Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Irrigators – Newell (SD) High School

Well, if there’s anything that’s gonna strike fear into the hearts of your opponents, it’s gonna be “a person or company who uses water supplied to their land to help crops and plants grow.” I mean, I’m trembling in fear here just typing in those words.

Newell is in the central western part of the state, almost on the Wyoming border. It has not quite 600 folks, and dates back to 1910. They like to call themselves the Nation’s Sheep Capital.

The town was named after FH Newell, head of the Unites States Reclimation Service (which “oversees water resource management, specifically as it applies to the oversight and operation of the diversion, delivery, and storage projects that it has built throughout the western United States.”). Quite a prolific author, he penned Agriculture by Irrigation (1894), Irrigation in the United States (1902), Principles of Irrigation Engineering (1913), Irrigation Management (1916), and many more.

So, I guess it make some sense to call the local team the Irrigators. Not a lot of sense, but hey … Thankfully, it sounds like locals call them the Gators for short.

The school dates back to 1922. Someone on Wikipedia called it “the most imposing structure in Newell … [and an] outstanding example of the English Vernacular Revival.”

To me, it kinda just looks like a big, brown box

They’ve only got 75 students in toto. Not sure how they can field any teams. Here, for example, is the entire senior class of 2022:

They do, though, have a mascot … an extremely lame mascot.



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