In 1982 I got the opportunity to become a head coach when the girls program opened up. I'm not sure why Coach Stroh resigned after only one season but I was grateful for the opportunity. Stroh's '81 team had been picked as a team to beat at State that year and they came up just short, finishing in a tie for 2nd place despite an injury to one of his top sprinters. In '82 I had 11 state qualifiers and 12 returning letter winners back. All that was missing from the team that scored points at state were 3 seniors who had graduated, 2 discus throwers and a sprinter who graduated and had run one leg on a relay team. The other loss was a big disappointment, a quarter miler who as a sophomore in '81 ran on the 4 x 4 and anchored the medley that both placed in the state meet. She was also a member of my 3rd place state cross country team. She became ineligible after cross country season and could not regain her eligibility until the '82 cross country season. That was a tough loss.
My first team as a high school head coach came with a lot of potential. We started the season strong as well. I took a mile relay to the Albuquerque JayCee Indoor meet and while we were only 6th in the prelims and didn't make the finals the girls ran a respectable time and it was good experience for our next indoor meet that was held at Lubbock Christian; we went there and won an 8 team invitational over District rival Artesia and six West Texas teams. The mile relay ran almost an identical time but won the meet. Additionally we won the 440 and 880 relays and the 2 mile and placed in several more events. That was the conclusion of a very brief indoor season a week later we were back in Texas for our first outdoor meet of the season and we had some rare nice weather for early spring.
The meet was the Mustang Relays in Andrews, Texas and provided me with a great opportunity to emphasize the importance of every place, every point, in every event. (This was a point of emphasis in my newsletters right through my final season of coaching in 2005). We won the meet over second place Ft. Stockton, Texas 149 - 148 and of course I emphasized that it was a "total team victory". We had to win the mile relay and Ft. Stockton had to finish outside the top three to secure the victory. We won with a time 14 seconds faster than we ran the previous week and Ft. Stockton finished 4th securing the victory for us. The meet was also a good example of having to overcome adversity as well as the importance of having team depth. We had 3 good 100 meter hurdlers entered, our 2nd best hurdler false started and was disqualified, our best hurdler hit a hurdle, fell and did not finish the race and our 3rd hurdler finished 6th and scored for us.
While the next meet was back in Texas and we only finished 4th place out of 13 teams it was a very important meet because it showed the girls that they couldn't simply show up and win based on previous performances. We were soundly beaten by Midland 120, Odessa Permian 117 and Monahans 75; as I said, we were 4th with 47 and once again beat Ft. Stockton by 1 point. Even though we were 4th and 5th it provided another opportunity to emphasize the importance of every place, every point, every event. The meet was a wake up call. Here are some of my comments from our newsletter; "I know several of you were disappointed with your performances Saturday and there's nothing wrong with being disappointed when you know you can do better. The thing to do is shake it off and do better Friday at Portales. Personally I'm very pleased with our showing as a team and with the exception of a few minor problems that I think have already been worked out, I don't have any complaints with individual efforts. Some of you who think you can do better won't unless you have a better week of practice starting today. Last week many of you loafed every day and it showed, you know who you are".
At Portales, back in New Mexico we had a dominating team performance by scoring 114 points, Las Vegas Robertson was 2nd with 58 1/2. The bad news is that we lost one of our top sprinter-hurdlers (TW) to an injury and didn't know when or if she would be back. We returned to Texas for our last out of state meet next and won with another strong performance; we scored 135 and Coahoma, Texas was 2nd with 99. When we returned to New Mexico we were hit by some type of illness bug that kept a large part of the team from competing and others performing at less than their best. We went into the meet knowing that it would be tough because half of the teams would be AAAA schools while we and three others were AAA. We placed 4th with 37 points while the host team, Roswell won with 107. "I think you all performed very well Friday considering the tough competition and the virus that many of you were fighting. Many season best performances were recorded despite the fact that the majority of you felt below par".
While it was a tough meet it would be our last loss until the State Championship meet in Albuquerque a month later. The next three meets were the Artesia and Lovington Invitationals and the District meet where we were the defending champions. Additionally they were all meets where athletes could qualify for the state meet by hitting qualifying times or distances. We won all three meets by wide margins and qualified for state in 15 of the 16 events with multiple qualifiers in 4 of them. At Artesia we scored 118 points, runner up Santa Rosa had 53. At Lovington we scored 146 points while runner up Artesia had 63. We defended our District Championship title scoring 137 to Artesia 74, Portales 59, Tucumcari 29 and NMMI 1. We won 12 of the 16 events including all 4 relays.
One of the local papers, the Hobbs News-Sun ran the following headline the day we left for the state championship meet, "LHS Girls Big Meet Favorites". Two things that they failed to take into consideration however is that many of our state qualifying performances were what I call "soft qualifiers" meaning that while they met the qualifying standard they were long shots to finish in the top 5 at state and score any points and the fact that the defending state championship team had their top athletes back. The headline in the same newspaper after the meet was, "LHS Boys First, Girls Second In State Meet".
Socorro, the defending champs scored 49 points, we were runner up with 36 and Las Vegas Robertson was 3rd with 31. And speaking of those Socorro athletes, "Socorro with Spurlock and Pyke accounting for 44 points once again won the AAA championship with 49 points. Spurlock and Pyke virtually single-handedly carried Socorro to the AAA title".
I summed up my feelings in the Lovington Daily Leader after the meet, "We knew we shouldn't have been listed as the favorite before the meet started, " Anstey said. "With Pyke and Spurlock, we knew Socorro was going to be hard to beat. If everything would have gone exactly right for us, we could have possibly beaten them. It would have been tough though". Anstey added, "We were very proud of the girls in their second place finish. We had many seasonal best performances, including a school record by K.B. in the shot put and seasonal bests by three of our relay teams in the preliminaries".
Spurlock won the long jump, high jump and 200 and teamed up with Pyke on the winning 400 meter relay while Pyke won the 100 and finished 2nd in the 200. Quite a performance by those two young ladies.
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