Prior Lake clay target shooting coach
Boys and girls lacrosse have been the most recent additions to the Farmington High School sports menu but there is another high-school age activity growing at even a faster rate.
It's clay target shooting and it has its own league (Minnesota High School Clay Target League) consisting of 29 schools from around the state. The league had just 13 members in 2010, its first year of existence.
Four former FHS athletes are coaching in the shooting league, headed by 1977 Tiger grad Doug Dingman, an avid hunter and state champion clay shooter, who is the coach and founder of the Prior Lake shooting program.
Dingman coached the Lakers to a top-five finish at last year's state meet and has seen his co-ed team's numbers swell to 47 (43 boys and 4 girls) participants this season.
Mark Henry, who ran on a couple of Tiger state meet cross country teams coached by Stan Otness in the 1970's, is the head coach of the Burnsville team and former Tiger Dan Nicolai heads up the program at St. Paul Academy. Dave Warweg, a classmate of Dingman's at FHS, is an assistant shooting coach at New Prague.
FHS grad Paul Harrington's Totino Grace girls softball team has wrapped up the North Suburban Conference title and owns a perfect 18-0 record. Grace, the seventh-ranked Class 3A team in the state, has outscored the opposition 184-17...1994 FHS female Athlete of the Year Amber Hegland is the softball coach at Wayzata (9-5) who won the Lakeville North Invitational tournament two weeks ago.
Mallory Betzold
Former Tiger softball player Mallory Betzold finished her college career at St. Mary's University in style, finishing with a .368 batting average with three home runs and 23 runs batted in. She was also the leading pitcher for the Cardinals with a 14-8 record and 3.01 earned run average. Betzold hit .455 in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC) playoffs and landed a spot on the all-tournament team.
2007 male Tiger Athlete of the Year Trey Davis, now a University of Minnesota junior, finished third in the shot put at the 102nd running of the Drake Relays in Des Moines, Iowa a couple of weeks ago...On the same day, 2010 male Athlete of the Year and Davis' teammate at the Minnesota, Logan Hussung placed third in the discus at the Drake Alternative meet held at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter.
Former FHS and St. Olaf College football and baseball players Carson Jones and Tyler Jones are playing amateur baseball for the Dundas Dukes of the Cannon Valley League this summer...No less than seven players with Farmington connections are on the roster of the Randolph RailCats of the Cannon Valley Classic League. Bryan Hegseth, Danny Tutewohl, Shane Hawkins, Andy Pierskalla and Matt O'Leary all performed for the Tigers and David Ripley and PJ McIntee both played on the Tiger hockey team.
Pierskalla should get more than his fill of baseball this summer as he and Jared Rowan, another former Tiger, coach the Farmington American Legion team.
