Getting up to speed

We’re two weeks into the winter sports season, and I think we have a lot to look forward to with our Dogie teams.

The importance of these games before the conference season truly gets under way after Christmas cannot be stressed enough.

These last two weeks have given Newcastle High School’s different teams the opportunity to get their feet wet, and to start to get an idea of where they stand in real competition. It’s a time to evaluate strengths as well as weaknesses in contests that really don’t make a difference when it comes to post-season possibilities.

There’s so much value in being able to put the work you’ve been putting into practice at the beginning of the year against other teams who are doing the same thing.

Will those moves and skills you’ve been honing work against opponents who don’t already know what you’re going to do?

Will your speed in the pool match the competition?

Will the plays and game strategies you’ve been executing work when faced with other varsity teams?

I remember the days when we would start off our basketball season with two back-to-back games against Thermopolis and Douglas in conference games on the opening weekend of the season. Even though every team was in the same boat — we were all playing our very first contests in meaningful conference match-ups — it was always nerve-wracking to be playing games that had the potential to put us behind the eight-ball in post-season seeding.

It’s been a minute since the season opened up with those types of games, and I have to say that I’m not sad about it.

It’s great for all teams, not just ours, to get the chance to knock some rust off before it matters, then be able to use the Christmas break to work on issues that showed themselves in the two weekends of pre-conference play.

So far, there have been some really bright moments shown by the five different winter sports teams.

We’ve seen Newcastle’s boys swim team, small though it is, really bring it as they started their season.

Already, we have three of the seven swimmers qualified for the state meet in multiple events. As a whole, the team is starting out their season ahead of where they finished last year, and that’s exciting.

Senior Scott Larson is showing that he is going to be a force to be reckoned with on the mat this wrestling season by making quick work of almost all of his opponents in the last two weekends.

The Lady Dogie wrestlers are showing improvement quickly, and the Lady Dogie hoopsters were able to notch their first win of the season against some pretty formidable foes.

Although the Dogie basketball squad has yet to get into the win column, we’ve seen some really fun possibilities from this relatively inexperienced crew.

What’s great is that all these teams are just going to get better and better, with the ultimate goal of performing at their peak at the end of February.

I’m super excited to see what they do when they get back into action as 2025 gets under way.