Wyoming Cowboys Basketball
The University of Wyoming men's basketball program, which currently competes in the Mountain West Conference, has a lengthy tradition dating back to 1905. Cowboys fans can claim something that few other teams' fans can: an NCAA Championship, won in 1943 under Hall of Fame coach Everett Shelton and behind star guard Ken Sailors, who pioneered the jump shot that is now the standard in basketball. Among other star players that played at Wyoming, there are Theo Ratliff, Flynn Robinson, Bill Garnett, Eric Leckner, Reggie Slater, Fennis Dembo, and Tony Windis. Wyoming has made a total of 14 appearances in the NCAA Tournament, though the closest it has come to the lofty heights of the 1943 team was a Sweet 16 appearance in 1987. Since the Mountain West was formed in 1999, Wyoming has won two conference titles, including an outright championship in 2002. Prior to that, Wyoming won five championships in the Western Athletic Conference, eight championships in the Skyline Conference, and one championship in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference.
Famous quotes containing the words wyoming, cowboys and/or basketball:
“The admission of the States of Wyoming and Idaho to the Union are events full of interest and congratulation, not only to the people of those States now happily endowed with a full participation in our privileges and responsibilities, but to all our people. Another belt of States stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.”
—John le Carré (b. 1931)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)