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.
I clearly remember my first conversation with my friend David Peck. He called during my planning period at Shoshoni High School and our secretary Mitzi Eads contacted me on the intercom to tell me I had a call. I said I’d take it in the coaches’ office which was just a few doors down the hall at the old school.
David was calling for a preview on the upcoming basketball season.
I had just been hired as the head boys’ coach. We were already in the second week of the season but the board had not acted on my contract until we played our opening games in our home Wrangler Tournament.
We beat St. Stephen’s in the championship game, something Shoshoni had rarely accomplished even back in the late 50s and early 60s. It was only then that they offered me a contract. What they would have done if we’d lost those first two games against Wright and St. Stephen’s will always be a mystery.
David introduced himself then asked me to list my starting five and top subs.
I began dutifully going through our roster. Troy Stone, 6-2 senior, Daryl Fullerton 5-10 senior, Brian Clemetson 5-5 junior…
The line went quiet on David’s end, before he finally said. “Coach, I have a roster from last year and everyone of your players shrank two to three inches.”
He was on to me. I answered him by saying, “Oh, you want the truth.”
It’s a trick as old as athletics themselves, bending the truth on your roster.
Nearly everyone does it, but some mislead on the other side, claiming players to be much taller or heavier than they really are.
My efforts were amateurish in comparison to some of the greats.
Perhaps the best one at this trick in Wyoming was legendary Laramie High School head coach John E. Deti. The senior Deti coached the Plainsmen from 1944 to 1976, winning 14 state championships in the process. His son John R. Deti took over the program after he retired.
The elder Deti never had a player over 165 pounds or over six feet tall if you looked at a Laramie High roster. It was a deception he mastered early in his career.
The “tiny” Plainsmen routinely played Golden, Fort Collins, Wheatridge, Grand Junction, Fort Morgan and Aurora from Colorado. The much larger Colorado schools were always amazed at the success Deti had against them and the sportswriters working for the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News bought into it, focusing their stories on the discipline and execution of the much smaller Albany County team.
I believed it as well until I moved into Crane Hall as a freshman and met one of Deti’s little linemen, Dennis Baker. Dennis was 6-3 and 220 pounds. He showed me a game program from his senior year when they played Cheyenne Central. There was Dennis, a senior tackle listed at 5-8 and 166 pounds. It was just a bit of a deception, but it worked splendidly for Coach Deti.
It’s not as easy to pull off the deception in the modern era with online rosters, Huddle accounts for players and the multitude of media that now follows high school kids, but it can still be done.
One Friday morning at the Village Inn in Casper the late Shoshoni head boys’ basketball coach Chuck Wells and I were having breakfast.
In walked Ron Moore and the Mountain View basketball team. Ron spotted Chuck and sat down with us.
He was playing Alfred Redman and the Chiefs later that day and wanted a scouting report.
Chuck gave me a look that said, “just play along” and proceeded to tell Ron the exact opposite of what Al’s boys were about to do.
“Do they still press full court,” I remember Ron asking.
Chuck replied, “It’s the strangest thing, Al has them playing good old fashioned half-court man-to-man defense.”
We’d played the Chiefs three times that year, winning at Ethete, losing at Shoshoni and getting eliminated in overtime in the tournament at Worland. Al’s teams pressed you when you went you got off the bus.
Chuck continued with the miscues for another half hour before Ron had to leave with his team.
“Why did you do that?” I asked Chuck.
“Payback,” was all that Chuck said. He and Ron had a long history coaching against each other.
The Chiefs won later they day at Casper College.
It’s illegal today, but the “Lonesome End” was once the greatest of all trick plays. After a kick return you huddled up at midfield with 10 players, and the 11th slowly stepped onto the field with the players on the sideline all lined up tightly together.
If you did it correctly, the defensive backs on the other team wouldn’t notice the end stepping onto the field.
Lingle Ft. Laramie was loaded in 1981, but we had a good team in Lusk as well. Head coach Jerry Fullmer had an adage about passing the ball. “There are three things that can happen, and two of them are bad,” Jerry often said.
This time we received the ball, huddled in the middle of the field on about the 30-yard line and as the boys broke the huddle, senior Shannon Bruegger quietly stepped onto the field.
Cody Sturman snapped the ball to Troy Hladky and Troy threw an arching pass to Shannon as he streaked down the sideline. A Lingle corner caught him at the five-yard line but we were in business and beat the Doggers 14-6 that night.
Cheating? No way, it was within the confines of the rules at the time and perfectly legal play. We rolled to a state championship two months later in a 21-0 win over the Pinedale Wranglers in Lusk.
Deception is just as viable as power, speed or aggression in athletics. It’s something that a few are born with and others must learn.
In that first conversation with David Peck so long ago, I neglected to let him know we had a German exchange student on the roster that season, but he soon learned of the 6-3 redheaded farm boy from outside Hamburg.
Manfred Roenz was a key to our state title that season. David would learn of him soon enough. Who was to let him know that early in the season?