Category Archives: Coaches Project

The 14 men who have pulled off the feat are not well known in the Equality State.

Even to fanatics of Wyoming high school football, the names are for the most part unfamiliar.

Wayne Jacka, Duard Davids, Alven Thorson, Harry McGee and 10 other coaches, though, did more in one football season in Wyoming than many coaches have ever been able to do.

Those 14 coaches, in their one season coaching in Wyoming, led their teams to undefeated seasons — and then left, ending their Wyoming football coaching careers forever unbeaten.

What some of these men did after leaving their coaching position has been lost to history. What others did is downright remarkable.

Of the 14 coaches who led their Wyoming school to an undefeated season, only to step down at the end of the year, Jack Johnson and Del Wight are two of the most decorated.

Wight, who led Worland to a 9-0 season in 1965, didn’t stay in the high school ranks for long. He was a defensive coordinator for several major college programs, including North Dakota from 1969-71, New Mexico from 1972-76, Washington State from 1982-85, Wyoming from 1986-90 and San Diego State in 1993. He also coached at Fresno State, Northern Iowa and Kansas. He was also a coach in the CFL with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Toronto Argonauts and the ill-fated Las Vegas Posse. To get there, though, after his 1965 stint in Worland, he moved to Pocatello, Idaho, and was the head coach at Pocatello High for awhile before heading into the college ranks.

Johnson, meanwhile, led Torrington to a perfect 9-0 season in 1969 but left for Montana soon afterward. In the Big Sky State, he became legendary. Leading Great Falls CM Russell High School, Johnson is Montana’s all-time winningest high school football coach and is one of the winningest active coaches in the nation with 341 career victories entering this season. He’s a member of the national high school coaches hall of fame and coached both CFL legend Dave Dickenson and NFL flameout Ryan Leaf in high school.

The 12 other men who coached their teams to perfect records in their one year as the head coach of a Wyoming football team — and their exploits either before or after their one year as head coach, when known — are posted below:

Earl Campbell, Kemmerer, 1924: 5-0 (No information available.)

Duard Davids, Byron 1967: 7-0-1 (As a student, Davids went to North Gem High in Idaho and then Utah State, graduating from USU in 1962. He is retired now and, from what I can tell, lives in Seattle.)

Royal Huckins, Torrington 1943: 5-0 (Huckins only coached Torrington’s last five games of the 1943 season, and the Trailblazers finished 6-1 that season. That year, he took over for Wes Evans, who was called to fight in World War II. Huckins played college football at Northern Colorado; what he did after coaching Torrington is unknown.)

Wayne Jacka, Sunrise 1931: 6-0 (According to 1940 Census records, Jacka lived in Cimmaron, Kan., that year. I think he’s from Kansas, although he may have also lived in Colorado for awhile, and it appears he died in the early 1980s.)

Jack Johnson, Torrington 1969: 9-0

Charles Marlowe, Laramie 1916: 3-0-3 (No information available.)

Harry McGee, Reliance 1945: 6-0 (McGee had been at Superior High as a commerce teacher prior to coming to Reliance. He may have also lived in Big Piney, although I’m not sure about that.)

Bob Pratt, Ten Sleep 1961: 5-0 (No information available.)

Leo Sherman, Sheridan 1911: 4-0 (No information available.)

Grant Smith, Cowley 1955: 4-0 (I think Smith may have been from Cowley.)

Alven Thorson, Glenrock 1940: 5-0 (Thorson died in 2009 at age 100. He had moved to Seattle in 1952 and taught at Ballard High School. He also apparently worked for a time with the Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association. He received his M.A. in Education from UW in 1946. He also apparently lived in Billings for a time in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was originally from Milan, Minn.)

John Whatcott, Byron 1958: 9-0 (From what I can gather, Byron was the first stop for Whatcott after graduating from Utah State, where he was a star running back for the Aggies. He soon moved back to Utah — he was head coach at Logan High in 1963 — and eventually became an athletic director at Pine View High School in St. George. From what I can tell, he still lives around the St. George area.)

Del Wight, Worland 1965: 9-0

Harry Wiley, Manderson 1924: 4-0 (No information available.)

If you have any information you can share about these one-stop-in-Wyoming wonders and what they did either before or after their perfect season in Wyoming, I would love to hear it! Email me or post a comment below.

It’s also interesting to note that, since Johnson left for Montana in 1969, this one-season perfection and evacuation hasn’t happened again. And with the coaches of all the remaining undefeated teams in the state having at least one year of head coaching experience under their belts in Wyoming, it won’t happen this year….

–patrick

Any Wyoming high school football fan who has more than just a passing interest in the history of the sport in the state knows that Wyoming’s all-time winningest coach is current Cokeville coach Todd Dayton, who has 263 career victories.

