Linda and Dave Cropper of Hailey will be having a nice, quiet, peaceful weekend in Pocatello Feb. 14-16 with their three grown daughters, three of their pre-teenage granddaughters and thousands of track and field athletes around them.
Star of the family gathering will be Lisa Bernhagen Ramos, 42, of Tampa, Fla. who is arguably the most notable athlete that Hailey's Wood River High School has produced. She'll be joined by sister Holly Thornsberry, a Boise schoolteacher, and sister Candi Dugan, a Boise mortgage loan officer.
Arriving from Florida Thursday night in Pocatello, Lisa Ramos will bring along her daughter Victoria, 12. Holly Bernhagen Thornsberry will bring her 11-year-old daughter Maggie. And Candi Bernhagen Dugan will bring her 12-year-old daughter named Hailey.
"It's going to be a wonderful weekend," said their mother Linda Cropper.
The occasion is the 30th anniversary Simplot Games track and field meet in Holt Arena on the campus of Idaho State University. One of the guest athletes is honorary Simplot Games chairman Dick Fosbury of Ketchum, the 1968 Olympic high jumping gold medalist.
Preliminaries start Thursday, Feb. 14 at 5 p.m. Action in the nation's premier indoor track meet for high school athletes continues all day Friday. Finals start at 8 a.m. Saturday.
Lisa Ramos has been invited as a special guest to the anniversary meet. That's because in 1984, while a Wood River senior, she set the first Simplot Games record, a 6-3 high jump that became a national indoor record that still stands 24 years later. She said, "I am honored to be invited back and excited to see what the Games have become. It is a meet that makes every athlete feel special."
She set the 6-3 record at the Simplot Games Feb. 16, 1984, so Saturday's 11:30 a.m. Parade of Athletes in which Ramos will take part will occur exactly 24 years after that special day.
Ramos went on to finish her career at Wood River High as a four-time Idaho state champion in high jump and also a four-time gold medalist in the 200-meter dash. She still holds the overall state girls' mark of 6-1 in high jump, set in 1984. She still holds the State 3A 200m dash record of 25.14 seconds.
In four Idaho state track and field meets, she earned 140 out of a possible 150 points for her Wolverine team. She won 12 gold medals in 15 events including two golds in the 400m dash, one gold in the 100m dash and one gold in her final state track event, a scintillating come-from-behind anchor leg of Wood River's 1600m relay team.
As a junior she led the Wood River volleyball team to second place in the State A2 tourney held in Idaho Falls in 1982.
She was voted into the Idaho High School Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1999. After high school she competed for Stanford University and made for the Olympic high jump trials three times, in 1984, 1988 and 1992. Ramos set a women's college indoor high jump record of 6-5 ½ at Flagstaff, Az. in 1987.
A few weeks later, she captured the NCAA national indoor title with a height of 6-3.
A series of leg and foot injuries hampered her collegiate track career but she was grateful for the chance to combine athletics and academics at such a prestigious school. She graduated from Stanford in 1988 with a degree in Organizational Behavior and went on to earn her Masters degree in Sociology from Stanford in 1989.
In Oct. 1989 Lisa married her college sweetheart, John Ramos, in Sun Valley. A baseball player drafted by the New York Yankees in 1987, Ramos made it to the big leagues in 1991 and played AAA minor league baseball before retiring from the game in 1996. He started a marble and granite business in Tampa. Son Nick, 14, was born in 1993 and Victoria, 12, in 1995.
Lisa said she has always been active in the lives of her children. Like her mother, she has taken up golf as a sport of choice. It has become a passion.
She said about the Simplot Games, "I met some great people and had the best time. I still remember dancing the night away and jumping high the next day."
Both of the Ramos children were born while John was playing AAA minor league baseball?Nick born in Columbus, Ohio while John was playing for the New York Yankees AAA team there in 1993, and Victoria in Syracuse, N.Y. where John played for the Toronto Blue Jays AAA team in 1995. Lisa?s children were born after she retired from track in 1993 and decided to move on to another phase of her life.
