2024 season wrap-up: Records, streaks, champions, etc.

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Here’s to 2024…

Champions: Sheridan, Star Valley, Big Horn, Pine Bluffs, Snake River.

All-state: Four players joined Wyoming’s small club of three-time all-state selections: Burlington’s Joe Bassett; Lingle’s Louden Bremer and Kaiden Riggs (2023 with Torrington); and Upton-Sundance’s Eli Gill.

Another 42 players made first-team all-state for a second year: Big Horn’s Avon Barney and Kolby Butler; Big Piney’s Caden Clifford; Buffalo’s Hayden Jawors; Burlington’s Rykael Andrew, Jordan Casey and Weston Gotfredson; Campbell County’s Trent Rosenau; Cheyenne Central’s Brycen Bailey; Cody’s Maddax Ball, Wyatt Barton, Chase Hatch, Grady McCarten, Trey Smith and Warren Sorenson; Douglas’ Carter Archuleta; Greybull’s Lucas Bolzer; Lingle’s Anthony Arnusch, Colt Brown and Cooper Smith; Lovell’s Davin Crosby; Lusk’s Raynce Brott and Jackson Smith; Lyman’s Max Gregory; Mountain View’s Justus Platts; Pine Bluffs’ Shawn Shmidl; Powell’s Doug Bettger and Keona Wisniewski; Shoshoni’s Quinton Clark; Snake River’s Bridger Cozzens and Mason Jones; Southeast’s Ayden Desmond and TJ Moats; Star Valley’s Cooper Lawson, Smith McClure, Bryson Nield and Grant Thomson; Thunder Basin’s Cort Catlin and Logan Mendoza; Torrington’s Kaden Romig; Wheatland’s Jake Hyche; and Worland’s Brody Thiel.

Individual records: Star Valley’s Bryson Nield set the state’s 11-man single-season receiving record with 1,283 yards, breaking the old record by 20 yards. Nield also set the single-game record with his 291-yard receiving effort against Powell on Oct. 4. Star Valley’s Smith McClure finished eighth all-time for passing yards in an 11-man season with 2,726. Jackson’s Tyson Kendall finished sixth in 11-man single-game receiving yards with 248 this season against Bear Lake, Idaho.

In six-man, Hulett’s Kyle Smith shattered the single-season passing yards mark with 2,508, breaking the old record by more than 300 yards. Hulett had two receivers crack the top six all-time in six-man receiving yards with Hudson Reilly (third, 1,072 yards) and Ben Harrison (sixth, 910). Smith also finished with three of the top four passing games in six-man history, including a six-man record 519 yards through the air against Midwest. Reilly also set the single-game six-man receiving yards record in that game with 321 receiving yards. Also in six-man, Snake River’s Bridger Cozzens finished second all-time with 2,492 rushing yards this season, and his 482-yard rushing effort — in the championship game against Burlington, no less — was the third-best all-time single-game six-man rushing effort.

Scoring records: As noted a couple times, Wyoming had its combined single-game scoring record broken — destroyed, really — in Midwest’s 94-93 victory against Hulett. The 187 combined points beat the old record by 25 points. Hulett was also involved in the No. 3 all-time scoring game this season in its 85-74 victory (159 combined points) against Hanna in (get this) Midwest. Burlington’s 92-point effort in the first round of the six-man playoffs against Farson tied for second-most points ever by one team in a playoff game. Snake River’s 87 points against Burlington was the most points ever in a championship game. Oh, and Burlington and Encampment tied the state record for most overtimes in a playoff game with three, tying Laramie and Cody from their 1976 Class AA championship classic.

In 11-man, Cody’s 49-42 victory against Douglas in the 3A semifinals ranked as the ninth-highest scoring 11-man playoff game in state history at 91 points.

Streaks: We know the big ones. Sheridan has the new state winning streak record at 43 consecutive games; Cheyenne South holds the new state losing streak record at 47. However, Sheridan has also climbed into a tie for second place with a 29-game home winning streak, while South now has the state record with a 22-game home losing streak.

