By any traditional reckoning, Steve Harshman should be on a farewell tour befitting a Wyoming coaching icon this autumn, with an outpouring of tributes coming both at home and at each of Natrona County High School’s football road stops.
Harshman is, after all, in his 36th and — barring a dramatic shift in political winds — final season as the Mustangs’ head coach.
He has won seven Class 4A state titles, molded thousands of boys into men and, by the way, in his side gig as a state legislator since 2003 owns Wyoming’s current longest House of Representatives tenure.
Harshman ranks second in Wyoming history in football victories (257 and counting). No. 1 and No. 3 on that list both have stadiums named after them.
A similar legacy would assuredly be a given, if not already a done deal, were it not for a former Natrona County football co-captain of some renown named Dick Cheney.
“How do you replace a guy like this?” wonders Natrona County Activities Director Spencer Cantrell, who will have to answer that question sooner or later. “How do you follow a legend?”
Sooner. Or later.
Therein lies the hitch for Cantrell.
What Happens In November?
It’s also possible, if highly improbable, that Cantrell won’t have to fill Harshman’s oversized coaching shoes when the Mustangs’ season ends in October or, if Hollywood script writers are paying attention, late November.
Last month, Harshman won the Republican nomination for state superintendent of public instruction.
Given that “Wyoming” and “Republican” are all but synonymous, and that Harshman has a distinguished legislative record of public-schools advocacy, it’s a virtual Kalshi lock that he’ll win the general election in November and accept a full-time job in Cheyenne come January.
“It’s a fairly safe assumption,” Cantrell affirmed to Cowboy State Daily. “I’d be blown away if it’s not him, not because he’s a Republican, but honestly because of his experience and expertise in education.
“But you don’t want to put the cart before the horse.”
There’s another hitch presiding over any brainstorming about a tribute.
Harshman is in full deflection mode, insisting on pivoting the spotlight away from him onto his players, much as the former four-sport Midwest Oilers standout has done for all of his 41 coaching years.
“We’re not talking about it at all,” Harshman told Cowboy State Daily when asked about his semi-impending transition. “First of all, I don’t think it’s a big deal. We’ve been playing football in that same spot for 120 years, and nearly 100 years in that stadium.
"I tell my players, if I die of a heart attack tonight you’re still going to kick off Friday. This thing is way bigger than us.”
The way Harshman sees it, he’s not unlike his seniors, only with salt-and-pepper hair and forehead creases from four decades of gridiron white-knucklers.
It’s his time to graduate, too — unless he doesn’t pass that November final exam at the ballot box.
“Nothing lasts forever,” he said.
So it’s business as usual or, in coaching cliché speak, one game at a time.
Coaching Reset In Year 36
Three games into his maybe-final season, the Mustangs are 3-0 and ranked fourth in Class 4A as they pursue Harshman's eighth state championship.
In the process, Harshman is modeling for his players that even at 63 and in the twilight of a Wyoming Coaches Association Hall of Fame career you can continue learning.
After two ho-hum seasons, by Natrona County standards anyway, Harshman and his staff have “hit the reset button” after a 5-5 campaign in 2025, just as they did in 2010 and before that in the early 2000s.
Less practice time. Less hitting. Fewer playbook-study groups.
Out with the old-school, in with the new.
“More isn’t better, it’s just more,” Harshman explained. “Last year, our best football game was the first game of the year. Man, we looked really good. That shouldn’t be. I think we got over-tired.”
Such introspection doesn’t surprise Patrick Schmiedt, a Wyoming high school sports historian, author, and 2004 founder of the wyoming-football.com website.
Some observers, said Schmiedt who, like Harshman, was born and raised in Midwest, perceive a stodgy old-school persona harkening to an era with leather helmets and wool jerseys.
That would be a miscalculation, he said.
Schmiedt recalls that Harshman ushered in the digital era of film exchange in Wyoming in 2006 after years of passing along VHS tapes. He also remembers the 2010 “reset,” when Harshman completely revamped a tried-and-true offense after his third and final losing season.
“It’s very easy to look at him as this old-school guy, but he’s actually been really progressive in instituting changes.” Schmiedt told Cowboy State Daily.
Title Rings In Sock Drawer
Harshman’s adamant focus on this year’s players aside, when pressed he’ll wax nostalgic as his coaching clock ticks toward 0:00.
He even harkens to his inauspicious debut in 1991, when the Mustangs went 0-8 and would eventually see the losing streak extend to 13 before finally finishing 1-7 in his second go-round.
“When he first got there, it was tough times,” remembers Don Julian, who was hired into the Natrona County School District the same year as Harshman and coached junior high football before eventually building juggernauts in Riverton and Sheridan.
“He was right on the borderline of not making it. He finally got a win, and I think it was over Kelly Walsh (14-6), so his arch-rival kind of maybe saved him,” Julian added with a chuckle.
Harshman would have but one more losing season thereafter: A dreadful 2-8 campaign in 2009 that fueled reset No. 2.