But another record Dayton holds has gone less heralded — he also holds the Wyoming record for most state championships, with 18. In a 33-year career (so far), that’s not a bad ratio.

I recently compiled a list of Wyoming coaches with the most state championships (both official and unofficial). The coaches that have at least four titles are listed in order below:

18 titles, Todd Dayton, Cokeville
14 titles, John E. Deti (John Sr.), Laramie
7 titles, Mark Bullington, Southeast; and Okie Blanchard, Cheyenne Central (4), Natrona (2) and Rock Springs (1)
6 titles, Bruce Keith, Sheridan; Don Julian, between Riverton (4) and Sheridan (2); and Joel Eskelsen, Big Piney.
5 titles, Carl Selmer, Worland; and Jerry Fullmer, Lusk.
4 titles, shared by nine coaches (Ben Smith, Carl Rollins, Fred Chez, Jim McLeod, John Scott, Lew Kelly, Robert Linford, Steve Harshman, Walter Gray).

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

While compiling the above list, I also put together another, shorter list — the list of coaches who have won championships at more than one Wyoming high school.

The leader of that pack is Okie Blanchard, who, as noted above, won seven total championships at three different schools. He won four titles with Cheyenne Central, two with Natrona and one with Rock Springs. He is also the only coach to win state football titles at three different Wyoming high schools.

In all, only seven coaches in state history have pulled off the double-championship feat. Other coaches who have won state titles with two different schools include:

Don Julian, 6 total: 4 with Riverton, 2 with Sheridan
John Scott, 4 total: 2 with Gillette, 2 with Kemmerer
Kay Fackrell, 3 total: 2 with Evanston, 1 with Lyman
Al Peyton, 2 total: 1 with Shoshoni, 1 with Tongue River
Eddie Talboom, 2 total: 1 with Evanston, 1 with Rock Springs
Walter Dowler, 2 total: 1 with Cheyenne Central, 1 with Rock Springs

And that’s what I’ve got for you today….

–patrick

School shopping — defined as a head coach leaving a position at one school to take a head coaching position at another school in the year after — used to be common practice in Wyoming high schools.

Not so much anymore.

Sometimes, coaches have come to — or left — Wyoming in a school shopping mode. But leaving the head coaching position at one Wyoming school for the head spot at another in-state school has become increasingly rare.

Certainly, other factors play into shifting coaching jobs, among them other career and family goals. But it is interesting to note how little it happens nowadays, especially when you consider how common it was 40 or 50 years ago.

Some of Wyoming’s most successful coaches switched one in-state head spot for another in successive years. John Deti Sr., John Deti Jr., John McDougall, Okie Blanchard, Dallas Hoff, Art Hill and Kay Fackrell all did so, and all of these men are on the list — the quite short list — of Wyoming coaches who have more than 100 victories in their careers.

This year, for the first time since Don Dinnel’s move from Rawlins to Evanston in 2005, we have a coach moving from one head coaching position to another, as Ted Holmstrom makes the move from head coach at Lyman to head coach at Laramie.

However, despite the technique’s fairly common use in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, it’s only been done 13 times by 11 coaches since 1980 and only three times since 1995 (John Cundall going from Gillette to Greybull in 2004, and Dinnel going from Mountain View to Rawlins in 2003 and from Rawlins to Evanston in 2005).

For comparison, the in-state switch was done 22 times in the 1940s, 12 times in the 1950s, 20 times in the 1960s and 14 times in the 1970s.

The 13 most recent coaches to swap head coaching positions in-state:

Don Dinnel, Rawlins to Evanston, 2005
John Cundall, Gillette to Greybull, 2004
Don Dinnel, Mountain View to Rawlins, 2003
Stephen Bailey, Ten Sleep to Meeteetse, 1995
John Scott, Kemmerer to Gillette, 1995
Rich Steege, Burns to Pinedale, 1994
Paul Colgate, Lander to Gillette, 1990
Gary Glenn, Riverton to Douglas, 1990
Craig Nelson, Lovell to Lyman, 1989
Dwayne Trembly, Seton (St. Mary’s) to Cheyenne East, 1989
Hunter Short, Meeteetse to Newcastle, 1988
Hunter Short, Douglas to Meeteetse, 1986
Jim Keen, Powell to Cheyenne East, 1982

The changes are a small but interesting footnote to Wyoming high school football. Many changes were not “up,” to bigger or more successful programs; in fact, a lot of changes were pulled off by coaches who wanted to move to smaller or less successful programs, where the pressure was not as intense. In many ways, these changes reflect the men more than the programs and tell more of a personal story than they tell a football story.

–patrick