Snake River and Star Valley now rank second and third, respectively, in consecutive games scoring, with Snake River scoring in 155 straight games and Star Valley in 140. The record is 175.

Cokeville had its 37th consecutive winning season, as well as its 39th consecutive season at .500 or better, both by far state records. Meanwhile, Sheridan continued in second place in the consecutive winning seasons category with its 18th. Laramie also continued its state record streak with its 24th consecutive losing season and tied the state record with its 24th consecutive season at .500 or worse.

Coaching: Both Lyman’s Dale Anderson and Wright’s Larry Yeradi reached the 100-victory mark for their careers this season; they’ll enter 2025 tied for fourth among all active coaches in total victories statewide with exactly 100 apiece. Mountain View’s Brent Walk (97 victories) and Cody’s Matt McFadden (95) could reach the mark next season. Natrona’s Steve Harshman, with 241 victories as head coach at Natrona, continues to lead all active coaches in victories, with 101 more than second-place Chad Goff at Cheyenne East, who has 140. Upton-Sundance’s Andy Garland is third at 116.

Rankings: Star Valley will enter 2025 having been ranked for 93 consecutive weeks, fourth-best all-time. Snake River’s state record of 24 consecutive weeks ranked No. 1 ended this season.

Picks: Oh, yeah. Here are the results of my picks from championship week and this season:

Championship week: 4-1 (80 percent). This season: 239-59 (80 percent). Total over 20 (!) (?) (!) seasons: 4,764-1,125 (81 percent).

By the way, everything from the 2024 season should be uploaded to its respective page. If anything looks weird, wrong, misspelled, in the wrong place, or generally discombobulated, please let me know! I’m at pschmiedt@yahoo.com, or you could publicly call me out with a comment. That works, too. 🙂

–patrick

1926 Wyoming all-state football team added to site

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The 1926 all-state team, one of two missing all-state teams from Wyoming’s football history, has been located.

But the echoes of controversy still ring out on the picks, almost 100 years later.

Finding the team was a challenge in and of itself. Most all-state teams are published at the end of the season. Well, the 1926 all-state team was published significantly later than that, making its appearance in the Wyoming State Tribune and Cheyenne State Leader on Jan. 10, 1927 (hence my delay in finding it; I wasn’t looking in the right time frame).

The team — chosen by “five coaches and two sport writers of Wyoming who have seen all of the teams in action excepting Sheridan and Buffalo” — was heavy on players from Cheyenne and Worland, the two teams who played for the state championship that season, as well as on players from the southeastern corner of the state.

The selections quickly drew criticism from up north, including Sheridan coach Web Wright and Buffalo coach J.R. Strother, who both advocated for Gillette’s Ross, Sheridan’s Wilson and Redhair and Buffalo’s Stevenson, Watt and Burger.

“I have felt ever since coming to Buffalo that there has been a tendency to ignore this part of the state and, as I see it, this section of the state merits consideration with the best schools all over the state — not only in athletics but in other activities as well,” Strother said.

See? Regional rivalries aren’t new. Your favorite team has always been overlooked and under-rated.

The full team is below. It’s also been added to the 1920s all-state teams page and to the all-state database. I’m still trying to find first names for four players from the 1926 team — Midwest’s Curley, Green River’s Davis, Lovell’s Craft and Torrington’s Havenly. Any help on finding those gentlemen’s first names is appreciated!

The only remaining missing all-state team is that from 1932, if it was even chosen.

