In early 2023, Star High School graduates Joy Nowell and Sam Duncan, along with Jeffrey Lee, started talking about the trophy collection at the school, which shuttered in 2014. Concerned about the collection’s preservation and availability to the public, the group worked over a period of Sundays at the school to systematically catalog, photograph, and barcode each trophy. Along the way, the group cleaned and repaired each trophy as needed.

Each of the 321 trophies had their photograph and description, including names of students, captured in an Airtable database. The Airtable database was then output to a PDF file, which was then used to produce a one-off publication, which is on display at the Mills County Historical Museum. The PDF is available for downloading below.

Along with providing an important record of the school’s trophies, the catalog also serves as a tool for analyzing trophy design, from an early, classical sterling silver tennis cup from the late 1920s to an early 2000s basketball trophy with gold plastic ornamentation.