Worland High School athletics underway for 2017 fall season

WORLAND - The fall sports season is drawing closer for Worland High School athletics as the football, volleyball, cross-country and girls swimming teams have been practicing over a week readying for their respective seasons.

WHS golf, however, began their season August 10-11 and is in midseason form as the conference and state tournaments quickly approach.

With Warrior and Lady Warrior athletes putting in the early season work toward successful 2017 campaigns, their coaches gave updates on the early goings of the practice.

CROSS-COUNTRY

Coming off a strong finish last season WHS cross-country coach Tanya Kienlen is thrilled for the start of the season as her boys team will be defending their 3A East conference title for the third year in a row. Porter Harman (2016 All-State), Jadon Swalstad (2x 3A All-Stater) and Kelli Holiday (2016 All-State) are among the notables of a strong group of returning runners.

On practice...

"It's been good and very nice to have some cooler weather," said Kienlen. "Sometimes the preseason is 90 to 100 degrees, so as runners we're appreciating the cooler weather."

The number of athletes out for the team this season...

"Hoping to have 28 runners with 20 of them being boys. I'm super excited about the potential of our boys team. Our girls will still be strong but we're hoping to recruit more numbers," said Kienlen.

Offseason workouts...

"The team did connect quite a bit during this summer. I'm very excited about the bonds that have begun to form. We had a glow stick run and went to Porcupine Falls and it was all really good," said Kienlen.

FOOTBALL

After Todd Weber resigned his teaching and coaching positions at WHS, Ryan Utterback, who has been on the Warrior coaching staff the past three seasons, was tapped to take the reins of the Warrior program. Helping Utterback with the transition is his coaching staff which has largely stayed intact from Weber's tenure.

Transition to head coach...

"It has been a relatively smooth transition. This will be my fourth year on staff so even though my role has changed the kids know who I am and are familiar with me. We also have coach (Josh) Garcia, coach (Ben) Hofmann and coach (Cody) Smith back. Then joining us we have coach (Aaron) Abel who coached eighth grade last year, so the eighth-graders now freshmen, as well as the basketball players, are familiar with him. We have a lot of familiar faces among our coaches. We also have student-teacher Zach Lempka, a former Worland Warrior himself, helping us out this year too," said Utterback.

Continuity on offense and defense...

The defense is going to be the same and we'll be doing a lot of similar things on offense. Defensively, coach Garcia is running that again and offensively coach Abel came on to run that. During the offseason we talked about what we were doing last year and how we could improve. It's going to look the same, we've ironed out a few wrinkles and this is the second year the kids will be in the system so we're expecting for things to run smoother," said Utterback.

GOLF

The season is sprinting by for Worland golf who already have two tournaments under their belt. The past weekend Worland hosted Buffalo, Lovell and Powell for the Worland Quad tournament at Green Hills Golf Course. The Warrior program swept the individuals, Jose Galarza won the boys division shooting 84-81 for a 165 and Katelin Scheuerman (2016 3A girls state runner-up) won the girls shooting 85-87 for a 172.

As a team the Warriors won the tournament with a 355-339 for a 649 and the Lady Warriors shot 304-309 for a total of 613, finishing second.

WHS golf coach Chad Rose has been impressed by the improvement he has seen from his boys team in the first two weeks of the season.

Team's performance so far...

"I think the last two weeks our kids have grown a ton and the first tournament was a battle of managing emotions. The practices have been going great. When I first got here the boys were in the strong 450s, so to go 100 strokes down when you're only counting four players is a lot, that's 25 strokes per kid," said Rose.

Scheuerman...

"The thing that concerns me the most with golfers is that they peak at the right time. Katelin has always done a good job of tempering her player over the summer. She's fresh but ready to go. We'll continue to see the same thing from her that we saw last year in that she'll continue to shave strokes as the season goes on," said Rose.

SWIMMING

The 2017 Lady Warriors team will have a good blend of extremely talented, experienced swimmers (Ellyse Russell, Juli Warren, Kristen Collingwood to name a few) to go with promising underclassmen for this year's swimming season. With this combo the ceiling for this team can be high but for now WHS girls swimming coach Mike Blissett wants his swimmers to keep improving each day.

Freshman class...

"We have a big freshman class this year. They make up close to half our team which is good but a little bad because they don't have as much as experience, just yet. They are coming along and they're a solid group of girls and we're excited to have them for four years," said Blissett.

Returning experience...

"There's definitely good experience on the team and they're doing a great job of working with the girls and demonstrating things. There's only so many of us coaches so they've stepped up and helped in a big way, and already a good group of leaders," said Blissett.

VOLLEYBALL

WHS volleyball coach Brittany Miller will look to some younger and inexperienced, varsity-wise, players to step up and fill the voids left by the 2017 class. This year's seniors of Olivia Scheuerman, Jaycee Page, Casey Wassum and Saige Jones will assume the leadership roles as they look to guide their team to another successful season.

Practices...

I've been really proud of their attentiveness and work ethic. I'm even more impressed that 95 percent of the girls that came out this season were a part of all our workouts all this summer. The cool part is we have a lot of girls that have worked really hard in our program. The neatest part was the seniors from our past two graduating classes wrote letters to the girls on this year's team and we've been reading all those letters to them. I think the girls that haven't had that varsity experience yet now know that everyone that has graduated has confidence in them and believes in them to keep adding to the program.

Seniors...

They've been behind the leadership of those previous seniors and I think those letters really hit home for them that it's their turn now. They've really stepped up vocally and serving others, every time I just listen during practice they're helping another underclassman. That's neat to see because they're picking up where the other class left off.

Full team previews of the Worland High School fall athletics, as well as Hot Springs County High School and Ten Sleep High School, will be in the Fall Sports Preview that will be published August 31.