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.
Kids today can see how they played on a cell phone just seconds after the whistle blows. Technology has been both a blessing and a curse to prep sports with each passing innovation. It wasn’t always this way.
In 1974, Coach Blackwell purchased an 8mm color movie camera and had his wife record one of our home games against Byron on the old field at Morton. They took it to a lab in Casper over the weekend, and early next week, we had the chance to see what we looked like on film. It was a graphic realization that we weren’t nearly as good as the guys we were occasionally able to watch on television.
Trent Blankenship and I came up with a blocking scheme we could signal to each other as we set on the line. The Byron defensive end was way inside Trent and the tackle was inside my guard position. I called a cross block on a pass play since the alignment seemed perfect. It was perfect until we tripped on each other’s feet, made a huge pile of arms and legs, and the end came through untouched for a sack.
To our chagrin, we came in early on Tuesday, and I thought Blackwell and assistant coach Bert Oakley would break the projector as they kept playing our cross block back and forth, all with commentary.
A few years later, we’d gather at head coach Jerry Fullmer’s house after Lusk home games to catch George Kay’s Friday night sportscast on K2 TV. In those days, they had the score from every game in every class since it was a coach’s responsibility to call in the games.
Our 1981 State Championship win over Pinedale at Lusk was recorded on a Beta Max video camera. I only watched the game on those gigantic cassettes one time.
A few more years passed, and I was the head basketball coach in Shoshoni. I had numbers for the AP, the UP, and the Casper Star in the back of my scorebook. After each home game, it was once again the responsibility of the home coach to call in the scores to each of those three numbers. The UP was easy, they just wanted a score, the other two requested individual scoring by each player on both teams with quarter by quarter scores.
It was hard enough to call in the games each night, but it was harder on the other end, manning the switchboard and typing all that agate print from several dozen games each Friday and Saturday. But that’s how it was done from the 40’s through the 90’s. When a score wasn’t available in the broadcast or in the paper the next day, it usually meant the visiting team had won.
One memorable night, as I related the box score to a reporter at the Star Tribune on a cold Saturday night, he must have been overwhelmed by the influx flowing in from dozens of coaches calling in scores. His story was accurate aside from one name; he wrote Darly Fullerton instead of Daryl. I still call him Darly once in a while, and we both laugh at the memory.
We used to wait until Monday morning when Jerry Kummerfeld drove to school from Thermopolis to get scores and scorers in the Big Horn Basin. The Billings Gazette covered Northwest Wyoming prep sports in those days, and it was delivered as far south as Thermopolis. Jerry took it the last 33 miles to Shoshoni.
Information was at a premium, and it often came with lower-level coaches driving to rival sites to scout games. Scouting is a lost art in prep sports. People assume a game film is just as good, but it’s not even close.
As a junior high coach in Riverton in the early 80s, part of our responsibility was scouting two away games each season for coach Dale McElhaney. One year I drove to Cody to scout Sheridan and Cody and two games later I watched Rock Springs slash Rawlins in Carbon County. It was part of the job in those days.
You can’t see a tackle’s knuckles turn white on running plays or watch him drop his tail and barely brush the grass on a pass like you can in person. You can’t see a halfback inch towards the line or lean into his stance when he gets the ball, but those little keys can be the difference between a win and a loss in a close game.
We didn’t have junior high coaches who could scout when I started in Lusk, so as the youngest coach, I made a trip to Burns one night to scout visiting Lingle while the Tigers destroyed Guernsey without me.
I noticed that Lingle huddled immediately on defense after kicking off and didn’t pay attention to the visiting sideline.
Fullmer put in a “lonesome end” play, and we used it to open the second half the following week. Shannon Bruegger scored on the pass play as he lined up next to our sideline and raced untouched for the game-winning score in a 14-8 battle. Six weeks later, we were the 1981 state champs.
In an era when eyes and wheels provided information, coaches used every available technique to get an edge.
Hoops starts tomorrow with the Tigers at home and everyone else in tournaments across the vastness of the state. I’ve got a few photographers on site. I will once again rely on the coaches to text me images of their scorebooks so I can get an idea of how the games went before I call them on Saturday morning for Friday’s games, and possibly catch them on the bus ride home for the Saturday story.
That was once a dicey issue, but cell coverage in the Cowboy State is nearing the level it was in more civilized areas of the country a couple of decades ago, and now you can have a conversation without losing the call multiple times.
Winter sports start this weekend and we’ll ride this train until mid-March.
Cheer on your favorite team while you’re on the road, and take advantage of the handful of home games they have this year.