Jill Schramm/MDN
Gene Yeater holds his Mentor of the Year award from Minot’s Companions for Children Friday, Jan. 9.

Gene Yeater’s positivity and willingness to go above and beyond caught the attention of Minot’s Companions for Children recently.

The Minot Air Force Base firefighter was named the organization’s Mentor of the Year for his mentorship of a middle school youth and his overall support for mentoring in the community.

“Gene is definitely someone who has supported us at our events. He brings mentoring to those events as well, and just kind of represents us as a whole for what we do,” said Kat Howard, community outreach manager at Companions for Children. “He’s very, very involved. And I think it just speaks for his care and mentoring by seeing how he shows up for his mentee. He plans a lot of different fun activities and keeps it engaging for his mentee, too. Those are just highlights that we look for when it comes to this award, just showing an above-and-beyond type of attitude toward mentoring.”

Yeater said the award was unexpected. He didn’t know he was in consideration for the annual honor until the organization handed him the award.

Yeater began volunteering with Companions for Children in November 2023. While working on his master’s degree, he took nonprofit leadership class in which he studied the leadership structure of Companions for Children. His interest in studying the organization came from his own positive experience as a young mentee with the Big Brothers program in California.

Upon completing his master’s, he signed up to volunteer with Companions for Children.

Yeater and his mentee share interests in a number of activities, including video games and sports. They engage in about three outings a month.

“We hang out. We play video games together. We go to the park. We’ll go to the arcade. We’ll watch movies together,” Yeater said. “We’ll spend a lot of time at the park, playing baseball, football. I have a whole bag full of sports equipment we’ll bring with us.”

Companions for Children also hosts a group event about once a month, such as an upcoming scavenger hunt, which Yeater and his mentee take part in.

Yeater has three children of his own, including one who is the same age as his mentee. He said it’s been helpful for him to see the similarities in what the two middle-school youth are going through as he helps them brainstorm solutions to problems they face.

Yeater said his relationship with his mentee has grown close over the past two years. They’ve become good friends who can talk about almost anything, he said. He would encourage others to consider becoming mentors for the opportunity to experience the satisfaction he has known.

“Part of it is getting to see the mentee grow and become a better person,” Yeater said. “I’ve seen him become a lot more confident.”

Minot’s Companions for Children has about 250 mentors across its five programs, Howard said. Some programs are school-based, such as Lunch Pals or Pen Pals. Another program is expected to begin soon that will be geared toward middle school girls.

Companions for Children will begin recruiting this week for an internship program through a partnership with Minot High’s Magic City Campus. Businesses willing to open their doors to high school seniors are invited to get involved. The fall semester each year features the World of Work Program, in which business people come into the classroom to engage with Minot High students.

But the largest program and the one in greatest need of additional mentors is the community-based program, in which Yeater participates. Men, in particular, are needed as mentors, Howard said. Mentees range in age from 6-18.

Companions for Children hosts a Mentor Mingle event each year to recognize the work of its volunteers. Mentors are encouraged to bring along a friend or family member who is interested in learning about possibly volunteering, Howard said. This year’s event will be May 7.

However, Howard added, “We are always recruiting for community-based (volunteers) at any time of the year.”

Yeater considers mentoring to be a valuable investment of time for anyone who enjoys being around children and youth.

“Getting to see your influence on the kids, I think, is probably the biggest benefit of it,” he said, “and getting to know that you’re really making a difference.”

January is National Mentoring Month

This month is National Mentoring Month, a designation that has been in place since 2002.

According to the nonprofit MENTOR, the organization and the Harvard T.H. School of Public Health launched National Mentoring Month to amplify, encourage and strengthen mentorship for young people. The goals of National Mentoring Month are to raise awareness of mentoring, recruit mentors and recruit organizations to engage their constituents in mentoring.

Within National Mentoring Month this year are: I am a Mentor Day, Jan. 6; International Mentoring Day, Jan. 17; Martin Luther King Jr. National Day of Service, Jan. 19; and Thank Your Mentor Day, Jan. 28.

– MDN STAFF

If things go according to plan, Saturday’s game between the BYU and Utah men’s basketball programs will be the first of many pitting Cougars coach Kevin Young against Utes coach Alex Jensen.

