Mark Cheney
History 2700
Professor Mulderink
Service Learning Project Paper
December 6, 2002
The title that I decided to give to my service-learning project is “1981-2000 Virgin Valley High School Football: Two Decades of Dominance.” Throughout this semester as I thought about what kind of information I wanted to include in this service-learning project I changed my mind a few times. At first I wanted to include the complete history of football at Virgin Valley High School (located in Mesquite, Nevada). As I thought about this I decided that I could not do an adequate job by myself. As I started researching the history of Virgin Valley football, I found that I could not find a lot of the information I was looking for. So I decided to focus on more recent times.
As I was growing up in Mesquite, I always heard how great the local football teams had been and currently were. I do not remember going to any of the games. My father, Ellis Cheney, was an assistant football coach at Virgin Valley High School since moving there in 1971. All I ever heard growing up was how great head football coach Evan Wilson was. Although I never had the opportunity to play for Coach Wilson while he was the head coach, his record proves that he was a very good coach. While at Virgin Valley he compiled a record of 155 wins and 38 losses. During his time as head coach his teams won eight state championships, the most in Nevada state history, including five in a row in the 1980s, and four state runner-ups. So I thought that I would focus on Coach Wilson’s career.
Finding research on Wilson lead me to remember when I played football at Virgin Valley in the mid 1990s. I thought the coach that I had was pretty good also. His name is Kirk Hafen. Coach Hafen is still coaching at Virgin Valley High School. He was an assistant to Coach Wilson in the late 1980s and took over the program in 1991 when Wilson retired. Although Coach Hafen has only won one state championship and been the runner-up twice, he has compiled a pretty impressive record as well.
I decided to include both of these great coaches in my service-learning project. I also decided to only include the years 1981-2000, because as the title of the project states, these were the years that Virgin Valley virtually dominated their division in the state of Nevada. In Coach Wilson’s years, 1981-1990, he compiled an 85-15 record with six state championships. During the years 1991-2000, Coach Hafen’s record was 84-23 with one state championship. Combined these records come to a .816 winning percentage, which is pretty remarkable. For these reasons, and the fact that my brother and I played during these times, lead to my decision to name my service-learning project, “1981-2000 Virgin Valley High School Football: Two Decades of Dominance.”
The intended audience for this project and those who will benefit from it is anybody interested in the history of football at Virgin Valley High School. The type of people who would be interested in this sort of history could include, but not be limited to: families moving to the area who are looking for a good football program, high school football history buffs, current residents of Mesquite, past football players at Virgin Valley, and current Virgin Valley football players. This information would be available to those people who have heard all the stories, as I did, about how great the football teams of the past were. Now these people have a source that they can turn to and read for themselves.
I love to read about the past history of professional and college football teams. If there were some sort of compiled histories of high school football teams I would sure love to read them also. I think there are a lot of people who have the same sort of interests that I do who would love to have information about high school sports where they live. When I graduate from college in the near future, I hope to be able to teach and coach at a high school that has the same rich history of excellence that Virgin Valley has. However, another part of me wants to be the one that creates a great history at a high school that is not accustomed to winning.
Local Contact Person(s)
I was able to contact a few important people while collecting information about this service-learning project. I talked to Coach Evan Wilson about some of his most memorable years and games. He was able to tell me some exciting details about a few games. I talked to him for about an hour and took notes for later use. Coach Wilson currently resides in Mesquite and is an assistant coach at the high school. He was excited that I was gathering information about the football program and was eager to provide me with any information that I asked for.
I was also able to talk to Coach Hafen. He was also excited, as Wilson was, to know that I was compiling information about him and his teams. He told me some of his most memorable moments since he became head coach. We had a good time recalling the 1994 season in which we won the state championship and went undefeated. I was the quarterback that year. We also talked about my senior year, 1995, in which we lost by three points in a state playoff game. I had never talked to him about that game. It was a heart crushing defeat that should have never happened. He also told me of the state championship games in which he lost. I could tell that he would of liked to coach those games over again. He said that he would of made some different calls. I guess we all wish we could go back in time and do some things a little differently. I know I do.
