The Kearney High boys track team experienced something it hadn't experienced in 11 years: The feeling of not winning a state track and field championship.
But they may have lost their seat to the throne long before the season even started.
Even as Fremont sprinted to victory in the last race on Saturday, it never occurred to Head Coach Roger Mathiesen that his team's run of state titles would end.
"Things always seem to work out for us, so it never really entered my mind that were going to lose until the last step. I guess I never really thought about it," said Mathiesen.
Until Saturday, it was the longest active winning streak in United States high school sports. Eleven straight state championships, 93 consecutive meet wins. But it was what happened away from the track that may have ultimately cost the Bearcats this streak, specifically, the issue of alcohol.
"We haven't suffered a lot of losses from people being hurt or people being suspended because of alcohol-related type things. We've been amazingly resilient in the 25 years that I've been here. You could say terribly fortunate," said Mathiesen.
Back in February, the terribly tragic happened. Senior Todd Becker was killed in a drunken driving accident.
The school lost a classmate and the track team lost a teammate, who placed fourth in the pole vault at state last year, good enough for four points. Kearney had no one qualify for the event this year and lost by three points.
Mathiesen said, "There is no question that some of the kids we thought were going to be on the team at the end of the year, they weren't there."
The driver of the car, Curt Westerbuhr, was suspended from school and suspended from the team, not allowed to compete in the district meet. He was one of the best shot-putters in the state.
Add another alcohol-related suspension for another state qualifier just in the last two weeks and you've got a team without three of it's point-getters, who could have made the difference and extended the streak.
"We're intolerant, like the Marines. But we feel like that's the way it has to be in order to succeed at the level that we've been succeeding," Mathiesen said.
Did alcohol cost his team its 12th consecutive State Championship?
"When you ask if I think that alcohol-related events cost our team the state championship, I would answer it by saying this: I think historically across the state, that would not be an uncommon thing to have happen, unfortunately," Mathiesen explained.
Despite the tragedy that the school experienced this year, Coach Mathiesen isn't so sure that students got the message.
"As sad as it is to say, I don't know how much of an impact it had and that's a terrible commentary on American life, isn't it? I'm afraid, probably, that it wasn't much of an impact," Mathiesen said.
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I need to hold on to the "11 straight state championships" t-shirt that Roger sent me.