Young and Jensen have some similarities in their journeys toward becoming the head coach at their respective schools: they both have G League head coaching experience and they both spent more than a decade in the NBA as assistant coaches before landing in their current roles.

Young has one year of experience on Jensen in his current job — he is in his second year as BYU’s head coach, while Jensen is in his first season coaching his alma mater.

That familiarity with each other has fostered a healthy respect between the two coaches. On Saturday, Young’s No. 9 BYU team got the best of Jensen’s Utes, as the Cougars held off Utah, 89-84.

BYU (15-1, 3-0 Big 12) relied on its Big 3 — Robert Wright III, AJ Dybantsa and Richie Saunders — to carry the load.

Wright scored 23 points and added six assists, Saunders logged a double-double with 24 points and 14 rebounds, along with three assists, and the freshman sensation Dybantsa contributed across the board with 20 points, six rebounds, four assists, one block and a steal.

BYU led for more than 31 minutes against its rival, and the Cougars never trailed in the second half, though Utah climbed within one at one point.

“It’s hard to give up 89 points and win, right? And if you look at all the good teams in college that win, (they) are the teams that defend and rebound,” Jensen said, about two factors that prevented Utah from pulling the upset.

He was then complimentary about the program Young is building in Provo.

“BYU has done a great job. Kevin does a good job. It’s hard to have those guys be together. They’ve done a great job as an institution, and (BYU athletic director) Brian (Santiago), giving the resources to the program,” Jensen said. “Just like (Utah’s recent loss to No. 1) Arizona, it’s a great lesson for us to learn from. They play well together.”

Utah (8-8, 0-3 Big 12), for its part, had arguably its best overall effort of the season, perhaps only bested by a one-point win over Ole Miss during nonconference play.

Terrence Brown (25 points, five assists, three rebounds, two blocks) and Don McHenry (21 points, two rebounds, two assists, one steal) led a spirited Utah attack Saturday, while James Okonkwo’s energy and results — 13 rebounds, 4 points and two assists — helped the Utes keep pace in front of an electric crowd.

“I’ve known Alex for a long time,” Young said. “We’ve coached against each other (a) long time ago in the G League. We sort of broke into the NBA around the same time, and when I was with the Suns, he was with the Jazz.

“We had a ton of battles, so I’m very familiar with him. He’s a good person, but you still want to beat him in a game like that.”

BYU’s coach, too, was complimentary about the organization and work that Jensen has already put into revitalizing the Runnin’ Utes program.

“He’s smart, man. He’s a smart coach, and he’s just figuring it all out, all the idiosyncrasies. He joked before the game — in the NBA, you do the anthem and the coaches wave and you play the game; in college, before the game, you walk the line, shake, and he’s still trying to figure out if we’re supposed to do this,” Young said.

“He’s still figuring everything out, but he’s a smart guy, and (Utah basketball general manager) Wes Wilcox, too. They’re smart. They have a lot of experience, and this will be some fun games over the years between our groups.”

WASHINGTON — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women’s sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state’s law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump’s Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because … this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court’s decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia’s attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women’s sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

“I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman,” said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia’s playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. “This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don’t Belong in Women’s Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution’s equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

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Lamb’s 16 points propelled Skyhawks to 72-53 win on Saturday

Katie Lamb of Fort Lewis College puts up a 3-point shot against Westminster University on Saturday at FLC. (Jerry McBride/Durango Herald)

Jerry McBride

Fort Lewis College women’s basketball coach has been confident in her team’s shooting this week, and her confidence was rewarded in the Skyhawks’ 72-53 home victory over Westminster on Saturday.

The Skyhawks have struggled to shoot from 3-point range and from the free-throw line at times this season, including in the team’s loss to Western Colorado on Thursday. But Zuniga liked her team’s shot selection, and the shots finally fell against Westminster.

After going 6-9 from 3-point range in the first half, the Skyhawks shot 50% in the fourth quarter to pull away from the Griffins. On defense, FLC forced 22 turnovers and Westminster never looked comfortable when it could hang on to the ball in the half-court.

“It was a really great response overall,” Zuniga said. “That’s all we can ask for. It’s just better all-around, better offensively, better effort, better communication, just more disciplined.”

