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 kids were loading on the bus in the early morning darkness. It was one of those cloudy Wyoming Saturdays in mid-April. Thankfully, the wind had taken a break that day.
We were headed for a track meet in Dubois, a 100-mile trip on a Bluebird bus, and had to be there by 8:30 a.m.
The starting blocks were under the grandstand in our equipment shed on the far side of the field. I walked over, picked them up, and started back across the field.
There was an eerie sensation that I wasn’t alone as I trudged back across the 40-yard line. I could hear breathing, lots of breathing, but couldn’t see anything except the bus lights in the parking lot and a few porch lights on the houses to the north and west of the field.
I froze in my tracks as the realization set in that a herd of pronghorn had bedded down on the field, and I was in the middle of them.
Wyoming has more pronghorn, (antelope, speed goats… whatever you want to call them) than anywhere else on earth. They often roamed the streets of Shoshoni, and they loved Bailey Field in the early spring.
Maybe it was karma coming back at me. I’d hunted antelope many times, and now, maybe, it was their turn. I sure wasn’t hunting goats that morning, but they could have been hunting me.
When I stopped, they started to stir. I couldn’t see them yet, but knew they were likely a herd of pregnant does, a few young bucks, and last year’s fawns. A couple of them came close enough to touch, then the entire herd bolted as one.
We played at Shoshoni a few times in high school, and I took some good hits on this same field as a kid, but getting drilled by a four-legged tackler who can run faster than 55 mph wasn’t something I wanted to experience.
Thankfully, their senses in the darkness were better than mine. As they thundered off, a few came close enough to let me feel the breeze as they raced by.
I finally saw them in the light behind the bus as they raced across the highway towards the open sagebrush east of the school.
When I reached the bus, a couple of the kids stopped me, “Hey coach, did you see those goats run by the bus?”
“Yeah, I noticed them,” I said.
Off we went to a warm spring day in Dubois.
In Wyoming, wildlife grazing on school fields is commonplace. When I coached in Lusk, the mule deer came down off the bluffs to drink from the sprinklers in the summertime. Deer often watch games in Dubois from just outside the fence.
I’ve had grayish-green stains on my uniform as a player and the pants and jerseys of my kids when we played in Ten Sleep, Pavillion, Ethete, Big Piney, Byron, and Cowley, little gifts left by mule deer.
Even in larger towns like Riverton, Lander, Rock Springs, Casper, and Cody, the antelope and deer often find gaps in the fences and graze on the field. Artificial playing surfaces have solved the problem in a handful of schools.
Sometimes it’s not wildlife but hooligans that make a sticky playing surface.
When we played at Ten Sleep one year, our coach stopped us as we got off the bus. Someone had grazed cattle all summer on the Pioneer field. If you’ve seen the “gifts” that cattle leave, you get the idea. Cow pies littered the field. It looked more like a feedlot than a gridiron.
We moved the game 25 miles west and played at Worland that afternoon.
That same year, when we came out of the locker room after halftime in Cowley, somebody had opened a gate and herded 300 or so sheep onto the field.
Real funny, we thought, until you tackled somebody or slipped trying to set up a block on the little piles of sheep droppings, then not so much. Did I mention that sheep manure has a unique, persistent smell that mothers don’t care for when washing clothes?
A story from early in my career came in Hanna when the Miners still played 11-man football.
As the kids dressed, the coaches walked out to check the field. Someone, maybe the entire town, had used the football field as a dog park that summer. No, they didn’t pick up after their pooches.
One of the established rules of football is a safe playing surface. We approached the Hanna coaches about the field and got little response. Our head coach told them they would forfeit unless the field was cleaned up, and the officials backed him up on the statement.
Grudgingly, the Hanna staff, a couple of custodians, and the three guys running the chain all grabbed shovels and plastic bags and cleared the field. We rolled over them in an easy 29-2 win.
Much of America doesn’t worry about wildlife, pets, or livestock wandering onto the field, but in the Rocky Mountain West, it is still a way of life.