Fall athletes report to practice

By JORDAN DAWSON / Bigfork Eagle

Whether or not summer is almost over is a debatable point these days. But one thing is certain, the beginning of the school year is just around the corner. This means it's time for Bigfork High School athletes to get ready for the fall season.

Monday was the first day that teams were eligible to practice. The volleyball team, the boys and girls soccer teams and the football team began practicing twice a day, while the boys and girls golf teams practice every evening and boys and girls cross country teams practice in the mornings to prepare for the upcoming season. Games begin for some teams as early as next week, but most begin after Labor Day.

Matt Jensen, in his first year as the BHS activities director, spent Monday attending practices and notifying coaches and players about the students' eligibility.

The school implemented a new process last winter to ensure that all athletes have completed a physical and turned in all of their required forms and permission slips. Now only Jensen and Susie Hullett, the school secretary, are allowed to collect the forms and keep lists of those received. The forms are then triple checked to be certain of their completion for each student athlete and lists of eligible athletes are given to the coaches, and updated frequently.

"For the first year of running a new program I think it went really well," Jensen said. "I think we ironed out a lot of the kinks."

The new system was created in part as a result of BHS student Jeff Bowman's death following a collapse at a football practice last fall. Bowman did not have a completed physical on file with the school.

Students that did not have all of their forms turned in were not allowed to participate in practice. Some were able to present the forms in time for afternoon practices, but others had to wait until later in the week.

Jensen said that after attending practices for all of the fall sports that it looks like BHS has "strong squads all around."

"I think that what that says about Bigfork is that the kids we have are very active in sports and really want to be involved," Jensen said.

The football team, which has been a point of concern for the school and community in regards to the number of participants, had a sizable turnout on Monday with about 45 boys attending practice.

"I think the football turnout was outstanding," Jensen said. "Everyone is really excited about that. It shows a lot of potential for the season."

The volleyball team showed potential as well on Monday with 25 girls showing up for practice, including seven returning lettermen.

"Practice went pretty well," said volleyball coach Yvonne Peck. "There's a mixture of teaching and not teaching them too much before we do some drills later this week. Right now we're just going over some of the routines about how we warm up, how we execute drills and skills and getting them familiar with the terminology that we use."