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By Dale Anderson
Contributor 

Long sports wait

 

Last updated 3/2/2021 at 11:07am



Normally we would be talking about the basketball playoffs now and my yearly trek to Spokane to enjoy four days of small school, high octane basketball tournament play. But the short football season just got underway Friday night.

Working with the chain gang I get to visit with the young kids from the visiting team. The Chewelah kids were a nice group and I learned a lot.

One young man said he was cold. I mentioned that he was from Chewelah and should be used to it. He said we still had snow on the ground and they didn’t. I said, “We had about five inches of snow on the ground but it went off fairly quick when it warmed up. How about this field? Looks pretty good doesn’t it? “Oh, yeah,” he replied.

I asked him about the field conditions at his football field and he said, “Not good. It is nothing but mud.”

The Cougar team had a roster of mostly juniors and seniors, and the last game they played in 2019 was in the state playoffs. This year’s Bronco team has six seniors and the rest are made up of sophomores and freshmen. Chewelah won the game 9-0 but the Broncos battled the whole night and were really exhausted in the last quarter, which is to be expected against a veteran team with a lot more bodies to throw on the field.

If Washington had been allowed to play fall sports starting in September like Idaho and Montana, I’m sure there would have been several more athletes turn out, which is a shame at this point in time. But these kids will never forget what they had to go through just to be playing right now.

Saturday was really nice, so we decided to take a drive and made a pit stop north of Pasco. The place was hopping with lots of people. I noticed a lot of high school aged kids wearing wrestling sweatshirts. I asked one young where they had wrestled and he said a regional meet in Boise. His team was from Post Falls.

I forget that Idaho has been playing sports since the school year started. When I told him Washington played its first football games on Friday, he said, “Oh wow. We’ll be playing spring sports in a couple of weeks.”

There was a lot to like about what I saw at Friday night's game. It's going to be a short season but the kids are working hard and improving along the way, and there are some really good kids on this team.

The kids from Chewelah said they were happy about playing also.

Life is really short and when school and extra-curricular activities become a political football, sorry about that, kids should not be short-changed like they have been. It has been a very long wait to get to this point, and it's great to see these competitors given the chance to play a game they all love.

 

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