Sports
West High School, a 4A school, offers a variety of sports, including boys and girls basketball, volleyball, football, boys and girls soccer, baseball, boys and girls cross country, boys and girls track and field, softball, boys and girls swimming, boys and girls tennis, and boys and girls golf, cheerleading and dance. There are sports-related clubs that often meet to play, for example, ultimate frisbee.
Under head coach Brian Sauser, the football team finished the 2011 season 9-3, after winning the MVC title and making it to the quarterfinals in the playoffs. The Trojan wrestling team, led by national champ and two time all-American Mark Reiland, has garnered national attention winning back-to-back team titles at the State Tournament in Des Moines. They are led by defending state champions Jack Hathaway, Phillip Laux, and placewinners Keegan Wakefield, Dakota Bauer, and Gradey Gambrall, brother of former West (and current University of Iowa) wrestler Grant Gambrall. The West High boys soccer team has played in the state finals for 6 out of the past 7 seasons, and won the 2009, 2010 and 2012 Iowa State Championship, three of their six championships. Head coach Brad Stiles was recently named ESPN RISE High School Soccer Coach of the Year. The West High baseball team has made the State Finals two of the last three seasons, finishing runner up to Sioux City North in 2009 and Cedar Rapids Kennedy in 2010. The boys basketball team won a trip to the state tournament in 2011, but finished 4th after a loss to Linn-Mar. However the team returned in 2012, ranked #1 in the state, and beat Sioux City East in the finals for their fourth state title. The volleyball team was ranked #1 in the state for the first time in history in 2010-2011 school year. They won in state in 2010 for the first time in West history as well, and then won again in 2011. The West High Women of Troy basketball team also entered state for the first time in the 2010-2011 school year. They made it to the finals, but lost against Des Moines East and received runner-up. In the 2011-2012 season they were ranked #1 in the state. They returned to the state tournament in February 2012, making it to the finals and then beating Ankeny in overtime for their first state title. In 2012 the West softball team made it into the State tournament for the first time in school history, ultimately losing to Pleasant Valley High School and placing fourth.
In the 2011-2012 school year, West High made Iowa history by winning six state championships (Volleyball, Boys Basketball, Girls Basketball, Boys Track and Field, Boys Tennis and Boys Soccer), the most any high school in Iowa has ever won.
Read more about this topic: Iowa City West High School
Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green;
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain;”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774)
“Come, my Celia, let us prove
While we may the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever,
He at length our good will sever.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)