It’s Friday afternoon in Julesburg, and a school bus from nearby Ovid pulls into town with its football players in wrinkled dress shirts and loosened ties. The bus, from rival Revere High School, slows to a stop outside Julesburg High School.
The door snaps open.
“Come on,” a coach’s voice cajoles another group of teenagers waiting outside the bus. “Let’s go, guys.”
One by one, 21 boys file onto Revere’s bus with overstuffed duffel bags marked “Julesburg Lions.” They drop their bags and sit among their new teammates.
The door snaps shut, and the bus lurches toward Nebraska for the first game of the season.
And a new era begins in Sedgwick County.
Barely a few months old, the Julesburg-Revere athletic merger is already seen as a potential savior for these northeastern Colorado communities as they seek a long- term solution to save their schools and towns from the population declines across the state’s Eastern Plains.
In Colorado, rural athletics programs are suffering. Dwindling student populations are forcing high school athletic directors to drop 11-man football programs at a record pace. And school boards are left wondering how to hang on to at least a piece of their once-larger- than-life traditions.
In towns such as Ovid, Julesburg and nearby Sedgwick, football histories go back nearly 100 years. Old men save programs from their state championship games, boys are admonished when they don’t play for Dad’s team, and fans wait in quiet anticipation for their return to glory times.
“People come here and see fans who say they’re a (Revere) Raider or a Lion until the day they die, and I don’t think people understand how important those things are to us,” says Lisa Ault, who heads the new Sedgwick County Cougars booster club and directs the county’s human services department. “Sports are part of us, and they’ve helped build our community. That’s why we needed help.”
Confronting crippling reality
From 2000 to 2005, Sedgwick County lost nearly 8 percent of its population as part of an overall decrease across Colorado’s Eastern Plains.
As with the rest of the Great Plains that stretch from the Dakotas to Oklahoma, the region is struggling with crippling drought, farm consolidation and residual job losses that have virtually stripped main streets and business districts bare.
Sedgwick County’s losses were among the deepest in the state, according to U.S. census figures, trickling down to schools where student- strapped athletic programs struggled to stay afloat. In four years, enrollment numbers in seventh through 12th grades at Julesburg and Revere have been slashed almost in half, leaving only 129 students combined in the two high schools this year.
At Revere Junior High School in Ovid – which includes students from the nearby town of Sedgwick as part of a consolidation 40 years ago – only six students planned to play on the high school football team. Coaches expected their successful six-man team would be dead within three years.
“That was a wake-up call,” says Brad Heinz, the Revere athletic director and a coach for the new Sedgwick County team. “We either had to (merge programs) or vanish.”
The agreement, also called a co-op, will save the two schools at least $200,000 combined over the next 10 years and merged all sports programs under an umbrella organization shared equally between the two schools.
A majority of school board members pushed for the agreement and got the backing of students and their parents.
Without the sports cooperative, they say, the two schools probably would have lost their football programs, driving yet another stake through the heart of rural America.
The idea of a merger excited the students, who adopted a combination of both schools’ colors – black and purple – and voted together on the Cougar team name.
The team’s home games will be divided between the fields in Ovid and Julesburg. The first is next week in Julesburg, but Ovid gets homecoming.
The agreement also spurred other plans, from a mixed-school homecoming, to a new pep band, to a combined cheerleading squad.
“Out here, you either have to be creative or you die,” says Larry Lowery, who played on the 1970 Julesburg state championship football team and helped negotiate the merger last year as the then-president of the town’s school board. “You have to find a reason to smile, even if it’s your worst day. We’re choosing to smile.”
But allegiances die hard, and several longtime alumni from Julesburg and Revere see the freshly minted agreement as akin to kissing an ugly cousin.
They argued about additional costs for new uniforms, how future state championship trophies would be shared between the two schools and, most important to them, what would happen to the identities of the two schools.
“When you discard 100 years of history and tradition, it does get people’s attention,” Julesburg resident Jim Kontny wrote in a letter to the town’s newspaper late last year.
None of the opponents, including Kontny, will talk publicly about their opposition to the merger, saying their feelings would only stir up ill will.
“We had better get along with one another or none of us will have anything out here,” says Lee Kizer, an unofficial keeper of Julesburg history and a former running back for Julesburg teams in the early 1940s. “We’re to the point where people have to fall in line with this and support it.”
Rural teams fewer, smaller
At least three rural Colorado high schools dropped football programs this season, and more than a dozen more were forced to drop classifications mostly because of declining enrollments.
For those that survived, the number of eight-man teams across the state this year proliferated to 49 from 38 last season, which Colorado athletics officials say is due in large part to schools forced to drop 11-man programs.
Bert Borgmann, an assistant commissioner with the Colorado High School Activities Association, says co-op teams like Sedgwick County’s soon could become the norm as more districts search for viable options to keep teams.
“You have these communities that might have had 1A or 2A (classification) schools, and now they’re looking like they’re on the border to fall” to eight-man play, Borgmann says. “Once you see that drop and you start losing programs, those schools usually never get their teams back.
“It’s just a sad reality of an agriculture-based economy.”
Cooperative agreements, though, have gotten mixed responses during the past decade.
In the Genoa-Hugo and Karval districts on the Eastern Plains, teams have used a co-op sporadically for 12 years and plan to continue the agreement for the foreseeable future. But in the Campo and Vilas districts, the school boards battled almost from the outset.
Campo ended a 10-year deal in 1999.
“I’m still confused why things happened the way they did,” says Jim Womak, Campo’s athletic director who briefly resigned to protest the decision. Womak’s high school has 20 students.
“The kiddos here really wanted the (co-op), and they had opportunities to play lots of different sports. Now, we really struggle.”
New team, new excitement
In one corner of an end zone Friday night, Dennis Hill surveys his team with the toothy grin of a new father.
“Man, those jerseys sure do look nice,” the bespectacled Sedgwick County head coach says to nobody in particular. “Yep, sure looking nice.”
Playing against Creek Valley High School 15 miles away in Chappell, Neb., Hill’s team is in away whites that gleam under the setting sun. Black and purple stripes streak along the sides. A cougar wraps clockwise around the players’ black helmets.
Hill looks to the sidelines and sees families filling the stands. Eventually, hundreds of people will arrive, nearly outnumbering the home team’s crowd.
In Julesburg, the Cougars are more popular than expected. A local sports outfitter planned to sell 60 Sedgwick County hats, shirts and coats in the first week or two. The first order was for 295 items. Nearly 50 more orders were put in this week.
The team is instilling a new pride in the community, and Hill and Heinz can feel it.
Inside their locker room before the game, the coaches tell the players how much pride they have for their team, how wearing their new colors represents a tradition they want to build in their community. How these teenagers now represent everyone in their county.
The players yell and stomp and scream.
Later, the Cougars lead 8-0 on their first-ever drive and celebrate on the sidelines with hugs and high-fives.
Quarterback Scott Heath, a student from Julesburg High, connects with receiver Ryan Lauer, from Revere High, on a 57-yard pass for a touchdown before halftime.
But Creek Valley, in its third year as a consolidated school from rural Nebraska, gains momentum. The Storm chips away at Sedgwick County’s lead, with deep passes and up-the-gut runs.
The opposition overtakes the team from Colorado in the final quarter.
In the last 14 seconds of the game, Heath’s pass to the end zone is caught for an apparent touchdown but quickly is nullified by a penalty. The quarterback then throws an interception that ends the game. He fights back tears as his mother hugs him.
Creek Valley wins, 19-16.
But Sedgwick County lives to play another day.
