Sports

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.

Kee baseball senior Jordan Cota played for the Small Schools East squad in the Iowa High School Baseball Coaches Association (IHSBCA) Senior All-Star Series played at both Ankeny High School and Urbandale High School this past weekend, Thursday-Saturday, July 31-August 2. The Small Schools East squad consisting of players from Class 1A and 2A players from the east side of the state won two of three games played in the series, joining both the Small Schools West and Large Schools West squads in each going 2-1 in their three games during this series, but the Small Schools East squad was granted the series championship on a total runs scored tie-breaker with its 25 runs, in comparison to 20 runs scored by the Large Schools East team and just eight runs scored by the Small Schools West squad.

The Harpers Ferry Fireflies traveled to Fort Worth, TX July 11-13 for the National Granny Basketball Tournament held at the Game On Sports Center. The Fireflies won five of the six games they played at the tournament to end up as the National Tournament Runner-Up for the fourth consecutive year and for the fifth time in the past six National Tournaments that have been played. 

Monday, July 21 was not a great day to have a Hawk nickname at the Class 1A State Baseball Tournament at Merchants Park in Carroll, as all three teams with Hawks as their team mascot ended up on the losing end of the final result of their opening-round game in that small school season grand finale.

Having worked its way through some more recent familiar history with a pair of Class 1A District Tournament victories over fellow Upper Iowa Conference (UIC) foes, the Kee baseball team brought back some even deeper historical familiarity when the Hawks played Mason City Newman in the Class 1A Substate 3 championship game Tuesday, July 15 at the Decorah High School baseball field. The eighth-rated Hawks and ninth-rated Knights had waged war in some pretty classic postseason battles over the years more than a decade ago, including the most recent of those that ended up in a 4-3 Kee loss in Substate play in 2012, among others deep in postseason tournament play.Having not matched up with Newman in any capacity on the ball diamond within the past decade, that lapse hadn’t done much to create any more distance between the two clubs when they renewed their postseason rivalry in their July 15 Substate finale.