By DIANE GASPER-O'BRIEN

dobrien@dailynews.net

Ag mechanics never has been Logan Stanton's thing.

He just wanted to help out his FFA members last spring when he agreed to compete in that event at the state FFA meet.

Now, Stanton and those FFA buddies have a runner-up national championship to show for it.

Led by Stanton's third-place individual finish, the Ellis High School FFA team placed second at last month's National FFA Agriculture Mechanics Career Development Event in Indianapolis.

The ironic part was that three of the four team members had to get permission to miss college classes for the week-long national event.

The state meet is conducted in the spring semester, with the state championship team advancing to the national competition the next fall.

Stanton graduated from Ellis High last spring, along with classmates Monte Honas and Justin Henrickson.

Stanton and Honas, now students at Fort Hays State University, and Henrickson, who attends North Central Kansas Technical College in Hays, rejoined current EHS senior William Poland and ag instructor Bob Kohman for the trip to nationals.

Stanton hadn't even planned on competing in ag mechanics at state last spring; he was going to Manhattan to compete in the agronomy division.

"They had three (team members), and they take the top three scores (for team scoring)," Stanton said.

But, Stanton added, it's good to have a fourth team member in case one has a lower score on a particular day.

"I had never touched ag mechanics in my life, but I can do math pretty well," Stanton said, adding that reasoning and math skills were part of the written test of the competition. "I was completely surprised when we were first at state."

Not nearly as surprised as when the team finished second at nationals.

Learning to improvise

The individual competition at nationals included routine maintenance on a John Deere Gator, finding seeding rates for a drill or fertilizer spreader, reading a blueprint and brazing a metal pipe to a metal plate and calculating a bill of materials.

The team event was constructing a small irrigation system out of PVC pipe.

Kohman said he thought his team had done a good job overall and was pleased to see it overcome some adversity along the way.

The welding technique of brazing at nationals was not something the students had expected.

"Most schools don't bother to teach that anymore because it's not practical for today's use," Stanton said.

"Those welding skills we had not practiced," Kohman agreed. "When we walked in and saw that, we thought, 'This is not good.' But they adapted well and did not panic."

The Ellis team reaped big rewards from improvising.

Then came the awards ceremony, with individual winners named first.

Honas was honored in the silver division for finishing in the middle third of the 170 competitors, and Henrickson made the gold division at 11th place.

Then Poland made the top 10 overall in 10th place.

Stanton was nervous that his name hadn't been called.

But his disappointment was short-lived when he was called to the stage as a top-three finisher and as the third-place overall individual winner.

Moments later, the entire Ellis team returned to the stage as the national runner-up to the California state champion.

The next day, at the overall general session, Stanton again was recognized on stage in front of 12,000 people and awarded a plaque as well as a $600 scholarship.

A long time coming

Last spring's state FFA championship was the first at Ellis since the 1986 team won state in the poultry division and went on to finish in the middle of the pack at nationals.

Coincidentally, a member of that team is able to watch the progress of these current students firsthand.

Brandon Armbruster -- who helped win a state title his sophomore year, then competed at nationals the fall of his junior year -- is a physical education teacher and co-athletic director at Ellis High.

"It was nice to see them do that well," Armbruster said.

Kohman had some national experience to fall back on as well.

He had finished in the top 10 in two different events -- nursery landscaping and farm business management -- two different years during his high school days in Abilene.

Kohman came to Ellis fresh out of college at Kansas State University three years ago with big shoes to fill.

Eldon Pfeifer had just retired after about 30 years as the agriculture education teacher at Ellis, where he also had a successful FFA program.

"I student-taught in Stockton but had no intentions of staying out in this area," Kohman said of his first teaching experience in western Kansas in the spring of 2006.

"But (Ellis) needed someone, and I filled the spot," he said. "I thought, 'I'm single and have no ties except my hometown, so I'll give it a try.' It's been really good, a lot of good kids excited about doing some things so it's made my job pretty easy."

Success at state

Ellis had placed in the top 10 at state in several areas in Kohman's first three years and he expected last spring's teams to do well again.

Maybe just not that well.

"I came into a group of kids who took in everything I had to offer," Kohman said. "They took it and ran with it. I did not go into state expecting to win. I just wanted to see what it was like so next year maybe we can do something."

"We did better than I ever imagined," he said of both the state and national competitions. "We set the bar so high, I don't know how we'll reach it again."

Stanton thinks that under Kohman's leadership, anything is possible.

"He's done so much for FFA in the (short time) he's been here," Stanton said. "I think they'll keep doing well."

Stanton has the hardware, and some money, to back up those thoughts.

"That definitely will come in handy," Stanton, who is majoring in informatics at Fort Hays, said of his $600 scholarship he earned at nationals.

"I'm at a different end of the spectrum," Stanton said in reference to the differences between FFA and his INT major. "I did not grow up on a farm, and I wasn't the traditional FFA student."

"But I would definitely recommend (students) to take part in FFA," he added. "I started FFA my sophomore year, and it's been worth it."