 57-0 in the playoffs?
Saratoga would argue that it was worth it since they entered the playoffs as the fourth seed from the East 1-A but upset Shoshoni 22-20 on the Wrangler’s home field. Maybe there is a point, but taking a battered team into the playoffs just to fill a bracket makes no sense.
Class 4-A wrestling, once the unopposed champion of the sport fell on hard times recently, but the arrival of WHSAA-sanctioned girls’ wrestling has given it a jolt. Wrestlers without a win at regional tournaments are still advanced to the state finals just to avoid byes in the 16-man bracket. An eight-man state bracket would create a regional tournament with true competition, but it would eliminate half the wrestlers currently competing at state, and would reduce the three-day tournament to only two, seriously affecting the Casper economy.
Another change comes this Thursday in the 1-A Regional Basketball Tournaments. The West 1-A doesn’t change much, St. Stephen’s drops down this year, and Riverside came down a couple of years ago, but in the East, Lingle-Ft. Laramie, Southeast Goshen, and the Lusk Tigers are all firmly set in the state’s smallest classification. Lingle and Southeast fluctuated between 1-A and 2-A for a while, but they’ve been in the smaller class for a few seasons and are likely to stay.
It’s an example of the diaspora of rural Wyoming. These towns have all diminished over the years, but none has fallen in enrollment as far as the Mighty Tigers of Niobrara County High School.
Lusk was a power in every sport as a Class A school in the 1950s/1960s and until they began to lose enrollment in the early 1970s.
The Tigers famously destroyed the defending AA State Champion Laramie Plainsmen on the floor of the Wyoming Fieldhouse before a Cowboy Home game to open the 1969 season. The Tigers were 23-0 the season before, beating Gillette in the state championship game in Laramie.
Head coach Ed Fullmer’s Tigers were runner-up to Wyoming Indian in the Class 2-A Finals last year, and hopefully will advance to the 1-A tournament this time.
The Tigers are one of the few programs in the state to compete at multiple levels, including the Lovell Bulldogs, Greybull Buffaloes, surprisingly the tiny Midwest Oilers, and the defunct, Cheyenne St.Mary’s / Seton Gaels. St. Mary’s, later renamed Seton, competed in every division of Wyoming basketball before the school was closed permanently in 1991.
Riverton and Lander will fill with teams from Cokeville to Cowley and all parts in between. The Western half of Wyoming will come to Fremont County this weekend. Let’s welcome them, it’s harvest time for local motels, restaurants, and stores if the management recognizes the opportunity and remains open.
A final note on the Lander swim team. The national record for consecutive state championships is held by the boys’ swim team at Jackson Prep, in Jackson, Mississippi. From 1974 to 2018 they won 45 consecutive championships.
The longest current streak is held by the Carmel, Indiana Greyhounds at 38. The Greyhound girls own this streak.
The swimmers that can tie or break the 45 consecutive win streak are already in Lander. They’re in diapers, but in a year or two, I’m sure a few parents will take them to the pool to begin swimming lessons. In a few more, they’ll begin competing at lower levels before reaching middle school.
If the Tiger tradition holds, the 2041 season could be an epic, national record-setting year.
Here’s to the future.