Delta coaches Luis Meza, center, and Clayton Curtis congratulate 152-pound senior Hunter Brasfield after an upset win sent him into the 4A Region 4 semifinals.
Hotchkiss senior Joe Boyle controls Ruben Chagoya of Basalt to win a 3A Region 1 title. He is one of 7 Hotchkiss state qualifiers.
Hotchkiss and Paonia boys will square off this week on the basketball courts. Both are 6-4 in league play.
Delta senior Brooke Taylor scores two of her 12 points against Summit after grabbing an offensive rebound.
Paonia 195-pounder Tyler “TK” Kendall sets Rangely’s Drew Collins up for a pin.
Paonia freshman Bo Pipher sets TJ Richard of North Park up for a pin in Saturday’s regional semifinal round. He is one of 13 Paonia wrestlers headed to state!
Surrounded by coaches and his dad, Conner Beard signs Letter of Intent to play football for the University of Nebraska Kearney.
Hotchkiss' Jacobe Galley signed a Letter of Intent to play football and study engineering at Colorado Mesa University.
Hotchkiss senior Cody Bartlett signed his National Letter of Intent to run cross-country for Hawaii Pacific University.
Last week's regular-season baseball finale in Gypsum was a victory for the Panthers as they rolled past Eagle Valley 12-1. The win left Delta with a league record of 12-2 and an overall mark of 16-3.
It was a tale of two games for Cedaredge's baseball team last week. The Bruins were on the road in Bayfield to face Peak to Peak's Pumas in game one of elimination play.
Photo by Tamie Meck Kylie Hodges releases the discus at the Bruin Invitational. Hodges will compete in both the discus and shot put at this week’s state 2A track meet in Lakewood. Teammate Daryl Batt had her best throw of the season and is going to state in…
Photo by Tamie Meck Senior Josiah Spano, of Paonia, was an All-Conference first team selecton in the 2A WSL for the 2012-13 hoop year.This year's Class 2A All-Conference and All-State honors in the 2013 Photo by Tamie Meck Paonia High School senior Annavah…
These four Hotchkiss Lady Bulldogs ran a great race in the 800m sprint medley relay. They erased Delta High School’s old mark of 1:54.53 set in 2008 with a time of 1:52.54. Members of the team include: left to right, Jennifer Celis, Savannah Rocha, Beth Wood and Jessie Mautz. Celis set an individual record in the 800m with a time of 2:18.55, eclipsing the old mark of 2:25.08.
Jenni Celis is on a fast track to state. The sophomore claimed a gold at Saturday's Cedaredge Invitational, winning the 800-meter run by more than four seconds with a time of two minutes 18.55 seconds.
Celis's time surpassed the National Elite standard and blew away the meet record of 2:25.08, set by Dana Shellhorn of Montrose in 2011. The second and third place times also surpassed Shellhorn's record.
Celis is a top-ranked runner in both the 400 and 800, and consistently runs a sub-28-second 200. Running the 400 leg of the 800-meter medley, she and teammates Beth Wood, Jessie Mautz and Savannah Rocha shattered the 2008 meet record by two seconds with a time of 1:52.54; the 1600 team of Rocha, Natalie Anderson, Aleksus Wilson and Celis also placed first.
Rocha also claimed three golds. In the high jump, she cleared 4-11 for her third consecutive meet win of the season. The 400-meter sprint relay team of Beth Wood, Mautz, Rocha and Wilson placed third.
The 3200-meter relay team of Nikki Buhrdorf, Isabel Silverstein, Tiffany Clock and Brielle Palmer was sixth.
Kylie Hodges threw the discus 89 feet, 7 inches in the preliminaries. Hodges, a sophomore who had previously never hit 100 feet in competition, hit the mark in the finals to place third. Hodges also placed third in the shot put.
Senior Lindsey Todd hit her best mark of the season in the discus with a fourth-place throw of 96-6.
The girls team earned 75 points to place fourth.
Hotchkiss Boys
Since the season began, Mason Oxford has steadily improved his distances in the discus by about 10 feet a week. On Saturday, Oxford had a preliminary throw of 126 feet, 8 inches to set a new personal record. He finished fourth, just slightly behind Miguel Barajas of Cedaredge.
"My first throw (of the day) was definitely my best," said Oxford, who knew by the release that it was a good one. "It's kind of hard to explain," he said. "It just came out right."
Oxford said he's been throwing well in practices, "But definitely not that far."
Oxford, who also competes in cross country and basketball, first threw in seventh grade, but didn't get serious about it until his freshman year when he started throwing under coach Curtis Hintz. While he's competed in shot put and some running events, including the "weight-persons relay," a fun relay race for throwers, Oxford focuses mainly on the discus.
Since he's often one of the lighter throwers, Oxford focuses heavily on strengthening and technique, and it's paying off. His freshman year's best throw was 92-9. Last year, he said, he barely broke 100 feet, a mark he surpassed at last year's Hotchkiss Invitational. His season best his sophomore year was 108-10. At last week's Hotchkiss meet, Oxford hit 116-4. Saturday's one good throw put him in the top 18 — the magic number an athlete has to make to qualify for state.
Competition was fierce at Cedaredge. Distance runner Kurt Katzdorn was the only individual to place in the top three. Katzdorn shaved 11 seconds off of his season best time to place third in the 3200-meter run.
The boys 400-meter relay team of Vikash Hypio, Tell Hawk, Nolan Tracy and Braeden Horton placed second behind Coal Ridge, which swept all of the sprint relays for the third consecutive week, and the 1600m team of Hypio, Hawk, Horton and Cody Bartlett also placed second.
The 3200-meter relay team of Hypio, Hawk, Katzdorn and Bartlett topped all 3A times to place fifth. Palmer Keegan made the finals in the triple jump, outdistancing his preliminary jump by 14 inches to place eighth with a distance of 37-09.5
The boys team earned 34 points to place seventh out of 16 teams.
Hotchkiss travels to Grand Junction this Saturday to compete in Palisade High School's Frank Woodburn Invitational at Stocker Stadium.
