IPSWICH – When the Lake Region Conference Cross County Meet concluded this past week, Dave Bauer finished another year as a starter.

The 77-year-old Ipswich man who is better known for basketball and baseball – sports he played at Northern State – has made his mark in the sports of track and field, and cross country. He has been serving as an official starter since 1976, and like the athletes he helps to organize, shows no signs of slowing down.

“I still get excited the night before,” Bauer said of working meets. “If I wouldn’t get excited, I think I’d get out of it.”

There have been many changes since the day Bauer fired his first starter gun 50 years ago.

“Our athletic director Marv Seyer, he ordered a gun. He’s said we’re going to have a little track meet here,” Bauer said. “We’ll invite Roscoe, we’ll invite Eureka, and Leola. I think we had like a six-lane track.”

Bauer said back in the day the town’s track wasn’t even an exact oval.

“The curves weren’t nice and curvy,” Bauer said, “they were more rectangular shape.”

The Eureka native got into the sport without much prior knowledge of it.

“I don’t even know if I ever went out for track,” Bauer said, “because we had baseball all the time in the spring.”

Bauer, who coached basketball for more than 30 years at Ipswich, was looking for a way to stay in contact with his coaching friends and being an official provided that.

“It’s kind of like entertainment. When I had to quit hunting, then you lose contact with guys that were in athletics,” he said. “A lot of the coaches when I was in athletics, they were in athletics. But most of the coaches now are half of my age or less than that.”

Bauer began working under the guidance of legendary sports figures Clark Swisher Sr. and Don Reshetar.

“I had two good guys to learn from,” Bauer said.

Some of the developments, especially in track and field, have been pretty standard, such as having a three-man starting crew, the changes in exchange zones, and the qualifications that allow the state’s best 24 entries to advance to the state meet instead of taking the top individuals out of each region, and a fully automatic timing system. Other changes have been pretty staggering.

When Bauer first started, he was responsible for marking out the track the day before a meet; a dirt track without any markings.

“They made a chalker with seven little buckets and filled those buckets with this chalk, and then you’d start pulling it,” Bauer said. “It was just like pulling some farm equipment by hand.”

If it happened to rain after the track was marked, the meet got called off.

Another major change took place in the 100-meter dash.

“In the old days you probably had to start the 100 six or seven times. Everybody started it one time to get the jump, because you could have one false start and you could come back,” Bauer said. “That’s why it was so hard to get it started, because if two guys were real close, they knew the first guy out could possibly win it. This was the best rule they ever made: one false start and you’re out.”

Some changes are more difficult to notice, right down to the bullets used in the starter’s gun.

Bauer said he learned a much more cost efficient method thanks to legendary official Randy Thomas of Faith.

“He has this 209 primer gun. You use 12-gauge primers,” Bauer said. “You can get those anywhere at these gun shops.”

The cost savings compared to the other primers is substantial. There was a reason other shells were used in the first place.

“This .32 shell that we used back in the early days, we needed to use that, because they had to have smoke or else they couldn’t see the start,” Bauer said.

Bauer is also happy the state has lessened restrictions on wearing jewelry, hair decorations and the like.

“To me, I always said, if you let them use what they want, they’re going to perform better,” Bauer said.

And those four-team meets that Bauer started out with in the 1970s are long gone.

“There’s usually three or four schools together as a team,” Bauer said of all the current cooperatives.

He said there were times when fields included up to 23 teams at one meet.

Bauer recalled a meet he worked with Thomas and Jim Schlekeway in Mobridge one year.

“They opened it up for middle and high school. I got there at 8 in the morning, I got home at 10 o’clock at night,” Bauer said. “I said I’d never do another one of those. That’s a long time you’re standing out there.”

Bauer, who will be back at it in the spring, said being a cross country official is easier if the course is fairly flat, but more challenging when you can’t really see the runners.

Either way, he enjoys working with the athletes and likes to put them at ease before they go out and compete.

“I always say, if you want to run, wait for the gun, or if you don’t hear the gun, don’t run. I like to joke around with these kids,” Bauer said. “Like when I start these cross country meets, I always say, have any of you ever watched the Wizard of Oz, and they start smiling and laughing. … I say all you got to do is just follow the yellow brick road. Here you just follow the white line.”