Mustangs girls soccer team aiming to take a leap forward
By Daniel Mohrmann
Following up a state championship game appearance with another strong season is always a tough task. But for the Manitou Springs girls soccer team, it was a challenge worth accepting. The Mustangs won 12 games with a mostly new roster following the graduation of 11 seniors that helped guide them to the Class 3A state title game in 2023.
The team ended the season with a 12-3-1 record and won the Tri-Peaks League, but there was some disappointment in how the season ended.
“We won in the first round of the playoffs, but lost in the second,” coach Ben Mack said. “We were the No. 7 playing the No. 10. Two pretty even teams, right? But we didn’t win. We were good, but we weren’t good enough.”
We’re ready to have fun, work hard and try to have a really good season. – Kara Donegan
To be good enough in 2025, the Mustangs have a tougher schedule in order to go into the postseason. They’ll play The Classical Academy, who was the No. 6 team in the 4A playoffs last year, and Delta, a 3A semifinal team in 2024.
The good news for the Mustangs is they have plenty of firepower returning. They bring back their top three goals scorers from last spring. Kara Donegan led the team with 18, Elie Bourgeois had 14 and Brenna Cote finished the year with 10.
Nici Sharon is also back as the keeper after allowing just 13 goals all of last season.
“We haven’t lost a lot of people and we’re bringing in some good freshmen,” Donegan said. “I think we can be really good. We’re ready to have fun, work hard and try to have a really good season.”
That begs the questions: What makes the season successful? How do you determine improvement?
Numbers are always an indicator but may not tell the whole story. It’s tough to tell if Manitou can match its 11 regular season wins from last year. If they get past the second round of the playoffs, that’s probably a better indicator. Mack’s goal in pursuing a better finish to the year might mean the regular season might see a speed bump or two.
“I think measuring how much better you are year-to-year is how far you make it [in the playoffs],” Mack said. “That’s when those game count the most.”
For the Mustangs, the games this year will start counting early. They open the season at TCA, which Mack believes could be their toughest regular season game of the year.
If he’s going to start the process of making this team better battle-tested, better to start sooner than later.
Spring preview: Manitou Springs girls soccer
Head coach: Ben Mack
2024 result: 12-3-1 (4-0 Tri-Peaks), lost in second round of state tournament
Key returners: Elie Bourgeois, Brenna Cote, Kara Donegan, Nici Sharon
First competition: March 11 at The Classical Academy
MSHS basketball teams conclude regular season, boys headed for playoffs
By Daniel Mohrmann
The Manitou Springs boys basketball team is headed to the postseason. CHSAA released the playoff brackets on Sunday and the Mustangs will go into the state tournament as the No. 18 seed in Class 4A.
They’ll take on University in the first round and should they win, they’ll get the winner of No. 2 Peak to Peak and No. 31 Conifer. This marks a return to the postseason for the boys team after missing out last year and going through a coaching change in the offseason.
But this is a team that has been competitive all year and is looking to take that momentum into the playoffs.
The Mustangs fell to Salida 68-53 at their first Tri-Peaks tournament game on Friday but turned around and beat Buena Vista 46-33 on Saturday to avenge a loss from earlier in the season. Comfortably in the playoff field, playing for a bit of vengeance was an attitude that coach Nick Nunley felt could serve his team well.
“It was looking like we’d be playing two teams that we had lost to,” Nunley said. “We wanted to treat it as a bit of a revenge weekend and also with it being a Friday-Saturday format that the Tri-Peaks uses, it was a good time to simulate the feeling of playing in regionals. It gives us a dress rehearsal going into the weekend.”
Cohen Barrett led the Mustangs (16-7 overall) with 19 points in the loss to Salida and Preston Rhodes added 11. Ashur Lavigne had 17 in the win over the Demons and Barrett nearly matched him with 16.
The Mustangs now turn their attention to University, a team that beat them 70-50 earlier this season. But this isn’t the same Manitou team that made the trip up north in December. Nunley is excited to see what this group does in a situation where the next loss ends their season.
“I love their effort and their lack of caring about outside expectations,” Nunley said. “They just really care about what’s in front of them this season and they’re excited for another chance to play some basketball this weekend.”
Heading into the Tri-Peaks tournament, the Manitou Springs girls basketball team was on the bubble of the playoff picture.