In Harshman’s third year, the Mustangs were 6-2, in 1994 they played for the championship, and by 1996 he had his first state crown.
Yet for all those epic outcomes, Harshman is quick to say he is every bit as fond and proud of that lone winless team and other win-loss stragglers as he is of his unbeaten state champs in 1999, 2003, 2012 and 2014.
Ask him about some of his favorite squads and he’ll barely mention the titles, instead highlighting teams, like the one in 2009, that resolved to face struggles and deficiencies with grit and fortitude.
His seven championship rings, he guesses, are in a sock drawer at home.
“It’s about the experience,” Harshman said. “Every year stands out because I think the greatest honor we have as coaches — and I’ve always said this about my own four kids — is regardless of what you do, whether it’s athletics, arts or music, have a passion for something.
"As a parent, there’s nothing better than watching your kids pursue a passion, and as a coach you actually get to see it from the sideline. Sometimes I’m not even sure their parents get to see that.”
Years later, he said he’ll bump into those same boys as men, many of them parenting the next generation of Mustangs, and see their faces as if they’re still looking back at him through an orange-and-black helmet.
“I see these kids decades later and they’ve got that look,” he said. “They’re at a different level, with a different passion, and it’s so awesome.”
Bigger Than Football
For Harshman, football has always been a vehicle for more holistic life achievements.
Cantrell, who has been the activities director and assistant principal at Natrona County for seven years, rattles off a litany of behind-the-scenes work.
The weekly gatherings where the players talk about character, integrity and honesty. The regular visits to the Boys & Girls Club of Casper. The stadium beautification project where the athletes plant trees each year.
With as many as 175 boys wanting to wear the school colors each year, one challenge is finding the playing time Harshman believes they all merit.
Here again is where he has proven progressive: He’ll arrange games for his backup and younger players with 9-man and 6-man programs that have scheduling vacancies.
“I don’t know that you can truly state the impact that Steve Harshman has had on Natrona County High School and, let’s be completely honest, the entire state of Wyoming,” Cantrell said. “Yeah, he was hired to be a football coach, but he’s taken it to the next level.”
Schmiedt, who routinely interviewed Harshman and his players during five years with the Casper Star-Tribune (2004-2009), agrees: “His players were always very respectful, very appropriate in the way they held themselves. Natrona guys were always disciplined, and not just on the field.”
Those standards, Sheridan's Julian said, are what made the longstanding Natrona County-Sheridan rivalry transcendent.
The teams have squared off eight times for Class 4A crowns in Harshman’s era, and Julian has indelible images of classic football games, but it’s the postgame handshakes that evoke at least as much pride.
“The thing I really appreciated about our two programs is I believe in my heart the student-athletes on both teams carried a lot of respect for each other,” said Julian, who retired as Sheridan’s coach in 2017 and athletic director in 2022. “That told me the coaching staffs must have demonstrated that there’s a well-coached team that does things well and right.
“Our games were always dogfights, but when all was said and done I really felt the respect the programs had for each other was always very, very good.”
A Win-Win Outcome
All of which begs the question: Why now?
Isn't Harshman just getting warmed up?
He answers with reflections on his tenure in the Legislature, a 23-year span that includes two tours as state House speaker. There, he helped spearhead the Hathaway and Wyoming’s Tomorrow scholarships for the state’s college-bound students.
He cites the need for strong education policy and finance, the importance of having an educator in the role of superintendent, and establishing the right tone in state government toward public schools.
“Bottom line is I just didn’t feel like I was done with the opportunity to serve this state,” he said. “I love this state, my home state. I raised my kids here. My parents are buried here. So if I can give a little back, that’d be awesome.”
And so the clock ticks.
Even if Harshman isn’t bracing for the end, others who recognize his stature are, especially at Natrona.
“With the level he’s at now, you will have a really hard time separating Steve Harshman’s name from the identity of Natrona,” Schmiedt said.
Cantrell added that, “His impact is going to be felt long, long after he’s gone.”
The only question now is how soon.
It’s left Cantrell and the district with that dilemma: How to celebrate one of the state’s coaching icons fittingly without putting that horse before the cart.
“It’s something I’m discussing with my principal,” Cantrell said.
The likely outcome is a ceremony during the 2027 season, when Harshman and his wife of four decades, Becky, can carve out a Friday night drive from Cheyenne to spend a nostalgic evening at Dick Cheney Alumni Field.
Or not.
After all, Harshman, who knows a thing or two about upsets, could still be pacing the sideline in Natrona County orange and black come next August, with no end in sight to a career that's chiseled him on Wyoming’s football Mount Rushmore with Cokeville’s Todd Dayton, the father-son Deti tandem at Laramie, and a fourth up for barstool debate.
In which case, the tributes will just have to wait.
“If the public wants the other candidate, so be it,” Harshman said. “This thing is win-win.”
Contact Jeff Welsch at jeff@cowboystatedaily.com
Jeff Welsch can be reached at jeff@cowboystatedaily.com.
