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"Young." That one-word answer from coach Jake Mickelson to the question of how the Thompson Falls boys will look in basketball this season pretty much sums up the situation for the Blue Hawks. With first team District 7B all-conference picks Danny Hoisington (who was also named All-State B), Payton Frields and Nathan Thibeault, and second team selection Dylan Beckman all gone to graduation, it will now fall on last year's role players and other up-and-coming ballers to lead the Blue Hawks this s...
There’s a new coach in town and the Plains Trotters will be playing basketball a little differently from now on. Actually not a new coach in Plains – he has coached the Horsemen football team the past two falls – Eddie Fultz inherits a Trotter team which won the District 14C regular season title last year before suffering two upset losses and being eliminated at the District 14C tournament. That team was led by 14C first team selections Jessica Thompson and Lindsay Laws and honorable mention pick Kassidy Kinzie, and important role playe...
Coach Jeff Kujala always has high expectations for his Plains-Hot Springs wrestling team, and the latest group of P-HS wrestlers he has on hand is no exception to that rule. "We have a good group of kids coming back," he said. "We have been looking good in practice. I wish our numbers were a little better, but the kids we do have should do pretty well this season." The Vanderwall brothers, senior Josiah and junior Conrad, P-HS's two returning State B-C individual placers – Josiah placed sixth a...
A new day has dawned for the Thompson Falls Lady Hawk basketball team. Make that, for the Lady Hawk basketball teams. For the first time in several years, coach Doree Thilmony reports that enough girls have come out for the sport that Thompson Falls will field the full complement of three teams – freshman (or C team), junior varsity and varsity – this season. Those three teams will open season play with non-conference games at Libby Saturday. It will be a full day of basketball in Lincoln Cou...
The laws of physics allow heat to rise. The laws of athletics should allow the Savage Heat girls to continue their rise as well. The upstart Hot Springs Savage Heat, who as the sixth seed ended up defeating the top seed in last year’s District 14C tourney before settling for fourth place in the conference, look to continue their rise up through the ranks this season. And the Heat may have the players, with only one starter missing from last season’s starting five and an influx of some other promising young talent, to contend for the title in 14...
Ryan Weltz has been down this coaching road before, only it was with the Noxon boys basketball team, not with the Lady Red Devils. Returning to the sidelines to take over the Noxon girls program, Weltz said he is glad to be back in the head coaching game, after spending the last few seasons serving as an assistant for the Devil boys team. Weltz, a Noxon graduate himself, head coached the Devil boys for several years. One of his teams from that previous coaching stint, led by Noxon hoop legends Daniel Beaudin and Kevin Wilson, advanced all the...
Bart Haflich will only be half the coach he once was this season. Still the head coach for the Noxon boys basketball team, Haflich gave up half of his coaching duties when he relinquished the head girls coaching job in the off-season. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Haflich seems less stressed out now than he was last year at this time when he was struggling to put together game plans for two different teams. The main difference is the amount of free time he now seems to have on his hands. "It does...
Like Mike, Tyrel wants to be like Mike. Stepping into the void created by the retirement of Mike Cole, who is still the athletic director in Plains, Tyrel Allen will have a largely new team of Horsemen to guide this season in his first year as the head man for Plains boys basketball. And Allen will have some work to do to match the last two years of Cole’s storied career as the Horsemen’s coach. Cole guided the Plains boys to records of 20-4 and 20-5 in those seasons and into the Western C divisional tourneys following both of those cam...
DePoe out! Barber in! The Hot Springs Savage Heat boys will play for a new coach this season as long-time head man Ricky DePoe has stepped down due to commitments with his other job in the private sector. DePoe’s brother-in-law Cameron Barber, who was the Hot Springs assistant coach last season, is the Savage Heat’s new main man. Barber has no illusions about what he is stepping into. “Yes, I have some pretty big shoes to fill following Ricky,” Barber said by email Monday. “Especially since he is my brother-in-law!” Barber is married to...
The final gun has sounded, it is game over for 11-man football in Thompson Falls. Thompson Falls High School will be playing 8-Man football beginning next fall, Principal Rich Ferris told the Ledger Monday after the Montana High School Association announced the move at a meeting of the MHSA executive board in Helena Monday. Ferris, Superintendent Bill Cain and Athletic Director Jake Mickelson represented Thompson Falls with a presentation to the board in Helena. Several other schools were reclassified during the meeting as well. None of the...
Hold the presses, that All-State C team published in last week's Ledger is not the complete one. Delaney Weltz's name went missing from the 2018 All-State C listed in last week's paper due to an incomplete list of the squad provided to the Ledger. Along with her teammate Kristina Brown, also a senior, Weltz was named first team to the District 14C All-Conference team, but her name was somehow inadvertently left off the All-State C list and was not included in last week's story. The Ledger...
Plains seniors Orion Pry-Hyde and Malachi Paulsen and junior Esvin Reyes have been named to the Western Division 8-Man All-Conference football team, which was released to the press early this week. Western C champion Flint Creek, the football cooperative between Drummond and Philipsburg, won a second straight State 8-Man championship Saturday in Butte with a 50-14 win over Great Falls Central. Flint Creek dominated the Western Division team and wound up placing nine of their players on the Class C All-State 8-Man team, which was announced in...
Did I anything miss? Or versa vice? It’s been a long time since this column last appeared on these pages (some might say not long enough!) so there is a fair amount of catching up to do, looking at things from front to back and from back to front. As many of you may or may not know, the writer of this column recently retired from his other job and should now have more time for the crucial stuff – you know, talking about sports until you get tired of hearing about sports or even thinking about sports anymore. *** The 2018 prep football sea...
