Two Alliance High School graduates will be among the nine former Eagles to be inducted into Chadron State College’s Athletic Hall of Fame the evening of Saturday, October 5. They are Stacy Langemeier Girard and Matt Weingart.
Girard was a distance runner and Weingart was a wrestler. In some ways, both saved their best for last as college athletes.
Stacy won the Class B race and was runner-up in the all-class 800-meter standings at the Nebraska State Track Meet as a high school senior in 2005. Four years later as a senior at Chadron State, she was not as fortunate.
Foot injuries prevented her from competing at both the 2009 NCAA Division II National Indoor and Outdoor Meets after she had run times that automatically qualified her for them. But, she had already been an outstanding track athlete at Chadron State.
When Stacy graduated Summa Cum Laude, she owned six school records and remains the only CSC distance runner, male or female, to earn All-American honors. That occurred when she was a junior and placed fifth in the 1500 at the NCAA II Outdoor Championships at Walnut, Calif., and set the school record of 4:33.51.
During her college career, Stacy won 17 races spanning from the 800 to the 5,000 meters and was the runner-up in seven more. She placed at Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Meets seven times, and as a sophomore in 2007, qualified to run the mile at the NCAA II National Indoor Meet in Boston, where her time of 4:58.58 was among her school records.
Although the foot problems caused her to miss all of her senior season except for the two races when she automatically qualified for nationals, there’s an unlikely footnote to her career.
It occurred in 2013 when she was taking graduate courses and it was discovered that she had another semester of athletic eligibility. Knowing that she often ran the streets of Chadron, CSC Coach Ryan Bailey invited her to join his cross country team for the RMAC Meet. She complied and led the Eagles by placing 22nd. Two weeks later at the South Central Regional Meet she lowered her time by 56 seconds and finished 14th among the 152 entries to earn all-region honors.
Those were the only times she competed in cross country because she had played volleyball during the fall when she was in high school and Chadron State did not have cross-country when she was an undergraduate student
Stacy’s husband, John Girard, is also an Alliance native and was a CSC track athlete. They married when they were sophomores at CSC and have three children—Malachi, Bristol and Asa. Besides being a mother, she has taught special education, coached and helped sponsor Christian groups at CSC.
Matt Weingart was a successful Alliance High wrestler, placing three times at the state tournament, including third as a junior and second as a senior. His college career was not as noteworthy until he earned All-American honors as a senior in 2007 by placing sixth at the National Tournament at 174 pounds.
Matt will be the first wrestler inducted into the CSC Hall of Fame who did not have a winning record. He finished 66-68, but both his college coach, Scott Ritzen, and his teammate, Brett Hunter, now the Eagles’ wrestling coach, insist that Matt’s dedication to the sport, his value as a teammate and his success at the National Tournament makes him a Hall of Famer.
He lost his first match at nationals his senior year, but it was to J.D. Naig of Nebraska-Omaha, who went on to win his third consecutive national championship. Never one to give up, Matt responded by winning his next three matches, one of them in overtime, to clinch his All-American laurels.
Matt was among the Eagles’ four All-Americans that year, helping them score 58 points and place sixth in the team standings. In addition, he made the NCAA II Second-Team All-Academic team and the Eagles finished third in the national academic standings.
He earned a Doctor of Pharmacy Degree from the University of Wyoming in 2012 and is in his 12th year as a pharmacist at the Regional West Medical Center in Scottsbluff. He and his wife, the former Jamie Mills of Alliance, who played volleyball at CSC, have a daughter, Reese, and two sons, Lawson and Lucas.