FLC improved to 10-4 overall and 3-3 in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference after it shot 41% from the field, 43% from 3-point range and 75% from the free-throw line.

Sophomore guard Katie Lamb led the Skyhawks with 16 points on 6-15 shooting from the field and 4-7 from 3-point range. Junior Makaya Porter had 14 points off the bench for the Skyhawks on 5-13 shooting from the field, 1-2 from 3-point range and 3-4 from the free-throw line. Sophomore guard Claudia Palacio Gámez had a quality all-around game, finishing with five points, seven assists and seven rebounds.

Westminster dropped to 3-9 overall and 0-6 in the RMAC after it shot 32% from the field, 24% from 3-point range and 60% from the free-throw line. Ellie Mitchell and Madison Anderson each had 14 points to lead the Griffins.

FLC mixed it up offensively to take the lead in the first. Skyhawks freshman forward Alemanualii Fonoti got inside to finish or get to the free-throw line, and Lamb hit a nice transition 3-pointer to take a 12-7 lead with 1:30 left in the first.

Both teams could’ve scored more, but they couldn’t finish inside. Fonoti’s misses were especially tough with her size advantage and how close she was to the basket. Regardless, FLC ended the first quarter with good momentum thanks to a great step-back 3-pointer by Palacio Gámez to give FLC a 15-11 lead after the first quarter.

After allowing nearly 40 free throws the previous game against Western Colorado, FLC did a great job pressuring in the half-court without fouling, causing some poor late shot clock shots from the Griffins.

However, that work wasn’t shown in its lead early in the second quarter because the Skyhawks were unsuccessfully trying to force the ball into Fonoti. She had a clear size advantage, but the Griffins were bringing timely double teams and forcing turnovers.

The Skyhawks’ defense continued to be fantastic in the half-court, disrupting Westminster’s sets and forcing turnovers. Without Fonoti on the floor as someone to force the ball into, the Skyhawks got to the basket, got to the free-throw line and pushed the pace, creating looks in transition. The Skyhawks finally hit some 3-pointers, went on a 14-0 run and took a 34-20 lead into halftime.

Savanna Dotray, left, and Katie Lamb of Fort Lewis College fight for the ball while playing Westminster University on Saturday at FLC. (Jerry McBride/Durango Herald)

Jerry McBride

Zuniga said she didn’t call one set play for a 3-pointer. FLC was getting its 3-pointers off drive and kickouts.

“We were not forcing so much,” Zuniga said. “We were just making our shots, and our offense maybe had a little bit more of a rhythm.”

FLC continued to play well to start the second half with strong half-court defense and impressive shot-making. Martinez made a contested driving layup with Lamb and senior guard Laisha Armendariz making 3-pointers. The Skyhawks led 43-24 with 3:45 left in the third quarter.

Westminster responded with a 9-2 run off some sloppy play from FLC, but FLC stayed composed and got to the free-throw line after crashing the offensive boards. The Skyhawks led 49-38 after three quarters.

The Griffins made a run to start the fourth quarter, cutting the FLC lead to 53-46 after some good ball movement and good shooting. FLC’s lack of a dominant offensive player showed in a moment like that, with no single player stepping up to stop the run, slow things down and take control.

“That’s a super great learning moment in a maturity moment for Claudia or Katie Lamb, but especially Claudia, just because she is our point guard and just knowing the trust is in her,” Zuniga said. “She needs to get the ball in her hand and slow it down; we want her to do that. She’s still learning, but she did a better job of that tonight.”

Lauren Zuniga, left, Fort Lewis College women’s head coach, and assistant coach Maggie Espenmiller-McGraw are all smiles with player Claudia Palacio Gámez after winning the game against Westminster University on Saturday at FLC. (Jerry McBride/Durango Herald)

Jerry McBride

However, FLC’s defense stayed consistent as the offense ebbed and flowed, allowing Lamb to hit a 3-pointer and Davis to finish an old-fashioned 3-point play to seal the win with a 64-50 lead with 2:20 left.

FLC hits the road to play at South Dakota Mines on Thursday at 5:30 p.m.

bkelly@durangoherald.com

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