Wyoming Media Grok

Down To The Buzzer

By Brodie Farquhar, 1-22-07

So what do you do, when the front-page lead article of the state-wide newspaper is about your spouse, best friend and life-long partner, but doesn’t mention her name?

If you’re me, you call New West’s managing editor, Courtney Lowery, whose sage advice is to either ignore it, or be 100 percent transparent.

So here goes:

My wife, Sharon Farquhar, is the gymnastics coach for the Natrona County and Kelly Walsh High Schools gymnastics teams. The Curriculum and Instruction Committee (CIC) of the Natrona County School District has recommended that the gymnastics AND the alpine skiing teams be dropped after this season, which would result in those two sports being dropped statewide. The Wyoming High School Athletic Association requires six schools to support a program if WHSAA is to sponsor a state-culminating game or meet.  Wyoming’s gymnastics and alpine skiing programs would drop to four if the programs are cut in Natrona County and Kelly Walsh.

The first inkling that the two programs were in jeopardy came out last week, and the initial pushback by supporters apparently convinced the administration to create a formal evaluation process to underpin recommendations of whether to close a particular athletic or activity program.

Parents and other boosters are planning to address the school board at its meeting tonight, at 7:30 p.m. in the district Central Services Facility, 970 N. Glenn Road. District officials said no decision would be made at the meeting. The board will hear a report about the process by which the district will evaluate programs. The results of that evaluation will be presented at an April 23 board meeting. A decision on the two programs isn’t likely until April and a final decision could come as late as next September.

The administration has stated that declining student participation, high expenses, sport clubs already meeting community needs and difficulty in finding qualified coaches is behind the recommendation to close the two programs. Yet as is often the case, the reality is much more complicated than that. (I’m not familiar with the alpine skiing program, but the Casper Mountain Racers will be addressing that, I hope, on their Web-site at http://www.caspermountainracers.org/.)

The problems are all true on the face of it, but there’s a complex history behind each problem:

Declining participation is tied to a range of factors, including a lack of support by the school district and high turnover in coaching staff in recent years. The gymnastics teams had highly inadequate facilities at NC and KW, that were unsafe and inconvenient for everyone concerned. Uneven parallel bars fell down and wrestling mats are not a good substitute for the spring floors used in floor exercise. As I can personally testify, it is not easy or quick to erect or take down gymnastics equipment to make room for other sports – a frequent occurrence.

High expense per gymnast is linked to moving out of the high schools to a gymnastics club facility – the Wyoming Gymnastics Center, which itself lost one home (a warehouse) and had to move into another, more expensive (warehouse) location. (The energy boom has made warehouse space a premium in Casper.) But at least this facility has all the proper equipment, which is safely laid out and maintained, with no constant routine of putting up and tearing down to make room for other sports.

There are sport clubs (for both gymnastics and alpine skiing) in Casper, and these sports clubs have hundreds of participants. But rather than meeting all community needs, these are closer in nature to feeder clubs, for which the high school programs are a desired goal for these young athletes. And these private sport clubs are expensive, which means that only upper-middle to upper income families can afford them. And (correct me if I’m wrong, I very often am), there’s no meaningful feeder program (like football, basketball, volleyball, track) in the junior highs, middle and elementary schools. Oh, there might be some tumbling in a PE class, and there’s Friday afternoon skiing at Woods Middle School, but where is the equity?

Finding qualified coaches is somewhat ironic, in that this is the fourth year, in the past six, that Sharon has coached in Casper. She was an assistant coach at NC and two years later head coach at KW. She had to quit each coaching position when her jobs within the school district were eliminated. We left Casper three years ago, so I could take an editing job in South Dakota. We’re now back in Casper and Sharon is working for the public health department, which has been extremely supportive of her coaching. She is a Wyoming-certified coach with experience as a high school gymnast, university gymnast (UNC), high school and club coach and meet judge.

When my youngest daughter moved back to Casper last year, to finish her senior year at KW (a great high school, by the way), she was anxiously asked if her mom was back in town, and could she take over the gymnastics program again? Alas, no, Sharon was already committed to teaching Family and Consumer Sciences (Home Economics) in Lander that year.

As you can see, this is a complicated saga, and I could research and write another missive about what’s gone wrong with other gymnastics programs around the state. What’s missing is the connection that young girls and young women make to the demanding, rewarding sport of gymnastics.

We see the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” in television coverage of gymnastics – especially the Olympics. And yet, there are daily victories and Phoenix-like risings from defeat, every time a high school gymnast picks herself up from a crash ‘n burn to get back on that balance beam, those uneven parallel bars, to run as fast as she can toward a vault, to throw her body through twists and flips on the floor exercise. That’s what develops not only skill and power, but self-confidence. And in this day and age, don’t we need all the skilled, powerful and self-confident young women we can get?

My Casper Star colleague Sally Ann Shurmur wrote a column about this issue recently, but she also sent the following e-mail to my wife, that I’d like to share with you:

“My daughter is a gymnast. She does not need gymnastics to keep her in school—or off the streets. She needs gymnastics because it fuels her soul and punishes her body. I have absolutely no idea why SHE chose gymnastics, but she did. She punishes her physical body nightly and stresses out more than you can possibly imagine mentally about mis-steps and legs that are not exactly, perfectly parallel.

“I don’t want to keep her in school or off the streets. I just want her to feel fulfilled, to be happy and to be a Filly.”
In other news around and about the state:
A Cody artist shares his imagination and visions in the realms of science fiction and fantasy;
New rules governing coal-bed methane waters are expected soon; and
Black Hills smoker/bootleggers in South Dakota and buying their cigarettes in Wyoming.

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