+++

1926 all-class, all-state football team
As chosen by the staff of the Wyoming State Tribune and Cheyenne State Leader
First team
CHEYENNE CENTRAL: Wayne Colvin, RH; Herbert Gage, QB; William Lane, LG; Holland Lyons, LT.
DOUGLAS: Orland Blackburn, FB; Howard Dickson, LE.
MIDWEST: Curley, RE.
WORLAND: Carl Dir, LH; Walt McDonald, C; Sam McPike, RT; Wilbur Wortham, RG.
Second team
CHEYENNE CENTRAL: Walter Kingham, RT; Arthur Morgan, LH.
DOUGLAS: Thurlow Peake, C.
LARAMIE: Blake Fanning, RH.
NATRONA: Verle Harlow, RG.
THERMOPOLIS: Clarence Poindexter, LE.
WHEATLAND: (Clayton?) Russell, LT.
WORLAND: Harry Barnes, FB; Alva Hamilton, RE; Jinks Hillberry, LG; Fred Werner, QB.
Honorable mention
CHEYENNE CENTRAL: Tom Bradley, FB; Alfred Erickson, E; Herbert Harris, E; John Nimmo, QB.
DOUGLAS: Clarence Slonaker, T.
GREEN RIVER: Davis, QB.
LARAMIE: Don Nolan, HB.
LOVELL: Craft, FB.
NATRONA: Taft Harris, E.
RAWLINS: Bill Engstrom, FB; Michael Pappas, HB.
TORRINGTON: Havenly, HB.
WORLAND: John Werner, HB.

–patrick

A new look for game results on wyoming-football.com

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This week, wyoming-football.com has transitioned to a new way of displaying game-by-game results on both team and year pages.

The new table-based display allows for a more dynamic and consistent way of showing game scores that also provides more consistency between and among pages than the old text-based display allowed. It also allows for more dynamic searching and filtering of results, allowing users to find out more about their favorite teams, rivalries, seasons and more.

Click here for a primer on how to use the new score display to its full potential.

This new approach has been a thought of mine for years, but only recently — thanks to the financial support of wyoming-football.com’s page sponsors — could I buy the kind of technical support I needed to implement the change. I don’t want to get too lost in the techno-babble here, but the quickest way to explain it is that all game results come from one place and are loaded on demand rather than the results themselves resting on any one page. What that means is when I do an update, I can do one update to the database rather than updates to the year page and each team page. And the benefit you get is the chance to have more of an opportunity to comb through those results to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Thanks to my wife, Charlynn, for sharing a bit of web development expertise beyond my understanding for helping me make it work.

If you see anything that looks weird or incorrect as you explore the new display, please let me know!

–patrick

Updates: Powell, Lovell, Glenrock, Moorcroft, Sundance, Huntley, Coaches Project

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Two games with the wrong winners have been fixed and updated. In both games, it was a case of the original source I looked at having the winner and score wrong:

Powell beat Lovell 7-0 on Sept. 3, 1954; I had Lovell winning by the same score.

Huntley beat Glenrock 12-7 on Sept. 10, 1965; I had Glenrock winning 17-12.

I also fixed the score for Sundance’s 41-27 victory against Moorcroft on Oct. 2, 1963; I had listed 40-21.

I also knocked off some missing coaches’ names from the Coaches Project:

Basin’s coach in 1930 was Frank Sharrar and 1948 was Martin Darling. … Burns’ coach in 1940 and 1941 was Bill Fiegenbaum. … Cokeville’s coach in 1927 was Okie Blanchard. … Cowley’s coach in 1924 was Andrew “Red” Willis and 1948 was Harry Mangus. … Guernsey’s coach in 1931 was Ray Frink. … Shoshoni’s coach in 1945 was Bill Gibney and in 1946 was Bob Porter. … Star Valley’s coach in 1928 was Newell Peterson. … Ten Sleep’s coach in 1940 was Ralph Crowton.

I also found the first initials for Lovell’s coach in 1923, C.H. McClure; added the full first name for Manderson’s coach in 1940, Harold Bender; and corrected the spelling for Sunrise’s coach in 1943, Jack Secrest.

All the updates have been made on all the relevant pages. As always, if you see anything that looks wrong on this site, please let me know: pschmiedt@yahoo.com.

