Starting May 16 and snowballing through May 21, Tiger athletics had a historical run at both the Girl’s Track State Meet and the Boy’s State Golf Meet, compiling the school’s first-ever girls and boys State Championship titles. This record-breaking week came from hard work and dedication from all the athletes on both teams and the efforts of several runner-up and third-place finishes in years past. However, a key component of every school’s athletic success comes from the behind-the-scenes work of the athletic director.
Athletic Director Rod Wiebers spoke on the success of both teams throughout their post-season runs and had much insight on their success.
“It’s obviously a huge sense of accomplishment and excitement for the athletes, coaches, and entire community,” Wiebers said. “It’s a combination of a lot of hard work from all the programs as well as a testament to our strength and conditioning program to be able to help develop our athletes.”
While sharing his excitement for the programs and their accomplishments, Wiebers also credited what goes on behind the scenes to get athletes in the position to win a title.
“It starts with coming up with a vision for that process and how it’s going to look to just perform the best that we can at the time when we get to the state tournament,” he said. “We’ve placed a huge amount of focus in head coaches meetings this year on not worrying about the outcome and just being the best that we can be in the moment.”
“We’ve done studies looking at our state events and seeing the state as a part of the process and performing the best that we can. We’ve studied how we do send-offs and not making State the end goal because once we get there we want to be and play the best that we can.”
“A lot goes on behind the scenes in ordering the right equipment, scheduling, doing the right programming for strength and conditioning, which Coach Rupe and Craig and their entire staff have done an excellent job with. There’s a bunch of stuff we do but it’s fun in my role to see it be fulfilled with those outcomes.”
Wiebers also noted that he is proud of and still loves to see teams that don’t win State give it their all in the post-season runs.
“When the girls won, it was fun. We were able to do a reception back at the stadium and had fire trucks and a police escort lined up and the community there,” Wiebers said. “Boys golf was a little bit tougher as we had some good ideas and things we were going to do that day but with getting let out of school early and the weather not cooperating it wasn’t able to happen. But we’re going to recognize them at the school board meeting and make sure that we do community receptions and things like that and bring that group back together. We’re also going to have State championship shirts and promote the success of these two programs and all of our programs.”
After looking into future plans for these State championship celebrations, Wiebers said he was personally proud of the historic week.
“Reflecting on both of them, for boys golf, those guys came in with such high expectations and had a lot of stress and pressure on them. For them to go out and perform and just worry about hitting the best shot that they could in the moment and seeing that they got the result they were hoping for and worked really really hard for was really cool,” he said.
“For girl’s track, my favorite moment was just a conversation with a student-athlete who’s really battled some adversity this year and didn’t have the year that she was hoping to have. But all she talked about was how happy she was and how great her year was because we won a state team title.”
