High school notes and quotes:
Last week before the Kansas Relays, KU track coach Gary Schwartz said, about the high school portion of the meet, “I think the buzzword `showcase’ is appropriate.”
Schwartz’ wasn’t just buzzing “Dixie.” Thirty-one Kansas high school athletes beat this season’s state bests and six more tied the previous best in 19 events.
Carrie Buckley, a senior at DeSoto High, shattered not only this season’s top mark in the javelin it was her own but also the Relays record.
The old state best was 150-0, which Buckley set a week earlier at the K.T. Woodman Invitational in Wichita. She threw 156-4 Friday at KU.
“I was really surprised when I hit 150 at the K.T. Woodman,” Buckley said. “That was my goal for the whole year. When I came to the Relays, I more or less just wanted to see if I could do it again.”
Her throw Friday broke the previous meet record of 155-8 set by Greta Semsroth of Independence in 1988.
“When I was walking out of the stadium I saw Greta’s record on the scoreboard, and for some reason I thought it was attainable,” she said.
With over a month left in the season, Buckley has time to attain a lot more.
“It just hit me (Saturday) that I even threw that,” she said. “Right now, I think in the back of my mind I want 160, and I’ll go from there.”
Two other other Relays high school records fell. Shawnee Mission East’s Sheldon Carpenter soared over 7-1 in the high jump, beating the old meet standard of 7-1, set by Topeka Seaman’s R.D. Cogswell in 1987. And two out-of-state preps ran the 100 in 10.3, breaking the five-year-old mark of 10.57.
Jeff Meyers, a physical education teacher and ninth-grade football coach at Olathe Indian Trail Junior High, has been hired as Olathe East’s head football coach.
The Hawks open their first season against Lawrence, the three-time defending 6A state champion.
“I’ve been told by an awful lot of people the score will be 67-0 or more,” Meyers said. “We’ll see if these predictions turn out to be true.”
Bob Danenhauer is leaving after three years as Hays High’s football coach to take a job on the coaching staff at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
Big deal, you say? Well, sort of. It’s a big deal that Danenhauer stayed in Hays three years.
This is the guy who lost his first seven games in Hays. In the middle of the losing streak, the Indians discovered that June Cross, wife of fired Hays coach Tom Cross, was copying Danenhauer’s playbook and distributing it to Hays’ opponents.
Danenhauer finished with a 15-13 record at Hays.
Gary Hammer, whose Lawrence High girls won the Class 6A state basketball championship last month, will speak at the Clinic of Champions on May 1 at the Lenexa Holidome. Coaches who won 11 state titles in six states are scheduled to speak.
The actual rules changed by the national high school basketball rules committee were dull, but some the ideas they discussed weren’t.
Iowa, for instance, currently is experimenting with awarding no one-and-one bonus but rather giving two free throws after an opponent’s seventh foul.
They also talked about lengthening overtimes from three to four minutes to encourage more normal play during the OT and about allowing dunking in warmups.
