Kole Becker spearheads Lisbon’s 1A state track title bid

LISBON — Don’t get Casey Baxa wrong.

He’s a big advocate of multisport athletes. Heck, track and field is a melting pot of multisport athletes.

But when he saw Kole Becker, stiff and sore and hobbling, a day or two before last year’s state meet, Baxa had to bite his tongue and grit his teeth.

“He’d been playing basketball all (of the previous) weekend,” Baxa said.

In some manner throughout the following hours, Becker worked all of the kinks and all of the knots out of his muscles. The reward was a memorable three days that netted four gold medals.

Becker capped his junior season with Class 1A titles in the 110-meter hurdles (15.06 seconds), the 400-meter hurdles (54.90) and the long jump (22 feet, 4 inches) and anchored Lisbon to the shuttle hurdle relay crown in 1:00.20.

How do you top that?

Well, you do it again, faster and farther.

“I definitely have better technique in the hurdles now,” Becker said last Tuesday after an abbreviated practice due to rain. “I might be faster in the sprints. I haven’t done the 400 hurdles yet.”

Becker is the ace of Lisbon’s full deck. Class 1A runners-up last year, the Lions return 50 of the 57 points they accumulated.

“We have basically our whole team back,” Becker said. “We have good people coming up to replace the ones we’ve lost. We definitely could come out on top.”

Juniors Cohen Kamaus and Luke Czarnecki also return from that shuttle team.

The Lions return their entire distance medley relay team that placed fourth. They just missed scoring in the 800- and 3,200-meter relays; the majority of those quartets, both of which finished ninth, are back intact.

“I don’t like to look back, but we do have just about everybody coming back,” said Baxa, who has developed a complete program at the school.

Lisbon didn’t have a track of its own until last year. Still, the Lions captured three straight 1A boys’ titles between 2015 and 2017.

This year’s squad has 40 boys, and a roster of 25 girls has designs of its own 1A top-10 finish, maybe higher.

Becker, whose father Aaron is the high school principal (he will begin duties as Hampton-Dumont superintendent on July 1), moved to Lisbon from Mount Pleasant in the summer after his sixth-grade year.

“We didn’t have a track here yet, and I was a little skeptical,” Kole said. “It was good having my dad here. I could shoot hoops with him a lot.”

He also has older sister Hannah Becker — a Lisbon assistant coach for the past three years — by his side. Hannah was an elite hurdler at Mount Pleasant, then was a heptathlete at Central Missouri University.

And that’s the path Aaron will take, as a multi-sporter, at Iowa State.

“The (ISU) campus is so nice, it’s all together and compact,” said Becker, who will major in athletic training or kinesiology. “Their (athletics) facilities are great.”

As a freshman Becker was, well, good for a freshman. In 2020, even though the track and field season was a COVID-19 casualty, Becker matured, growing 2 inches and putting on 10 pounds.

And now, at 6-foot-4, “he’s definitely a man-child among boys,” Baxa said.

The indoor season is compete, and Becker already has long-jumped 22-9 1/2 (Friday, at the Tri-Rivers Conference indoor, at Dubuque). He has his eye on 23 feet, as well as steady time drops on the track.

“Last year, that really showed me what I could be,” he said.

Baxa said, “It’s going to be interesting to see what he can do this year with fresh legs.”

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