Wrestlers from the Blue Hawk Wrestling Club competed in the Idaho Panhandle Championships in Sandpoint last weekend and several local grapplers came away with placing medals for their efforts. Competing in the Pre-Bantam, 40 pound division, Hartleigh Block won second place while Weston Haun placed sixth in the Pre-Bantam, 49-pound class. Mason Bartlett won fifth place in the Bantam-53 division. Going at it in the Intermediate-56 class, Weston Block placed fifth and Lane Thilmony did not place, Owen Franck took fifth at Intermediate-77 and...
Plains junior Kylee Altmiller, Hot Springs junior Sydney Jackson and Noxon seniors Kristina Brown and Delaney Weltz have been honored as first team selections for the 2018 District 14C All-Conference volleyball team, and Altmiller was further honored as being only one of the two players in the league selected as an All-State C performer. Charlo senior Kaitlin Cox was the other player from 14C to be accorded All-State status by vote of league coaches following the completion of regular season...
And a freshman shall lead them... Headed up by dynamic freshman Scarlette Schwindt of Thompson Falls and seniors Brooke Fraley of Bigfork and Sienna Utter of Eureka, District 7B's All-State B selections, the 2018 7B all-conference team has been named. Determined as always by a vote of league coaches, the 2018 team also includes Lady Hawk sophomore Jody Detlaff on the first team, and senior Maya Stiles and junior Brooke Bowlin on the second team. Coach Sandra Kazmierczak and her Lady Hawks recent...
Highlighted by the selection of Hot Springs seniors Tyler Carr and Tyler Knudsen, and Noxon senior Levi Brubaker to the All-State team, a total of six Sanders County football players have been named to the Western C 6-Man All-Conference football team. In addition to Carr, Knudsen and Brubaker, Noxon senior Edison VanVleet and Hot Springs juniors Luke Waterbury and Brandon Knudsen were also named all-conference by a vote of league coaches following the completion of regular season play. The Hot Springs Savage Heat completed their 9-2 season in t...
The final numbers are in, and we are not talking about a recount in a disputed election. The Hot Springs Savage Heat recently completed another outstanding season of 6-man football, and the raw numbers, the statistics accumulated from the campaign, help demonstrate the reasons why the Heat were so successful during their 9-2 season. Beginning with the offense, senior Tyler Knudsen keyed the Heat's punishing ground attack with 780 yards on 102 carries, an average of 7.6 yards per rushing...
HOT SPRINGS – These Mustangs proved to be hard to break. Paced by a dazzling offensive attack keyed by quarterback Keenan Murnion, the Jordan Mustangs outscored the Hot Springs Savage Heat 74-57 in the Class C 6-Man playoff quarterfinals in Hot Springs Saturday. Now 9-2, the Mustangs, the No. 3 seeded team from the Eastern C will travel to Lambert Saturday to take on No. 2 seeded Eastern C Richey-Lambert in the semifinals. The winner of that game will face the survivor of the other semifinal g...
Saving their very best for last, the Thompson Falls Lady Hawks were the upset queens of the Western B divisional volleyball tournament in Florence last week and very nearly earned a trip to the State B tournament this week in Bozeman with their efforts. Coach Sandra Kazmierczak and her Lady Hawks were the talk of the Western B after scoring huge wins over Deer Lodge and Anaconda Thursday to advance to the undefeated semifinal with favored Florence Friday evening. After falling to Florence in...
As far as youth wrestling tournaments go, they don't come much bigger than the Monster Match Nationals. Wrestled in Denver each year about this time, the Monster Match usually attracts competitors from all across the country. This past weekend, there were 14 grapplers from this little part of the world participating in Denver. Coach and trip organizer Mike Thilmony said that more than 1,700 wrestlers from 29 states, including the 14 from western Montana and northern Idaho that he was with,...
The Plains Trotters completed season play at the Western C divisional volleyball tournament in Churchill last week, winning one of three matches before bowing out. Manhattan Christian won the Western C title and the Eagles and the second place Ennis Mustangs, who defeated Plains in a loser-out match Friday afternoon, now advance on to the Class C portion of the Montana All-Class tournament in Bozeman this Thursday through Saturday. Ennis defeated Gardiner in the loser-third match Saturday in...
by John Hamilton The greatest wrestler in Plains High School history, Russ Kujala has also proven himself to be quite a competitive runner. A senior cross country runner for the University of Montana Western in Dillon, Kujala won fourth place in the Frontier Conference Championships at Hickory Swing Golf Course in Great Falls Saturday and will now make plans to compete in the NAIA (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics) National Finals in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Nov. 16. If Kujala manages a top-30 finish in Cedar Rapids, he will be...
HOT SPRINGS – The Hot Springs football tradition lives on. Although none of the current roster of players for the Hot Springs Savage Heat football team were on the 2016 State C 6-Man championship team, the current players take the maintaining of the Hot Springs football tradition, which also includes the 2012 State C title, very seriously. Look no further than the Heat's 49-24 playoff win over visiting Denton-Geyser-Stanford Saturday in Hot Springs for proof. Now 9-1, coach Jim Lawson and his S...
All things being equal – and they pretty much were this season in District 14C volleyball – the Plains Trotters proved themselves to be a cut above the rest in the conference tournament at Hot Springs last Thursday and Friday. Sanders County's two other 14C teams, Hot Springs and Noxon, both played well but fell Friday. Hot Springs, after winning their way into the first championship match with victories over St. Regis and Arlee Thursday, eventually settled for third place. For their part, the...
