Star Northwest College basketball player Deangelo Newsom was just one among many outstanding athletes coaches brought to Powell during the writer’s time covering the sports programs.

Tribune file photo by Steve Moseley

Steve Moseley

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I arrived in Powell on the Trib staff with zero experience applying whatever journalistic skills I had to anything college.

So, I began from scratch. It did not take long to open these eyes to recognition that junior college sports are a whole different breed of cat than high school, even a small college like Northwest.

Economic impact is a no-brainer asset at a glance. But time revealed much more.

The injection of lively young adult dynamics (and no few high jinks) into life in Powell, it seems to me, maintains a palpable pulse for everyone else. It seems to help hold off the inevitable slide of small rural towns to geriatrics.

Then there’s the ethnic diversity of which towns like Powell benefit so greatly, again in my opinion. Despite present screeching within our fractured, increasingly fanatic and tribal society, it is clear to me variety of skin colors and languages and cultures is enriching.

I, for instance, grew up and graduated high school in Nebraska. There were 36 members of my Genoa High School Class of 1967 and no college demographic at all. Not long after leaving high school I found myself at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, for Army basic training. My assigned roommate in the barracks? One Walter T. Scruggs from Wichita, Kansas.

To that point in life, I had yet to have so much as a conversation with a black person, never mind share a tiny room with one under the strain of such intense training. Looking back, I am still embarrassed by some of the dumb questions he had to answer for me.

Trapper athletics was an awakening, too.

As already admitted, my expectations for junior college sports were not high. The Trappers of basketball, volleyball and wrestling did not need long to demonstrate the error of my condescension.

Coach Ken Rochlitz brought in great players from across the country and beyond to Powell, there to win games and put me in my place. Deangelo Newsom (in the photo) was just one among so very many outstanding athletes Ken, wrestling coach Jim Zeigler, Tom Webb of the women’s basketball program, rodeo head man Del Nose and volleyball coach Sue Pollart attracted to Powell. I am the better for those kids and so are you, whether you realize it or not.

Deangelo found his way to the edge of the wilderness from Memphis, Tennessee, if you can believe that, and played his way into a scholarship with the Thunderbirds of Southern Utah.

In 2004, Robert Roszkiewicz from Poland won a national wrestling title for NWC. Leap ahead to just a few weeks ago when Azizbek Fayzullaev, the Trapper ‘Man from Uzbekistan,’ won his second national championship.

And these are only three examples among dozens and dozens over decades of time.

Isn’t that neat? I sure think so.

(Contact the writer at stevemoseley42@gmail.com)