Stangel, Amos among SWABs junior award winners
The wealth was spread among six different high schools, including two record-setting athletes, when the Inland Northwest Sportswriters and Broadcasters chose the 35th Junior Awards winning class.
Lake City High four-year pitching star Casey Stangel is Junior Female Athlete and Shadle Park junior record-setting quarterback Brett Rypien is Junior Male Athlete of the Year for 2013.
Coaches of the year are Coeur d'Alene football's Shawn Amos and Mead girls basketball's Quantae Anderson. Teams of the Year are Freeman football and Colton basketball.
The statistics put up by Stangel and Rypien are staggering.
Last spring, Stangel put the capper on her Timberwolves career by being named MaxPreps National Softball Player of the Year and to her third Idaho Gatorade Player of the Year.
She was a perfect 28-0, winning her second Idaho 5A state title, with 208 strikeouts and 0.73 earned-run average; hit .640 with 64 RBIs and 33 extra base hits, 15 of them home runs.
Over four years she compiled a 93-9 pitching record (seven of those losses coming as a freshman), and a career batting average of .590 over her last three years with a combined 37 homers and 175 RBIs.
As a sophomore state titlist Stangel went 25-0 with a 0.33 ERA, 283 strikeouts and a .590 batting average. And her junior year when Lake City finished second in state, she finished 22-2 and hit .558.
She is already producing on the mound and with the bat at the University of Missouri.
Rypien surpassed his Greater Spokane League single season passing record of the year before and the Highlanders shared the GSL title and reached the state 3A football semifinals. He was 253 for 374 with seven interceptions, 3,266 yards and 46 touchdowns, also a league record.
He already holds GSL single game, season and career passing and total offense records after debuting in the sixth game of his freshman season and passing for 689 yards and 8 scores in four games.
As a sophomore Rypien obliterated the league's then-single season record with 3,179 yards and holds the career record with 7,135 (that doesn't include the nearly 1,500 yards he's added in postseason) with a year to go.
Despite the revelation that he had cancer, and after Coeur d'Alene lost three of its first four games, Amos guided the Vikings to eight straight wins and its third state 5A title in four years.
In just his second year as head coach of the Mead girls basketball team, Anderson guided the Panthers to a 24-1 record and 4A state championship with a 58-42 win over Arlington. It was Mead's first state title since 1996 and fourth overall.
Colton's 1B basketball team is a juggernaut, last winter winning its sixth straight state championship. The Wildcats finished the season 26-1, winning tourney games by 62 and 41 points - typical of their season - before a 55-41 title game victory.
Freeman's football team won all 14 of its games by an average margin of 36 points en route unbeaten to its first Washington 1A state championship. The Scotties averaged 42 points per game and scored more than 50 three times.