–patrick

Updates: Star Valley, Wheatland, Sunrise, Guernsey, Albin, Huntley, Hawk Springs, Deaver, Super 25

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I’ve tracked down a few more dates, locations and scores for some missing games, including several for Star Valley:

Found the date for Star Valley’s Oct. 21, 1949, game with Malad, Idaho; found the location for Star Valley’s Oct. 29, 1948, game vs. Malad, Idaho (it was in Afton); and the dates for four Star Valley games in 1945: the Oct. 5 game against Downey, Idaho; the Oct. 19 game at Paris, Idaho; the Oct. 20 game at Superior (yes, the Braves played two road games in one weekend); and the Oct. 26 game at Montpelier, Idaho.

Found the score for Sunrise’s 43-0 victory against Albin on Sept. 24, 1954.

Found the date for the Sept. 15, 1967, game between Huntley and Lyman, Nebraska.

Found the score for Albin’s 23-14 victory against Hawk Springs on Nov. 11, 1941; I knew Albin had won, but I didn’t know the score.

Fixed the date and added the location for Bridger, Montana’s, 7-6 victory against Deaver-Frannie on Oct. 21, 1939, in Bridger.

Fixed the date and added the location for Sunrise’s 12-0 victory against Wheatland on Nov. 1, 1935; it was in Sunrise. Also noted that Wheatland’s game scheduled with Manville on Nov. 1 was not played.

Corrected the date for Guernsey’s game with Sunrise on Sept. 29, 1934; I originally had Guernsey playing two games on Sept. 28, one with Manville and one with Sunrise. Guernsey played two games that weekend, with the Sunrise game coming a day after the Manville game.

All the updates have been made on all the relevant pages.

Also, the Casper Star-Tribune released its Super 25 team recently. That team has been added to the Super 25 page on this site, as well.

–patrick

Updates: 1994 all-state, Kemmerer coach

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After years — more than a decade — of not being able to locate the 1994 Class 1A nine-man all-state team, I finally have it. Thanks to my former coach at Midwest, Mike Good, for the hookup! This team was the last team dating back to 1932 that I had yet to locate. The completionist in me is quite happy right now. The listings are on the 1990s all-state page.

Also, I fixed Kemmerer’s coach for 1999; it was Jason Sleep, not Joe Aimone. Thanks to Chris Wagner for his help with that fix!

–patrick

Updates: Cody, Evanston, Greybull, Upton

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A few quick updates to the site:

I fixed the score for Upton’s 34-26 loss to Newell, S.D., on Sept. 9, 1977. This game is famous for being the most overtimes in a game in Wyoming history with five OTs. I noted this game a few weeks back in another blog post, where I first noticed the discrepancy between what I had (32-24) and the actual final.

I also found three coach names — two first names and one full name — for the coaches’ project. I found first names for Cody’s coach in 1921, E.E. Phillips, and Evanston’s coach in 1924, Julian House. I also found Greybull’s coach in 1925, John Simpson.

All the updates have been made on all the relevant pages.

–patrick

Changes coming for wyoming-football.com

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Eighteen years.

That’s how long this site, at least in its earliest iterations, has been online.

I first posted the framework for what would become wyoming-football.com online in early 2005 and officially moved it to this URL in mid-2006.

I was just over 23 years old when I started the site. I’m now 41. And my life has changed in significant ways in the past 18 years.

When I started, wyoming-football.com was a repository of historical information. It still is, but it’s grown into much more than that.

The problem with growth is that it requires time and energy.

At 41, I no longer have the time or the energy to run the site as I have the past several years. After some serious thinking, I have decided to return wyoming-football.com to its roots as a repository.

Don’t worry: The site will stay. What will change is how much time and energy goes into doing live work on social media and on the site in real time on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays during the season.

Two big changes are forthcoming this fall.

First: Live updates to the site will end. Instead, the season’s scoreboard page and standings will be updated once a week, probably each Sunday during the season. Team pages will no longer be updated weekly with results. Meanwhile, one big bulk update will continue to come at the end of each season for updates to team pages, similar to what I do with champlists.com and wyoming-basketball.com.

