By Les Knutson
Sports Reporter
Two weeks ago, the Fulda Free Press featured a sports article mentioning most of the remarkable accomplishments by Raider athletes at the state high school track and field meet from 1969 through 2018.
There were so many great Fulda High School track and field competitors who placed in numerous events over those past five decades. There have been six state championship performances, including three in the girls’ discus.
Those three state-champion discus throwers were Nancy Overman (1994), Amy Paulzine (2009) and Sylvia Zanini (2012). Overman set a Class A state-meet record in ’94 with an amazing toss of 154’0” — a mark which lasted 22 years before a girl from the Blake School in Minneapolis bettered that distance with a throw of 155’1” in 2016. Overman’s winning distance in 1994 is still the second-best over a 24-year span, as the winning distances in both 2017 and 2018 were not even close to Nancy’s whirl of 154 feet.
Julie Kramer’s 1988 state championship in the 1,600-meter run was highlighted in the earlier article and next week a feature about Overman’s record-setting performance and her amazing collegiate career as a multiple-event weight thrower will be detailed.
But this week, let’s look back to the springs of 1980 and 1981 when lanky Ken Larson (6-3, 160) was putting Fulda on the map with his amazing high jumping exploits.
When hits like “Call Me” by Blondie and “Ride Like The Wind” by Christopher Cross were at the top of Billboard’s pop music chart, Larson was making state-wide news — perhaps even getting a bit of national attention — as he continually cleared heights at the Tri-County Conference Meet, hosted by Fulda on Tuesday, May 13, 1980 when he was a junior.
Larson, who also excelled in the 110-meter high hurdles and frequently anchored Raider relay teams, had cleared 6-8 at several meets that spring. But on the day of the conference meet, which is well-remembered by Jasper High School four-sport star athlete Matt Prunty, Larson soared even higher.
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