By Cole Jorgensen

Trojan Tribune Staff

Photo by Emily Miles

West Central’s boys and girls track teams have experienced great success in the past few years. Last year’s boys’ team got runner-up at state while the girls won the state title. This year, the teams were a little nervous about their chances for another successful season after they lost a number of important runners to last year’s graduating class. However, both teams have made adjustments and are running their best at the most important time of the year.

Senior Dalton Kuehl stated, “Track is going very well. I think we’re right where we need to be. We’re missing a lot of valuable assets from last year, but we have people who are rising up to the challenge.” The boys got third at last week’s conference meet and are looking forward to the region meet on Thursday in Wagner.

The girls’ team is doing great. They won the conference meet last week and are Big 8 conference champs. Joan Peters, the coach of the girls team, reported that while this year’s team doesn’t have as much depth as last year’s they have a lot of quality athletes. All around the board, the girls are doing great. Distance runners are doing really well at getting the team a lot of points, and Kylie Hanisch is setting personal records in the triple and long jumps. Also, the girls’ relays, hurdles and short distance events are looking strong. Overall, the girls have great odds of becoming back-to-back state champs.

By Cole Jorgensen

Trojan Tribune Staff

Photo by pantherbook.org

Hooray! We have made it through over three quarters of the school year! In these last few weeks all of us will have a lot on our minds. Underclassmen will have to prepare for semester tests and fill out class schedules for next year. For seniors, it will be an emotional roller coaster full of jubilation, sadness and stress.

Seniors, it’s your last year at West Central, a place that has helped form you into great young people. Realize also that it has made as much of an impact on you as you have made on it. You may or may not have realized it, but all of the underclassmen have been looking to you for guidance over the past year. We have made memories with you that we will never forget. Needless to say, we will miss you dearly.

For the rest of us juniors, sophomores and freshmen, we have a few things to get done before the year is over. With only a few weeks left, it is easy to fall into the depths of laziness. It is important that we stay focused and end the school year with the same work ethic we began with. I know it is easy to shrug off homework because it’s nice outside, but we must stay focused. Procrastination will only cost us more in the end. If we shrug off our last few assignments, our grades will reflect it. It would be a shame to end up with poor grades after you have worked so hard throughout the school year.

“Senioritis” is a term used to describe the laziness that begins to apply at the end of a senior’s high school career. However, this laziness also applies to everyone else at some point in their school year. The most helpful preventative cure to “senioritis” is to stay organized. Keep track of all deadlines and important dates on a calendar. This will help you to keep projects from piling on and help time management. If you see that you have a baseball game, a large project due, and a semester test on the same day, you may want to finish your project ahead of time. Also, try to get lots of sleep. We all know that it is a lot easier to stay on task when you are avoiding sleep.

In the end these last few weeks will be stressful. But if you manage to keep track of things, it can be very enjoyable.

By Cole Jorgensen

Trojan Tribune Staff

Photo courtesy of brothersoft.com

The year of 2011 has flown by and the holidays are now in full swing. This time of year is a time for friends and family to get together and enjoy themselves. Another part of this season is the dreaded gift shopping. I say gift shopping is dreadful because finding the perfect gift for someone is much more difficult than it needs to be. There is a lot of confusion and hassle when trying to find the right gift.

Finding a gift for someone is not nearly as easy as it should be. When you ask someone what they would like for Christmas, it seems like there are only two responses; either, “I don’t want anything,” or they list items that are too expensive to be reasonable. Once simply asking doesn’t yield any gift ideas, some clever espionage must be done. Yet, it seems like a lot of the time even that returns little information. How the gift giving process occurs baffles me. People are bummed when the gift they wanted is not received, but they never told anyone what they wanted to begin with. In my opinion, the gift-giving/gift-receiving process would go a lot more smoothly if everyone made a list of about five things they would like to receive as gifts and gave it to whoever asks. The person buying the gift wouldn’t have to struggle to find the right gift, and the person receiving the gift wouldn’t be disappointed when they didn’t get what they wanted.

In the end, gift buying is hard enough when you consider the rush people get into this time of year and the horrible weather that sometimes occurs, so why must we add another worry into the mix? My advice to everyone this season is to simply express what you would like for Christmas so that all the distress of buying a gift can be avoided.