{"id":2451472,"date":"2019-11-22T20:40:01","date_gmt":"2019-11-23T03:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/news\/forty-years-later-and-basalt-football-is-back-in-the-state-semifinals\/"},"modified":"2019-11-24T17:09:14","modified_gmt":"2019-11-25T00:09:14","slug":"forty-years-later-and-basalt-football-is-back-in-the-state-semifinals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/forty-years-later-and-basalt-football-is-back-in-the-state-semifinals\/","title":{"rendered":"Forty years later and Basalt football is back in the state semifinals"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Basalt High School’s Duane Bair carries the ball in a 1979 football game for the Longhorns, as seen on the cover of the Roaring Fork Valley Journal from Nov. 15, 1979.<\/strong>
Courtesy<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

When Dan Duroux thinks about the 2019 Basalt High School football team, images of his senior season come to mind. After all, the Longhorns haven\u2019t been to the state semifinals in 40 years, when his 1979 team made a run of its own.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so similar to my senior season in that the two years before should have been the better teams,\u201d the now 57-year-old Duroux said. \u201cYet these are the guys that took it to the next step, so that\u2019s pretty awesome. They may be overachieving a little bit, which is one of those great things.\u201d<\/p>\n

No. 9 seed Basalt (9-2) is set to host No. 4 Delta (10-1) at 1 p.m. Saturday in the Class 2A state semifinals. The winner will face either No. 2 Sterling or No. 3 Resurrection Christian in the state championship game Nov. 30 in Pueblo.<\/p>\n

This will be the first 2A semifinal appearance in Basalt\u2019s history. The program\u2019s first 2A playoff win only came in 2017 over Salida, which led to the first of back-to-back quarterfinal losses. Prior to this recent run, Basalt\u2019s football history is fairly bleak and empty, at least until you get back to the 1970s.<\/p>\n

That 1979 team is the only other semifinal team in school history. The Longhorns were then playing in Class A, or 1A, and also were enjoying a stretch of football dominance that culminated in those seniors.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t know,\u201d said Duane Bair, another senior on the \u201979 team who now lives in Utah, of that year\u2019s team rewriting school history. \u201cWe used to joke that we may be small, but we\u2019re slow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over their four-year high school careers, the 1980 senior class never lost a league game. According to Duroux, who now lives in South Carolina, BHS won its first playoff game in school history in 1977 and followed it up with a second win in 1978. Both of those seasons ended with second-round playoff losses.<\/p>\n

Then came the 1979 squad, coached by Jerry Mohrlang and led by sophomore quarterback Del Goolsby and the two-headed running back attack of Scott Havens and Mike Parker, who Bair claims were the best two backs in the state that season.<\/p>\n

Although, it wasn\u2019t all dreamy. Basalt lost to 2A powers Palisade (34-16) and Roaring Fork (27-14) in the first two games of 1979. Still, even after starting 0-2, the Longhorns believed.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter that game it was like, \u2018Wait a minute, this team could be pretty decent.\u2019 We hung with them the whole game and had them on the ropes for a while,\u201d Duroux said of the second game against the Rams. \u201cAfter that, the next week we hit league play and we went undefeated again through league. Like, our starters, we didn\u2019t see the second half hardly at all. We were just blowing our opponents out every game.\u201d<\/p>\n

Basalt beat Platte Canyon in the first round of the playoffs, 31-15, and then beat Haxtun in the state quarterfinals that season, 28-15. Their season ended in the semifinals to powerhouse Limon in a 35-0 rout.<\/p>\n

According to coloradopreps.com, Limon has won 17 state championships in school history, including in \u201976, \u201978 and \u201979.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had nobody on our team that was close to 200 pounds. Our offensive line was pretty much all in the 160s, maybe 170s. We gelled together as a team and really carried things in when we hit the playoffs,\u201d Duroux said. \u201cUnfortunately we got to draw (Limon) in the semifinals and they got us pretty good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bair said Basalt had about 200 kids in the high school that season. Of the roughly 100 males, 50 went out for the football team, a staggering percentage for a school anywhere. There was a passion for the game that seemed to fade away over the following few decades but it has certainly been revived in full over recent years.<\/p>\n

\u201cLooking at it the past four years, it just reminds me so much of when I was there,\u201d Duroux said. \u201cSeeing it come to life like that again, every year they are overcoming things, they are pushing forward. I would love to see this team be able to get past the game that we couldn\u2019t get past. That would be amazing to see Basalt playing for a state championship finally.\u201d<\/p>\n

acolbert@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Basalt High School’s Duane Bair carries the ball in a 1979 football game for the Longhorns, as seen on the cover of the Roaring Fork Valley Journal from Nov. 15, 1979.Courtesy When Dan Duroux thinks about the 2019 Basalt High School football team, images of his senior season come to mind. After all, the Longhorns […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2451472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-19 05:13:58","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2451472"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2451508,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451472\/revisions\/2451508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2451472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2451472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2451472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}