The Chadron State College football team played their annual spring scrimmage on Saturday, April 21, at Elliot Field, which resulted in the victory of the Cardinal team over the White 20-10.

The coaching staff has had a successful recruiting process, according to Jay Long, the football coach, despite the recent NCAA investigation. According to long, 54 players have been added to the roster this year, and the possibility of NCAA sanctions did not hinder the recruiting process.

Cody Hunt and Jazmyn Webster will soon be competing at the highest level of NCAA DII track and field. But neither Webster, a sophomore jumper from Cheyenne, nor Hunt, a junior shot-putter from Lingle, Wyo., is overly concerned with the pressure of national competition.

Vince Lombardi once said “Winning is everything.”

The 2011-2012 Chadron State College golf team disagrees.

The team competed against eight other squads in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Championship Monday and Tuesday and returned yesterday with a last place finish. But with their season over, they’re taking the loss in stride.

After a 5-25 (0-18 RMAC) 2011 season, the Eagles are hitting the gym with one thing in mind: improvement.

“They’ve been lifting at 6 a.m., three days a week since the beginning of spring semester,” head coach Natasha Marquis said in an interview yesterday. “It’s been a grind.”

You know those cold mornings, when you try to start your car and it just whines pathetically for a few seconds, and then roars to life with no warning? That’s pretty much the story of the Eagles’ season so far.

It’s springtime. The air is warm. The birds are chirping. And starting Monday, Chadron’s football team will rise from its winter hibernation and hit the gridiron.

It’s tempting to look at the Eagles men’s basketball team in terms of what they didn’t do. At 13-14, they didn’t have a winning record. They didn’t win any of their first six games. They didn’t advance past the first round of the RMAC Shootout tournament.

In 1980, the U.S. Olympic Ice Hockey team, a group of amateur and collegiate players, beat the best hockey team in the world and won an Olympic gold medal. But for every “miracle on ice,” a thousand teams must fail.

In 2012, the Eagles joined the ranks of those teams.

It’s at once terribly cliché and, if you’re superstitious, possibly dangerous to call the Eagle’s 2011-2012 season a Cinderella story. But it’s tough not to notice the similarities.

But now, in an the midst of an electrifying, 8-win, 2-loss, late-season surge, the Eagles are poised to finish this season in a far more spectacular manner.