Second: Social media accounts on Twitter and Facebook will stay, but I will not use them for live score updates during the season.

Other activity you see on the site right now will continue, albeit some things may change slightly.

On The HQ — the blog where you’re reading this right now — weekly blog posts with picks will continue during the season. I will also likely post less frequently, although hopefully more thoughtfully, during the offseason, and I will stop doing individual posts for each coaching change that takes place during the offseason.

I won’t stop research, or accepting tips on research, on information from games that are missing it, or seasons where coach information is missing. That work will continue, but at my own pace, on my own time.

I will continue to produce the annual preview magazine, as long as its sponsors and the publisher want to continue doing so.

However, another edition of “A Century of Fridays” will likely never be made. Better get the latest edition while you can.

A HUGE thank you to those of you who were willing to support me over the past 13 years when I asked for the financial support necessary to maintain this site, whether through a book purchase, a page sponsorship or a Ko-fi donation. And another huge thanks to those who have helped support the site with your time and energy researching — and sharing — details about the sport and state we all love. Page sponsorships will continue as long as the sponsors are willing.

That said, I have other things I also want to do with my life, and for the first time in 18 years, I feel ready to devote my time and energy to those things, too — at least on Thursday and Friday nights and Saturday afternoons in the fall.

–patrick

Shared state championships: An update

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With the archive of weekly football rankings complete, I wanted to turn my attention to something that I now have the opportunity to fully research and expand upon: the shared state championship.

Several championships were already listed as shared on my state champions listings. In the pre-playoff, polls-only era, this isn’t unprecedented. However, with both the complete AP and UPI rankings now fully available, it’s afforded me a chance to look back at season-ending polls to see if everything matches up.

In short, it doesn’t. And that’s what this post is designed to do — give some teams the props, and championships, they’ve earned but not had listed here.

This isn’t a new exploration of mine. When I first worked through shared champions in 2009 on this site, I made the decision to solely accept the UPI polls. With the extended research, though, I’ve come to the realization that both the AP and UPI polls were just about as equally valid, run just as often and about just as far and wide across the state as each other.

I defaulted to the UPI rankings because they were the favorite of my adopted hometown paper, and later my employer, the Casper Star-Tribune, which often didn’t even run the AP rankings for an entire season. But the AP rankings definitely had validity, and they need to be recognized as such. That means this site should accept the champions of both the AP and UPI polls, not just the UPI.

So that’s what I’m doing.

This means four teams — Torrington and Glenrock from 1972, Deaver-Frannie from 1971 and Cheyenne Central from 1966 — will retroactively have the championships they earned in those years added to the site. All four were AP champions in some form:

  • Torrington and Glenrock were AP champions in their respective classes (A and B) 1972, as opposed to UPI champions Star Valley and St. Mary’s.
  • Glenrock and Deaver-Frannie tied for the top of the Class B rankings in the final AP poll in 1971, whereas Glenrock won the UPI poll outright.
  • Cheyenne Central and Powell tied atop the final AP poll of the 1966 season, as Powell won the UPI outright.

Two other final polls where teams shared the top spot in the polls were NOT added for the following reasons:

  • The 1971 AA final polls’ top spots were shared between Laramie (AP) and Natrona (UPI). However, by 1971 Class AA had a championship game, which Laramie won. Likewise, the final polls were taken prior to the championship game, in which Laramie beat Rock Springs.
  • In 1961, Greybull (AP) and Laramie (UPI) finished atop the final polls of the season. These, too, came before the playoffs, in which Greybull as a Class A school was involved. Greybull’s loss to Buffalo in the Class A semifinals ended its title run and could not be accounted for in the polls, leaving Laramie as the sole Class AA title claimant and Star Valley, the team that beat Buffalo in the Class A championship game, as the titleist for that class.

