Sports

The 2025 season got off to a very promising start for the Class 2A fifth-rated Waukon girls cross country team, as the Lady Indians, literally, ran away with the team title at the Edgewood-Colesburg Invitational Tuesday, August 26. Placing three runners within the top 10 individuals of the 98-runner field, and all five of their scored runners within the meet’s top 23 placewinners, the distance Tribe tallied just 35 points to leave the rest of the eight-team field behind by more than 30 points.

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The Waukon football team’s first half of play in its season opener at home against Class 4A eighth-rated Decorah proved to be all the highly-regarded Vikings wanted, as the grid Tribe held an 8-7 lead late in the second quarter over its visiting rivals from nearby Friday, August 29 in non-district play.

The second half, however, proved to be a different result, especially on the scoreboard, as Decorah rattled off a 35-0 outburst after that lone Indian lead of the ballgame to end up dealing the Indians a 42-16 defeat.

The Waukon football team will return 19 varsity letterwinners this fall from a team that played its way to an eighth consecutive Class 2A State Play-Off qualification but did so in a manner relatively rare for the Indian grid program. The continuance of that streak where every team desires to be came in non-championship fashion for the first time in the past seven years of the program, with this year’s squad hoping to bounce back from last season’s first non-winning record since the 2014 season, at 3-6 overall and 2-3 in Class 2A District 3 to earn a 12th Class 2A State Play-Offs berth in the past 14 seasons.

Coming off its most successful season in recent years with its first team qualification in five seasons for the State Cross Country Meet last fall, the 2025 Waukon girls cross country team will be focused on renewing a qualifying streak as the Lady Indians hit the course this fall. Headlining that effort will be the return of 12 letterwinners from last fall’s campaign, five of whom return after helping the distance Tribe to a 13th-place team finish among Class 2A’s elite at last fall’s season grand finale.

Nearly half of the 2025 Kee football team will be returning with varsity letterwinning experience, as 10 of the 22 Hawks reporting for early-season practice have made varsity contributions over the past year or more, including to Kee’s 5-4 campaign last fall that took the Hawks into the Eight-Player State Play-Offs for the second consecutive season. Those returning veterans provide a fairly balanced mix of those in the trenches on the front line, those powering out of the backfield, and other skilled positions on both sides of the football.

Headlining that wealth of returning experience will be a group of six seniors, including Noah Connelly, Zach Goetzinger, Sam Janzen, Kyle Mauss, Zach Meyer and Adam Wheeler. A pair each of juniors, Trey Cota and Tanner Troendle, and sophomores, Irey Mettille and Eli Schobert, round out that list of letterwinning returnees.

The lifeguarding staff at the Waukon Family Aquatic Center has wrapped up its 2025 summer season. More than three dozen lifeguards - the most in several years - made up this year’s staff, and a vast majority of them are pictured above. Management staff wants to thank these lifeguards for stepping up and helping keep the aquatic center open every day possible this summer, noting that some area pools had to trim hours or not open at all due to lifeguarding shortages in their communities.

The Kee softball team’s 2025 campaign featured the most wins the program has seen since the Lady Hawks’ golden era of 30 or more wins in five consecutive seasons nearly a decade ago, as Kee’s diamond dwellers played to a 27-12 season record this summer, their best mark since a 36-6 result in 2018. That overall mark included a 15-1 result in Upper Iowa Conference (UIC) play that earned the Hawks their first outright UIC season championship since that same 2018 season when Kee’s girls played to a 17-0 league mark, with the Lady Hawks tying for the UIC crown in both the 2021 and 2022 seasons with 14-2 conference records.

Logan Houg of Waukon won the Waukon Golf and Country Club 2025 Men’s Invitational held Saturday and Sunday, July 26-27. The 2020 Waukon High School graduate shot 18-hole scores of 67 and 64 for a nine-under-par total 131 strokes. It was the first time Houg has won the event. More than 150 golfers took part in the tournament. Results of each of the eight flights are listed in the Wednesday, August 13, 2025 edition of the Standard.

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The 2025 Kee baseball season represented a return to where ninth-year Hawk head coach Jim Mauss has said the program “belongs”.

The 32-11 overall record this season’s Kee diamond squad compiled included the Hawks’ third-most victories in the past 12 seasons and landed Kee at every team’s ultimate destination for just the second time in the past 14 summers. It was the last time that the Hawks went to the State Tournament (2021) and followed that qualification with the last time Kee baseball hit the 30-plus win mark (2022) that this year’s group of seniors began to earn their varsity stripes, ultimately taking what they learned from that 2022 senior group that accomplished those program highlights during their careers and creating highlights of their own ever since.

The 2025 Waukon baseball season saw an overall young squad continue to find its way down the path of success, as a team without a senior in its day-to-day line-up and with a vast majority of its game roster being sophomores or younger played its way to an 11-16 season record and a mark of 7-9 in Northeast Iowa Conference (NEIC) play that placed them third in the final five-team NEIC standings. Still, after having to replace a majority of last summer’s line-up that included five graduated seniors, and recording his lowest win total in five seasons, seventh-year Waukon baseball coach Shane Schellsmidt made note of continued growth by his squad that set a foundation for the building of future success.