A 62-28 loss to Vanguard and a 47-25 loss to Buena Vista popped that bubble as the Mustangs slipped to No. 33 in the CHSAA Selection and Seeding Index. The state tournament takes the top 32 teams in that metric to the postseason.
Aylin Gomez and Kate Jorstad each scored eight points in the Vanguard loss and Lexi Sobral led the team with 14 against Buena Vista.
The Mustangs finished the year with a 10-13 record and lost four straight games to end the season. They’ll lose just one senior in Annika Kuzbek and will have a lot of experience returning for the 2025-26 season.
Manitou track team loaded with experience, leadership
By Daniel Mohrmann
The Manitou Springs track and field team is hoping that valuable lessons can be learned from what Mustangs runners have already accomplished this school year.
The additional work and effort from the cross-country teams, specifically the girls, resulted in a truly successful season that brought home a runner-up finish at state. For those distance runners, and for coach Anna Mack, they would love to see that work ethic carry over into the spring.
“We rely on those two things, time and dedication,” Mack said. “If you want to be injury free and see consistent improvement, you have to be dedicated to your craft.”
The Mustangs have a decent number of athletes returning from last year’s team, including several state qualifiers.
Ethan Traenkle and Yonas Hanson helped the boys 4×800-meter relay team take seventh at Jeffco Stadium last May. Cohen Barret and Jon Polizzi will be back after helping the 4×400 relay team take eighth.
Keyaira Moore and Mackinzy Wall are two notable returners for the girls. Wall qualified for the discus, eventually taking ninth and, and was also on the 4×400 relay team that just missed the cut to get into finals. Moore was also on that relay team, as well as the 4×800 that finished 15th.
It’s a good foundation to have coming into the year, but the big hope for the Mustangs is that the work that went into the results of the cross-country season can carry over into track this spring.
“We ended cross-country with a really good season,” Moore said. “I’m hoping we can bring that [energy] into track along with all of our training. We have to all be on top of it. Drinking water, getting good sleep. Stuff like that.”
A big part of incorporating good habits into the team is just building the culture and holding each other accountable. This is an exciting season for a lot of reasons, but for a kid like Hanson, who comes in as a junior and a leader, it’s that he gets to take the habits that were instilled into him by teammates like Cody Kelley and Cody Wyman and pass that knowledge on to the 2025 team. It doesn’t matter if they’ve been here before or if they’re brand new.
“We’re going to have a mix of new faces and old faces,” Hanson said. “The new guys will have to understand that this is how we roll. We’re hard-working and we’re consistent. We want to stay energized and make sure that it’s emulated through the team.”
The Mustangs begin their season on Saturday at the CSU-Pueblo Early Bird, hosted by Pueblo West. It will be the start of what Manitou hopes will be a strong track and field season.
Spring preview: Manitou Springs track and field
Head coach: Anna Mack
Best 2024 result: Cody Wyman (2nd in 3200-meter run)
Key returners: Yonas Hanson, Ethan Traenkle, Keyaira Moore, Mackinzy Wall,
First competition: March 8 at CSU-Pueblo Early Bird
Brian Brown to retire after 22 years of service to MSHS
By Kaleb Cervantes
After 38 years of teaching, history teacher and social studies department head Brian Brown announced he will be retiring at the end of the school year.
Brown has been a teacher for over three decades, and 22 of those years have been at Manitou Springs High School.
“I’ve been contemplating retirement for probably three years, been looking at it,” Brown said. “Each year it was one of those, ‘I don’t want to end on that note.’ You know, coming out of Covid, I didn’t want to end coming out of Covid. I wanted to end on a good year, more than anything else.”
Brown originally started teaching as a way to stay involved with coaching which he started to do while in school. “It really wasn’t about the classroom, it was more about being on the field, being on the court, that type of thing and that’s what got me into education at first,” Brown said.
Being the current head of the social studies department, and a history teacher for over two decades, Brown has not only helped educate both current and former students, but he has helped prepare them for their future after high school. “When you give 40 years of your life in the service of other people’s children and helping them achieve their dreams, that selflessness is something to be celebrated,” Executive Director of Secondary Schools Kolleen Johnson said.
For Brown, teaching is not just about teaching students the curriculum but helping them prepare for life. “I would hope that the students know my first obligation was to educate them, to impart knowledge, and to try and have fun in the classroom as much as possible,” he said.
