Stangel, Rypien take top junior awards

The wealth was spread among six different high schools, including two record-setting athletes, when Inland Northwest Sportswriters and Broadcasters chose the 35th Junior Awards winning class. Lake City four-year softball pitching star Casey Stangel is Junior Female Athlete and Shadle Park junior record-setting football quarterback Brett Rypien is Junior Male Athlete of the Year for 2013. Coaches of the Year are Coeur d’Alene football’s Shawn Amos and Mead girls basketball’s Quantae Anderson. Teams of the Year are Freeman football and Colton girls basketball. The statistics put up by Stangel and Rypien are staggering. Last spring, Stangel capped her Timberwolves career by being named MaxPreps National Softball Player of the Year and was recognized as the Idaho Gatorade Player of the Year for the third time. She was a perfect 28-0, winning her second Idaho 5A state title, with 208 strikeouts and 0.73 earned-run average. She batted .640 with 64 RBIs and 33 extra base hits, 15 of them home runs. Over four years, she compiled a 93-9 pitching record (seven of those losses coming as a freshman). Her batting average over her last three years was .590 with 37 home runs and 175 RBIs. As a sophomore state titlist, Stangel went 25-0 with a 0.33 ERA, 283 strikeouts and a .590 batting average. And her junior year, when Lake City finished second in state, she finished 22-2 and hit .558. She is playing as a freshman for the University of Missouri. Rypien surpassed his Greater Spokane League single-season passing record of the year before and the Highlanders shared the GSL title and reached the State 3A football semifinals. He was 253 of 374 with seven interceptions, 3,266 yards and 46 touchdowns, also a league record. He already holds GSL single game, season and career passing and total offense records after debuting in the sixth game of his freshman season and passing for 689 yards and eight touchdowns in four games. As a sophomore, Rypien obliterated the league’s single-season record with 3,179 yards. He holds the career record with 7,135 (that doesn’t include the nearly 1,500 yards he’s added in the postseason) with a year to go. Despite the revelation that he had cancer, and after Coeur d’Alene lost its first three games, Amos guided the Vikings to eight straight wins and their third State 4A title in four years. In his second year as head coach of the Mead girls basketball team, Anderson guided the Panthers to a 24-1 record and 4A state championship with a 58-42 win over Arlington. It was Mead’s first state title since 1996 and fourth overall. Colton’s 1B girls basketball team is a juggernaut, last winter winning its sixth straight state championship. The Wildcats finished the season 26-1, winning tourney games by 62 and 41 points – typical of their season – before a 55-41 title-game victory. Freeman’s football team won all 14 of its games by an average margin of 36 points en route to its first Washington 1A state championship. The Scotties averaged 42 points per game and scored more than 50 three times.