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.
One of the more ridiculous things that occur these days is the overuse of technology. A case in point came at Wind River a couple of years ago.
At Leroy Sinner Field, the game programs are usually available at the concession stand. As they do in Dubois and Ethete, the programs at Pavillion are usually in a stack under a rock. Yes, the wind blows ‘occasionally’ in Fremont County.
At this game, there were no programs, just a full-page QR code with the title “Program” above the code in bold letters. Disgruntled fans, most of them grandparents of players on both teams, looked at the paper taped adjacent to the concession stand window in disgust.
A lot of them knew how to scan a QR code, but in Pavillion, even on the best days, cell phones get only one or two bars of service, and most of the time, no service at all.
That night there was no service to allow their phones to open the digital program.
“All dressed up and no place to go,” described the situation.
Wind River was in the midst of a revolving door of activity directors at the time. They’ve finally settled on a great one in Todd Ghormley.
We have some fantastic ADs in Fremont County in addition to Ghormley. Matt Mason at Shoshoni, Max Mills at Riverton, Tommy Massey at Wyoming Indian, Gale Rowan at Fort Washakie and Dan O’Brien at Dubois all go the extra mile.
Programs are just a minor part of their duties in a job that has ever-increasing demands, but programs are the focus today.
A good program is a Godsend for a sports reporter. Every year a fresh batch of boys and girls rise to the varsity level. Many times, their names are a bewildering mismatch of letters. Yes, sometimes it’s easier to leave them out than face the anger of an overzealous parent because their child’s name, often spelled like it spilled out of a bowl of alphabet soup, is misprinted.
A program takes care of that.
The online programs available through the WHSAA website are a crapshoot on a good day. On a bad one, they don’t reflect the team at all and occasionally you’ll find players listed who are now in their late 20s.
Going back to the 1950s and 1960s, the programs were often works of art. They had stylized covers with ornate script inside and usually contained advertisements in the back from local businesses that supported the team.
I stumbled across a couple of artistic programs printed in 1951 when I was researching railroads in western Nebraska.
The Hay Springs Hawks played the Morrill Lions and Chadron Prep that season in 11-man football. The Hawks still play, but it’s now in the Nebraska Class D 6-man division. They still play the Lions, along with Minatare, Harrison (Sioux County), Cody-Kilgore and Crawford.
Those programs could easily be framed. They are works of art.
Programs in the 1970s were made in the front office of every high school on the mimeograph. If you’re old enough to remember the purplish/blue printing on the stark white paper, you no doubt remember the smell as well. Kids across America grabbed mimeographed papers and took a deep whiff as teachers passed them out.
I still have a few from the dawn of time.
In Lusk and Shoshoni, the business teachers made the programs. The same gals who produced award-winning yearbooks did the same with football, basketball, volleyball and wrestling programs.
The ones made by my late friend Rita Isabel were outstanding.
In Lusk, at Niobrara County High School, the Tiger football program was informative, accurate and full of ads from the proud businesses along Main Street in the biggest town, in the smallest county in Wyoming. I still have a couple of those as well.
In modern times, program quality depends entirely on the dedication of the person in charge. For a few years, the Shoshoni High School programs included player biographies, full-color images of the kids and coaches, complete schedules with a focus on the next game and ads from local businesses.
There is a theme with local businesses. For a few bucks, they get their name on the program and hopefully the fans notice and give them a little patronage.
I like to give credit where credit is due, and our rival news agency in Riverton, WyoToday produced some excellent full-color programs at schools across Fremont County.
Sometimes you wonder how much people pay attention to what you’re doing and who you’re with. I wondered about that often over the last few years when fans would thank me for producing the programs. I didn’t. I just smiled and walked back to the sideline or end of the court.
Last night Riverton and Lander opened the newly renovated Wolverine Gym with an exciting five-game volleyball match won by the Lady Tigers.
At a table near the Lady Tiger bench was a stack of programs next to another stack of Wolverine sports schedules. It was inconspicuous and effective. Fans just picked them up as they walked into the gym.
No fancy graphics, no full-color ads, just the Riverton team with names, numbers and grades and the Lander girls on the other side with the same information. It was perfect for the event.
I interviewed the late Bill Thoren back in 2024 for a story on the 1953 Shoshoni Class B State Basketball Championship.
Bill had programs from individual games and a gem from the 1953 regional tournament played in Greybull. He also had the state tournament program, with every score penciled into the bracket. It was held the following week at Powell.
It was history right in your hands.
That same year as Bill’s interview, my friend Joe White, a longtime football, basketball and track official and an outstanding athlete at Burlington High School in the 1960s, dropped off a collection of old programs, photographs and a scrapbook his mom had made of his playing days.
It was another treasure of years gone by.
There is a lesson in this. No one ever keeps a QR code for posterity. It’s claimed that everything on the Internet stays forever, but does it? Maybe a forensics expert working with law enforcement could scour data and discover some vital link in an investigation, but will you be able to pull up the roster of your team, or your daughter’s team, or check a score from long ago?
Probably not. Those fading mimeographed, Xeroxed, and newsprint pages may be thrown away, but if you keep them, the stories are eternal.