Brown’s teaching style has changed throughout the years. “When I first started teaching, I was 22 years old, and I was teaching mostly seniors who were 18. I was like a brother to them,” Brown said. “Eventually, you become kind of like the uncle, and then you get to the age where those are your kids. Now I’m at the stage where I’m the grandfather age for these kids.”
Brown hasn’t only taught at Manitou in his 22 years of working here; he has also coached multiple sports. PE and health teacher Gabby Santos is a former student of Brown’s and goes to him for advice for coaching. “He is somebody who I’ve turned to for volleyball and basketball and all of the things in the last four years I’ve been here, and really heavily in the last two since I’ve been a head coach,” Santos said. “He’s got 40 years of experience with all of these things, and being new everything feels big and overwhelming. And with the perspective that he carries, it helps me come back to what’s most important now. And how do you take on those things one at a time instead of trying to take on the world all at once.”
Brown has had a great impact on students both past and present. Sam Duff, a social studies teacher and mentee of Brown, remembers a time where a former student of Brown walked up to both him and Brown while watching the baseball team’s spring break tournament in Arizona. “A student from ten years ago walked up to Brown and said, ‘You were the only teacher that gave me an F,'” Duff said, “but the fact that the student would still want to go up to Brown and say hello and catch up with him and hang out despite Brown giving him an F shows how much Brown cared about that kid, and how he won’t give you a free pass because he holds you accountable.”
Though Brown is retiring from teaching at the end of the year, he is not going to stop working entirely. “To me, the biggest advantage of retirement is I can do what I want when I want to do it,” he said. “I know I’m going to work part-time, but it will be where I want to work, when I want to work, and on my terms. I want to travel as much as I possibly can and spend as much time with my grandkids as I possibly can.”
While Brown’s retirement marks the end of an era for MSHS, the legacy that he has left on the school will influence people for years to come. “When you embrace life as being a quest for knowledge and you’re curious about what goes on in your world, that’s what makes your life fun. It makes your life enjoyable,” he said.
The impact that Brown has had on the students and staff here at MSHS is massive, and he will be greatly missed. The staff and students will forever be grateful for all that he has done for the school in his 22 years of teaching.
Everyone who knows Brown knows that he will always have a word of advice. “Embrace the day as a joyous event. If you wake up in the morning and you dread going to school, you dread going to your job, that’s not going to be a good life,” Brown said. “You have gotta simply say ‘it’s a new start. It’s a new beginning. Yesterday’s done. Can’t do anything about it. Let’s go see what today is going to give me.”
Mike Talbott makes an impact on MSHS
By Marisa Fonkert
Mike Talbott, a math teacher at MSHS, is retiring after the 2024/2025 school year following 11 years of teaching at the school.
Before starting his teaching career at MSHS, Talbott took online education courses to obtain his teaching certificate. After completing those courses, Talbott student-taught at MSHS in 2014 for a math class. “I sat in all those classes every day,” Talbott said. “I was only required to come five hours a week, but I came in every day, all day long.”
After his role of student teaching, a position opened up for a math teacher at MSHS, marking the start of Talbott’s teaching career at the school. “The teacher at the time said that she was going to quit, and she was going to teach International Baccalaureate in Japan to Japanese students,” Talbott said. “So that opened a position, and I said I was interested and got the job.”
Since then and throughout his 11 years at MSHS, Talbott has taught many classes which include, Pre-algebra, Trigonometry, Algebra I, calculus, Algebra II, Algebra II Honors, AP Calculus AB, AP Calculus BC, AP Physics and a Success Skills class.
He says that his Calculus AB class has been one of his favorites to teach. “I always enjoyed my calculus AB course the most, partially because I felt most comfortable teaching that, because I taught that in college for a few years. But it’s also the students,” Talbott said. “The students that come in there are very good mathematically, even the weakest students in that class are still above average, and they’re motivated. They generally are good students, not all, but most generally.”
Talbott’s other favorite classes to teach were AP Physics and Trigonometry. He enjoyed physics because of how students get to apply mathematics. “Seeing kids actually apply mathematics to physics problems is the closest thing we have had to engineering here at the school,” Talbott said. “I’ve got my undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering, so I’ve always enjoyed that one too.”