Another person I was able to speak with was my father, Ellis Cheney. He coached with both Wilson and Hafen. It was nice hearing my dad talk about the good times. He is much more of a storyteller then the other two coaches I talked to. He told some pretty wild stories. He tends to get the football seasons mixed up and over exaggerate. I think he told me five of six different times that so and so was “the best football player I ever coached.” I also got a little different perspective on football. He was the offensive line coach for about twenty years. He told me about how during the games he would make suggestions to the head coach about calling a certain play that he was sure would work. Of course when the play was called it hardly ever worked. It was nice to sit down with my father and hear him talk about when he played high school football in Oregon. He also told me of his brief experience playing at Brigham Young University. Doing this service-learning project gave me an opportunity to sit down and talk about things with my father that I would of never gotten a chance to do otherwise.
The workload to complete this project was much more than I expected. After gathering the information from the primary sources I had to edit and compile all of it, which took me much longer then I had anticipated. I also had to locate all of the pictures and the scores. This took a while until I found out that the high school had kept all of the yearbooks that I was looking for. Although the library had them, I had a hard time talking the librarian into letting me look at all of them and make some copies. She was not very helpful. Once I gathered all of the information I decided to complete the project in Microsoft Publisher. Since I was not very familiar with Publisher, my lovely wife helped me a great deal.
As far as the hours it took to complete this project, I would say that it took me approximately thirty-five hours putting it all together. This time is not including the travel time from Cedar City to Mesquite. I probably went down to Mesquite every other weekend and did some research. As an estimate, I spent fifteen hours collecting the interviews and other information that I used while compiling the project. The remaining twenty hours were spent actually putting the booklet together. There are about twenty pages altogether, one for each year covered. On the twenty are the team picture along with the schedules and scores for that season.
I had planed on doing the work for this project in my spare time here at Cedar City, and do a lot of the research on the weekends in Mesquite. I was able to follow this timetable pretty well throughout the semester. As the end of the semester came quicker than I expected, I was forced to spend more of my free time at home to complete the project. The time it took to edit the interviews and then type them up on Microsoft Word took me longer than I expected it to. In conjunction with that, I had to copy some of the pictures and scan others. This part of the project also took quite a bit longer than expected. I am fortunate enough to have a helpful wife who did not mind helping me out on the publishing part of the project.
I was fortunate enough to have been able to contact Coaches Wilson and Hafen on the weekends as I had anticipated. They were cordial enough to sit and listen to my questions. As stated earlier these interviews took about an hour or so. The interviews I had with my father were on different occasions, but usually on the weekends at his home.
The technology-related resources that I used were Microsoft Picture It Publishing and a local print shop called Image Pro. Since I do not have a color printer I had to go to Image Pro and have them print it out for me. I also made some copies of the project there. I used a computer and a scanner to create the project.
When I first thought about the project I thought about creating a web site devoted to Virgin Valley High School Football. I thought I could just somehow link it to the Virgin Valley High School web site or possible to the City of Mesquite web site. Unfortunately I did not have the know how to accomplish this idea. First of all I do not know the first thing about creating a web site. The second problem that I ran into was how I would link my site to one of the others mentioned above. As this idea became more and more unfeasible I just decided to just create a booklet instead. With the web site someone could take more time and put all of the football years on it. A web site would also be easier to update then a printed copy would be. Maybe someday I can put my love for high school football on some sort of a web site. I think this idea would be an excellent project for a high school itself. Hopefully when I am a teacher I can get together with the computer teacher and form some sort of a club devoted to creating web sites for all of the high schools’ sports, not just football.
Connections to Other Service-Learning Projects
To my knowledge there are no other service-learning projects that deal with the Virgin Valley High School football team. Maybe somebody else has done a project along the same lines. I think that other people could do the same type of project for their school. I think it is important for high school students to know the history of their school. If they know the history they might have a little more pride in their school. Knowing the history of the activities at their school might help students to be more supportive of them. In the same way, the community might show more support to the local athletics and other high school extracurricular activities if they know a little bit about the school and its history.
Suggestions
I have a few suggestions for service-learning projects in the future. I think there should be more guidelines for what is acceptable and what is expected. I do not think letting students have so much free rein on their projects is the best way to go about it. I think that the professor should contact local historical sites or societies and have them come up with ideas of projects that they would like done to better the beautiful area around us. Another suggestion is to have bigger groups working together to accomplish greater tasks. I had a hard time deciding what to do for my project. I think that if I would have been a part of a group of five to seven students then I could of accomplished a lot more and for a much greater cause. I am sure there are a lot of service-learning projects out there that are just to big for one to three students to accomplish.
I learned a lot about the history of Virgin Valley football. I gained more respect for the former players and coaches at Virgin Valley. I also have a greater appreciation for historians who write books and do a lot of research. Doing good research is hard and very demanding of your time.