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.
(Dubois, WY) – The sun came up without him. He’s gone from us physically, but his spirit lives on. My friend, the friend of many, and a man who will forever be remembered as “coach” to hundreds more departed the mortal plane sometime Tuesday evening or early Wednesday morning.
David Trembly was my friend. That’s the best thing I can say about a man who was an inspiration to everyone who knew him.
I received a text message from his wife Adria last Friday while I was covering the Dubois / Meeteetse 6-man football game. The message was clear, “If you wanted to visit David before he’s gone, I would recommend within a week.” I drove west of Dubois to Union Pass as soon as the game was over.
We had talked through the summer about me coming up to the cabin, but life gets in the way. Wyatt was heading off to football practice at Black Hills State, David was in the last days of battling the bastard that is cancer and it just didn’t work out.
It worked out on Friday.
I arrived not knowing what condition my friend would be in. David was cognizant, still had his sense of humor and was a gracious host.
What would two men who’ve known each other for over a quarter-century talk about? You guessed it, our boys and athletics.
David and Adria went beyond the pale in raising Wyatt. He’s the kind of kid every parent hopes for, tough, smart, competitive, witty and with a motor that will not quit. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree with this one.
As we were talking about Wyatt’s first game for the Yellowjackets, David interjected a comment about my son Brian.
“I always loved to watch Brian hurdle,” David said. “He was great.”
David and I went through many seasons together, over a quarter-of-a-century of football, wrestling and track.
In 2004, while I was working for the Wyoming Department of Education as a distance education consultant, David was one of my online teachers.
Many fans look at a coach and think only of the sport he’s leading his team in, but David was a teacher, an excellent teacher.
He taught Calculus I, a dual credit college course online, over compressed video to kids across the state. Not many people can make the screen disappear in an online, live teaching session, but David was a natural.
Chalk one up against all those who don’t understand that often the best teachers in school are often the football coaches. Argue if you will, but it is often the case.
A few years ago, I could tell something wasn’t right with David during track season. He confided in me at the Shane Brock Meet in Lander that he’d been diagnosed with colon cancer. Trying to bolster his confidence I said, my dad had colon cancer, he just passed away. I went on to say, he was diagnosed when he was 51 and lived another 36 years.
David grinned and laughed with his familiar head down reaction when he heard something funny.
“I can only hope,” he said.
Sadly, he didn’t make the 36 years.
We shared much more than athletics and education.
David was a farmer at heart. I shot pictures of the Trembly clan at Cheyenne Frontier Days one summer when my daughter Staci was marching in the Wyoming Honor Band. There was David in a green shirt, with a cowboy hat on his head driving an old, restored John Deere tractor down the streets of Cheyenne.
We often talked about haying equipment, tractors and harvests during down times at wrestling matches and track meets.
We talked about hunting as well.
He had one of the most spine-chilling hunting stories anyone could imagine.
On Thanksgiving Day 2012, David and his two older sons Grant and Joel were elk hunting in the Black Tail Butte area near Jackson. David had harvested an elk earlier but the boys had tags to fill. They spooked a 534-pound grizzly boar.
In the lapse of just a few seconds David emptied the entire contents of a can of bear spray into the charging boar before his sons fired a combined five shots, hitting the bruin three times before it fell just eight feet in front of their dad.
“Dad peaked around a tree, hunched over and had a puzzled look on his face, then he stood up extremely tall. ‘Oh, crap, what is it?’ I thought. My dad doesn’t stand up like that unless he’s trying to intimidate something,” Joel said. “I’ve seen him do that before and it’s never a good thing.”
Separated by just 40 feet the bear turned toward David and began to run. A six-inch tree and a couple of two-inch trees were directly in front of him as he set to spray the bear.
“He was so close I could see his nostrils flair,” David said. “I emptied the bear spray right into his face and could see droplets falling from the roof of his mouth and off his fur. I fanned the spray back and forth and some of it bounced off the trees in front of us.”
Since David had filled his elk tag earlier, he didn’t have his rifle. “After the spray ran out, I pulled my knife and set my feet,” David said. “Maybe I could dodge him and get on his back…”
Only a wrestler could think that. I laughed out loud when he told me he’d try to jump on its back, but that’s David Trembly in a nutshell.
David lived life with exuberance. He was one of a kind, and such a great role model to the kids of the High Country.
There have been hurdlers at Wind River, Riverton, Shoshoni and Lander, but under David, Dubois was “Hurdle High.” There were always blue and gold hurdlers in the boys’ and girls’ finals at Casper each season. That’s when you can tell a coach has come through a program.
I think of the influence of coach Trembly in a few lines from the baseball film, “The Natural.”
Roy Hobbs is discussing the path of his life with his childhood sweetheart Iris Gaines.
“I could have been better, I could have broken every record in the books,” Roy says.
A few lines later Iris replies, “With or without the records, they’ll remember you. Think of all those young boys you’ve influenced.”
David had that power.
In our last meeting on this earth, David was getting tired and I had two more games to cover.
As I started to say goodbye, he mustered the little strength he had left and I helped him to his feet.
I’m not an emotional guy, but we were both in tears as we hugged each other one last time, and then I drove down the mountain.
David Trembly, I rode with him, I’ve got no complaints.