And while Talbott liked physics due to the application seen in math, he enjoyed teaching Pre-algebra specifically because of the students. “They are the salt of the earth kind of kids,” Talbott said. “Many of them have a lot of challenges in their life. It’s not just mathematics. They were always interesting because of their backgrounds and the struggles they have outside of the classroom, and it’s always enjoyable to see them learn something against all the hardships they’re dealing with. For the most part, not all of them are experiencing hardships, but the majority do, and so that was always interesting.”
Before becoming a teacher at MSHS, Talbott attended the United States Military Academy West Point and taught there for three years. Following that, he moved on to work in the military for 30 years, which he says he enjoyed. “At West Point, there’s a commitment of five years. You have to stay in the military for five years,” Talbott said, “I thought that was going to feel like five years an hour, but I enjoyed the military so much.”
After leaving the military, Talbott wanted to start teaching. “My duty to honor the country that was instilled in me a long time ago was to come in and teach young people and hopefully prepare them better to be adults and be successful in life. So that was why I started to teach,” Talbott said. “I knew that I could have something to offer, but I also knew that teaching was going to keep me abreast of what life was still about from a young person’s perspective.”
Talbott says that he was specifically drawn to MSHS because of the students and the small-town atmosphere. “The kids are just so good, even the kids that aren’t good students,” Talbott said. “It’s still in their heart. I think they’re still good kids and that’s what drew me here.”
Some things from Talbott’s previous careers that he has implemented into his teaching here at MSHS are his fast-grading style and boards, an activity in his class that gives students the opportunity to solve problems and present their thinking, which is something Talbott acquired from West Point. “Boards help you speak in public and verbalize what you’re thinking about, and it helps everybody understand,” Talbott said.
Some advice that Talbott says he would leave for students and teachers is to establish standards, make them very clear and hold to them. He also highlights the importance of being very organized and grading papers faster. “Grading work is a vehicle for communication back to the student,” Talbott said. “It’s not just to check the block or get a good grade. It’s that vehicle for feedback. And I don’t think most of the teachers understand that. They just see it as a requirement.”
Talbott’s post-retirement plans include doing lots of volunteer work including one at the Rocky Mountain Youth Leadership Program and coming back to the school to do scoreboards for various sports and to see students. “I think once this year’s freshmen graduate, I probably won’t be as interested in doing that kind of thing,” Talbott said. “I just want to see the kids I’ve seen in the classroom and watch them as they mature through high school.”
His plans also include a lot of traveling to places like Moab, Hawaii, a golfing trip, a cruise and Disney World. “I gotta manage that with the time that I give for volunteering, which I don’t have any problems with,” Talbott said. “I volunteer all the time, but I don’t want to overload my plate, so I can’t fade into the sunset gracefully.”
Ace Fridman (grade 11) has had Talbott as her teacher for the past two years and has taken his Calculus AB and BC classes as well as being a teacher’s assistant for his current Calculus AB class. She says she feels disappointed that Talbott is leaving because of his teaching abilities and how that affects other students.
“I’m kind of disappointed also for everyone else in the school,” Fridman said. “Mr. Talbott just knows how to teach, and he understands the intricacies. I just feel like he’s the teacher whose lectures have always made the most sense, and I’m a little disappointed that my sister and other future students won’t get that.”
Fridman also says that she not only thinks the math department will be greatly affected but also sports and activities throughout the school. “I think unfortunately, we’ll lose one of our greatest supporters in sports and activities, and I think Key Club, which also organizes a good portion of our school activities, will also take a big hit,” Fridman said. “I also feel like the math department as a whole will take a hit, because this is the third year in a row we’ve lost one of our longer-time teachers.”
Anna Conrad, MSHS’s principal of three years, believes that Talbott has had a great impact on students at the school. “I think that Talbott has had a monumental impact on students, families as well as staff members, and I think that that is encapsulated in his leadership within the math department,” Conrad said. “He’s also one of the most accessible teachers in terms of providing time for kids to come in before or after school, during lunch, during his planning period and following up with tutoring.”
Conrad also says that he has done a great job working with the math department and building leadership. “He is really diligent around creating alignment across classes and really being thoughtful that we are growing as educators as well,” Conrad said.
After 11 years at MSHS, Talbott says one of the things that make this school unique is the students, and he says that through his teaching he has learned many things from them. “One of the biggest things I learned here was not so much about teaching, but what is healthy and beneficial to young people,” Talbott said. “People care about each other, and they’re there to help each other and support each other.”
