Battle Mountain’s Wild, Wallace win Senior Awards in Beaver Creek
Vail, CO Colorado
BEAVER CREEK ” Really, the key to winning Battle Mountain’s Outstanding Senior Athlete Award is a simple one. If you’re a guy, run on the school’s 3,200-meter relay team. If you’re a lady, play soccer.
That is doubtless an over-simplification of all the hard work that it takes to win the Senior Award, but some trends continued Wednesday night as Conor Wallace and Carrie Wild collected Battle Mountain’s top athletic honors at the Vilar Center at the school’s awards night.
Seven of the last eight winners on the boys’ side have run on the 4-by-8 ” the exception was Keith Denton in 2004. Meanwhile, Wild is the fifth-straight girls soccer player to win the award. By the way, the favorites for 2010 for these awards are Connor Tesdtrom and either Erin Barker, Maddie LyBarger or Lizzie Seibert, so look for that trend to continue.
That’s you
In the meantime, Wild was one seriously surprised young lady when soccer coach David Cope read her name.
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“He announced all the nominees, and after that, he said who won. I was like, ‘I what?’ It was surprising,” Wild said. “It’s really cool. There are so many good athletes who are equally deserving.”
Wild played soccer and skied for four years. On the pitch, she, like the young ladies who have won this honor before her, have helped build Battle Mountain soccer into a perennial power, including two league titles in 2007 and 2008.
During her winters, she qualified for three state meet in alpine skiing. She also mixed in two years of track.
“She’s a good kid,” Huskies soccer coach David Cope said. “The big thing is that she brings a positive life force to things she’s associated with. She has had a great experience playing sports for her high school.”
Wild will attend Colorado State this fall and is looking at studying science.
Good call, Davey
In addition to the Senior awards, Battle Mountain athletic director Rich Houghton also handed out Athletic Scholar Awards from CHSAA to Davey DeChant (soccer and skiing) and Miriah Jones (basketball and soccer). What’s interesting here is that DeChant has been writing columns for the Vail Daily on the NFL and the NBA Playoffs.
But his first column for this paper ran after last year’s Senior Awards, predicting future winners of the honor, including, “As he heads toward his senior season, Wallace will be in the spotlight.”
While DeChant is deservedly off to journalism school at Northwestern, Wallace did, in fact, pick up his Senior Award.
“I was a little surprised,” he said. “I was more excited when I got it. I worked super hard to get that.”
Wallace is the latest of a line of superb endurance athletes from Battle Mountain. He lettered three years in cross country, where he was a part of three league title teams and one of two squads to win a state title.
In the winter, he excelled in Nordic, finishing second in classic and seventh in the skate race. In all fairness, he was a bit under the weather when it came to freestyle in February.
He even ran track his junior year and was on, yes, the 3,200 relay team which won regionals last spring. Wallace will be studying and racing Nordic at the University of Denver next year.
Sports Editor Chris Freud can be reached at 970-748-2934 or cfreud@vaildaily.com.
Senior Awards
The following is a list of recent Outstanding Senior Athlete winners at Battle Mountain:
Year Boys Girls
2009 Conor Wallace Carrie Wild
2008 Jonny Stevens Jamie Lee Roberts
2007 Travis Landauer Kelsey Sanders
2006 Connor Drumm Erika Ghent
2005 Grant Stevenson Alexis Guinn
2004 Keith Denton Madison McCaulley
2003 Rob Finlay Kati Russell
2002 Chris Jackson Krista Kedrowski
2001 James Stevenson Christina Aiello
2000 Pat Martinez Stephanie Feldhaus
1999 Mark Perna Jackie Pirog
1998 Joel Sandoval Molly Marquez