Other shared championships that are already listed will remain, including Byron and Glenrock sharing the 1968 Class B championship, Sheridan and Laramie sharing the 1958 Class AA championship, and Sheridan and Natrona sharing the 1957 Class AA championship.

Shared titles before the start of statewide polls in the mid-1950s were “by acclaim” champions, as no formal polling system existed prior to the AP/UPI polls, and in earlier days the polls by the Wyoming Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association.

Researching the polls week to week has given me significantly more insight to the processes used in these times to choose a state champion. I think these updates accurately reflect the sentiment at the time.

And it makes me glad that we have playoffs these days.

–patrick

So, Wyoming’s missing 1930 all-state football team turns up in a 1957 Nebraska newspaper…

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One thing that constantly amazes me is that no matter how much research I do into Wyoming’s sports history, I always keep finding more interesting things.

The latest? Wyoming’s 1930 all-state football team, published in a Nebraska newspaper published in 1957.

Yep, you read that right.

The 1930 all-state team was one of just a handful of missing all-state teams on wyoming-football.com, a list that now includes only the all-class teams from 1926 and 1932 and the elusive 1994 Class 1A nine-man team.

But I did not expect to find the 1930 all-state team the way I did, published in an out-of-state paper nearly 30 years after the season was done.

In doing research for a big project (details coming, maybe this summer), I fell into a deep dive of looking into Sheridan’s 1930 championship team. I started looking into a few of the players, particularly guys like Raymond “Jeff” Doyle, Sheridan’s speedy halfback; center Rusty Thompson; and end Clarence Brokaw. They were cornerstones of the Broncs’ team that beat Laramie (and later Cody) for the championship in the final year before state-sanctioned playoffs and the formation of the Wyoming High School Activities Association.

When I threw their names into a search on newspapers.com — a subscription made possible by the site sponsors (thank you!) — I stumbled into a column from the Oct. 29, 1957, edition of the Scottsbluff Star-Herald in Nebraska from Bill Madden. More on him in a bit.

In that column, Madden said the upcoming game between Scottsbluff and Laramie would be his first time seeing the Plainsmen since 1930, when he was a boy in Sheridan and the Plainsmen came north for a key game. He then went into detail on the 1930 game between the Plainsmen and Broncs, which for all intents and purposes decided the state championship, and those who played in it. Madden said the rosters included five all-staters from Sheridan (Doyle, Thompson, Brokaw, guard Clint Endicott and tackle Albert Husman) and two from Laramie (end Lester Forsyth and fullback Wes Christenson).

But in addition, he also mentioned the other four players named all-state that year: tackle Dan Sedar and quarterback Porter Davis of Natrona, guard Fay Thompson of Midwest, and halfback Don Tottenhoff of Cheyenne Central.

That’s 11 guys. An all-state team from that era only had that many. I double-checked the names in other publications and yearbooks I could access online, and the list looks legit. No unexpected names here.

However, Madden didn’t cite his source, which is always a big question in research like this. After looking into his career, though, if there’s one Nebraska journalist whose word we can trust on matters like this, it’s Madden’s.

Madden grew up in Sheridan an avid sports fan and attended Hastings College in Nebraska. From 1955 to 1974, Madden was a sportswriter for the Scottsbluff Star-Herald; he then moved on to the nearby Gering Courier, where he stayed until he retired in 1991.

He was named to the Nebraska High School Sports Hall of Fame in 1996; his bio said he was “a noted historian of high school athletics.” In reading a selection of Madden’s work, it’s easy to draw comparisons to Chuck Harkins, Casper Star-Tribune sports editor in the 1970s and the one person who has taught me more about Wyoming sports than anyone else I’ve never met. Madden died in 1997.

In his 1957 pontifications of a 1930 football game and the all-state players in it, Madden didn’t need to cite a source because he was the source. That’s good enough for me.

The 1930 all-state team is now listed among this site’s all-state listings — with any luck, never to be lost again.

–patrick

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