November 19, 2010: What do you want on your tombstone trophy? (Center: Sara Stoakes, one-woman championship.)
The state high school softball tournament was last week — AGWSR won its first title in that sport — and the baseball tournament is this week. (Actually, it started at the end of last week, with Mason City Newman routing Gladbrook-Reinbeck.) While state tournament memories last a lifetime and the participation is about more than the hardware, Iowa’s postseason trophies are now universally generic and lack the luster they used to have.
On the girls’ side, the trophies at best look like wooden J.D. Power awards but also bear a striking similarity to tombstones. This has been the case since 2007-08, when styles in use for decades were supplanted by rectangular slabs dominated by the IGHSAU logo*. It wasn’t always like this; Everly’s girls’ basketball trophy from 1968** is half the height of the participants themselves and the following style wasn’t bad at all.
Starting this past year, the boys followed suit. They have gone from this and this and this and this, large and regal pieces that leave no question about what sport they’re from, to trapezoidal slabs that say “State Participant” for everyone except the top two teams and a champion’s trophy just like a quarterfinalist’s. No matter the sport, they ALL look the same.
I can only guess that this move was done for financial purposes, that bulk-ordering trophies that are entirely identical except maybe for one line and placing a thin sheet of metal on them with the specifics is cheaper than trophies of different shapes with different figures on them. I want to believe that because otherwise the change — even or especially for the sake of change — doesn’t make sense.
This needs to be fixed, and I think I have an idea on how to make it happen. Read on.
The Iowa Farm Bureau is the “sole title sponsor” of both the boys’ and girls’ high school athletics organizations. Farm Bureau provides commemorative balls for many sports’ champion team members.
Each year, county Farm Bureaus seek input from their members on what positions to take about issues related to agriculture and rural life. What if those county Farm Bureaus encouraged the state-level organization to use its sponsorship to get better trophies?
I can tell, right after typing a draft of the above sentence, that the biggest obstacle to this idea is the potential perception that Farm Bureau is telling someone what to do (we already have enough of that floating around). But a movement that started at the grass-roots level — something like “Resolved: The Iowa Farm Bureau should offer support to create sport-specific trophies for high school postseason play” — might get the right people’s opinions swayed.
I am not saying to put any logo besides the IHSAA’s or IGHSAU’s on anything. However, I am saying that we can do better than what we have right now. If the big trophies became too expensive, OK, I get that. We already have a template for a smaller one. Use the style from the baseball tournament that was used for decades, with an appropriate figure for each sport. They’re all one size, but they clearly denote that the trophy is about a sport in Iowa, and which sport that is, and how far the team advanced in big letters (“State Quarter-Final[ist],” “State Semi-Finalist,” “State Runner-Up,” “State Champion”). The only tweak this could use is a little sharper state shape.
Trophy cases that show off the diversity, or singular strength, of a school’s extracurricular activities are neat things to behold. The emotion of winning a state championship doesn’t change no matter what the trophy looks like, but let’s go for something that looks great on display, too.
*Trying to nail down the year this changed, using only Internet pictures, was ridiculously difficult. You would think an image search for “2006 iowa girls state champion volleyball trophy” would eliminate or downplay states that are not Iowa, teams that are not high school, sports that are not volleyball, and years that are not 2006, but you would be wrong. I only got it because North Tama’s girls’ track titles in 2006-09 resulted in two big trophies and two tombstones (top). The 2006 and 2007 trophies looked just like NT’s 1979-81 girls’ track three-peat, except the figure on top faced the opposite direction.
**”Cattlefeederettes” has to be the longest team name there’s ever been, and possibly the only one of its kind.