FAR FROM HOME
Guymon travels farther than any Oklahoma team, but still there's miles to go
Holding the blue and brown paisley- patterned pillow he'd grabbed off his daughter's bed that morning and a red and black checked blanket, coach Kyle Davis stepped off his team's charter-style bus.
It had been about seven hours since his football team boarded the bus in Guymon. A couple of scheduled breaks and one unplanned stop later, Davis and the Tigers finally arrived in Midwest City for their game against Carl Albert High School.
But for the Guymon Tigers, that's just part of life in the panhandle.
“You get used to them, but it's always one of those things that you look at and say, `Oh wow,'” Davis said of the team's long bus trips. “We've got four or five trips this year, and having to get everybody prepared and everything like that, but yeah ... we know what we have to do is probably the best way to say it.”
As another week of high school football gets underway in Oklahoma, some schools will travel across town, and some will drive to a different county, to play. A select few teams will have to drive hundreds of miles, but no team makes such long trips as often as Guymon.
Guymon is 54th in the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association's enrollment rankings — higher than schools such as Noble and Ardmore — putting it solidly in the 5A classification. Being the only Oklahoma school in Class 5A
in the far northwest corner of the state, most of the districts Guymon competes in include Oklahoma City-area schools. Between band, speech and debate and all the athletic teams, Guymon, whose main industry is the Seaboard Foods processing plant, has at least one group in the city area pretty much every week.
Guymon's football struggles make a long drive feel even longer. Through the first three road games of the season, the Tigers have lost by a combined score of 201-7.
Guymon's school district owns a set of activity buses to help alleviate travel distances. They have big comfy seats like a charter bus, and some of them have USB ports and WiFi at each seat. With the Tigers' logo on the side, Guymon looks more like a college team rolling in for a football game than a high school. The buses look extravagant, but they are a necessity to travel as far and as often as Guymon does. Expenses for trips to the Oklahoma City area and beyond are funded by bond issues.
“We don't have to go and put money down to rent a bus or something like that,” Davis said. “And we don't have to take regular school buses.”
To play Carl Albert, the team left school around 10 a. m., made a stop in Woodward at about noon to eat lunch and then stopped at the Cherokee Trading Post to stretch and do a quick walk-through practice at the travel plaza. It's all part of their regular routine for trips like this.
That same Friday, Guymon's speech and debate team and cross country teams were both competing at schools in Edmond. It was lucky for the football team because their bus broke down, and they had to stop in El Reno. There was an issue with one of the wheel bearings.
A bus came from Edmond to get the football players, dropped them off at the game and then went back to its team. At the same time, a bus was dispatched from Guymon to pick up the Tigers from Carl Albert. It arrived about 30 minutes after the game ended.
Guymon isn't the only school traveling long distances to play these games. District opponents also have to come to Guymon. Carl Albert athletic director and football coach Mike Corley said it's a fun experience for his team to play at Guymon. The players get to leave school early and take a charter bus to the game.
“Our kids get to see a different part of the state that a lot of them haven't seen… but I could do without that trip back,” Corley said.
Carl Kirk has been a bus driver for Guymon for the past eight years. He has to drive to OKC about once a week.
“We're basically a large school in a really isolated area, so to compete we have to go to Oklahoma City because there's no other big schools around us,” Kirk said. “We're a 5A school, and in the Oklahoma panhandle, there's no other 5A school other than 265 miles away in Oklahoma City.”
This week, Guymon traveled even farther to play its game. The Tigers played at Lawton Eisenhower — another district opponent — on Thursday night.
The fastest route from Guymon to Lawton goes through Texas.
With district opponents so far away, the football team tries to put closer teams on its non- district schedule at the beginning of the season. This year, Guymon played at Liberal High School in Kansas. Liberal is only 45 minutes from Guymon, so it's a different experience to travel there.
“We consider it almost like a home game because it's so close and the kids go up there all the time to eat, to shop, and that kind of stuff,” Davis said.
But for those long road trips, driving back home to Guymon is the hardest part. The pregame adrenaline has worn off and everyone just wants to get back to their own beds.
“For us, when you get to Woodward you say to yourself `Wow, we still have two more hours,'” Davis said.
Davis is happy because the speed limit on the road between Woodward and Guymon has been increased a bit, so they can get home a bit faster now.
Gannon Wallace tries to sleep on the way home, but the junior said it can be hard to get a good sleep on the bus.
As for the smell — for a bus full of football players after a game — it's not too bad.
“In the past, a lot of guys have taken showers after games,” Wallace said. “But when some people don't, it gets a little bad smelling in there.”
Kirk said, “If anything, it smells too much like cologne.”
Long-distance travel is just part of living in the panhandle. People have to travel to Amarillo, Texas, or Oklahoma City to see a doctor or go to a concert. Traveling to play a game, or watch your children play, isn't much different.
Jennifer Madrid has two sons on the team. She and Debbie Brooks, a grandmother of one of the players, took part of the day off work and drove down together for the game at Carl Albert.
Madrid said the travel isn't too bad, but for the boys' sake, she wishes they didn't have to go so far. They haven't had much success lately, and they get bummed about it, she said.
“They still try to get pumped up to come to these games regardless of whatever team they're facing. ... And they don't give up,” Madrid said. “That's one thing about these boys, they do not give up. They keep fighting for each other and that's the way it's going to be. They'll always fight for each other.”