Daily Pioneer News

Pictured are the national champion 2004 UWP soils team (left to right): Co-coach Chris Baxter, junior Eric Riedeman, senior Josh Kamps, junior Dennis Vollmer, junior Jake Engelke and Co-coach Roger Higgs.

PLATTEVILLE - Unfazed by competition from much larger schools, the University of Wisconsin-Platteville soils team dominated the field at the 44th annual American Society of Agronomy's National Collegiate Soils contest.

UWP beat out teams from schools like Ohio State, Texas A&M, Georgia and Nebraska in becoming national champions for the 11th time since 1976.

"We're a much smaller university compared with most of them. It's a real sense of pride for the students to know they're competing against schools like Ohio State and Purdue, and winning," UWP professor of agriculture Chris Baxter said. Baxter coaches the team along with retired professor Roger Higgs.

UWP set the bar for excellence at the competition, scoring 2,545 points to best second-place Ohio State by 109 points. Rounding out the top five were Georgia (2,423 points), Maryland (2,420) and Texas A&M (2,417).

"It's very gratifying. There's a lot of satisfaction," Higgs said. "We have long since forgotten that these other schools might have more students than we do."

Though soil testing is traditionally associated with agriculture, the skill has a broad range of applications, playing an integral role in the engineering, construction and transportation fields. At the national competition, students analyze soil data from a number of test sites. Their results are compared to an official scorecard to determine the winner. Group judging sites are combined with individual scores to determine the overall champion.

In individual competition, UWP placed all four team members in the top 10; no other school had more than one. UWP students Josh Kamps and Dennis Vollmer placed first and second overall while Jake Engelke and Eric Riedeman placed fifth and eighth, respectively.

"It's a matter of having a combination of excellent students with good work ethics," Higgs said. "They're intelligent, they're self-starters and they all are hard-working team players."

Higgs has coached the UWP soils team to national competition every year for the past 38 years, and he said this year's team was one of the finest during his tenure.

"I think this is one of the top five or six best teams ever in national competition," Higgs said. "Over my period of time, I would say there have been six really exceptional teams at the national level, and four of them have been from UWP."

"It's a lot of individual effort put in by the students themselves that helps them be successful at this level for so long," Baxter said.

Though UWP was competing against much larger land-grant schools, Higgs said there were benefits to being small, such as the sense of community between students and the support from the student body and from the faculty and administration.

But Vollmer said the team's true secret to success was something a little more fundamental.

"We have great team members, we know what we are doing and we have something they don't have-a great coach that knows how to prepare us for the contests," he said.

Coach Higgs continued to help coach the team in order to aid first year coach Baxter in adapting to his new role. Higgs's involvement with the team is entirely on a volunteer basis, following his retirement from the university one year ago.

"You just don't totally walk way," Higgs said. "It gave me some continued contact with students as I phased out of teaching. I knew we had a very capable group that stood a very good chance at finishing high at nationals. I thought they deserved the opportunity to do the best they could."

"You could say he has a very competitive side to him. He may not admit it, but we all know he wants us to do our best and also to be number one," Vollmer said. "As long as his students give it their all, he is proud of us. We all appreciate that he is volunteering his time to help us."

A second UWP team also placed first at the National Association of Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture soils contest, also in April. UWP bested teams from second place South Dakota State and third place Purdue to win top honors there, with Bethany Schultz, Steve Steinhoff, Brent Weist, Katie Knuth and Chris Keil all placing in the top 10. Krissy Adams placed sixteenth overall.

Meanwhile, Higgs expects to continue the tradition of success next year, in what will be his final season with the soils team. Though he feels the educational benefits of performing on the soils team are greater then the benefits from winning any competitions, Higgs isn't afraid to set the bar high for next year's squad

"Our goal is to be first," he said.