THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: TALES FROM THE ROAD: A substitute trophy, a bus crash and a unique view of a moon

Before Bruce Bailey became athletic director at his alma mater, Wallace High, a few years back, he coached at Mullan for five years, and spent two years at Mountain Home.

At Mullan, he and John Drager were co-head coaches, and co-athletic directors for a few years. 

“John Drager was just a big mentor of mine, coming back home after leaving Mountain Home,” Bailey recalled.

One year, in the early 2000s, Mullan was hosting the boys basketball Silver Valley Tournament at the Pavilion.

“It was my first Silver Valley Tournament as athletic director, so I was still learning,” Bailey remembered. “There was about a minute and a half left in the championship game, and Kellogg was going to be the tournament champions, and I started thinking, ‘Geez, do we need a trophy for this?’ So I looked at Drager and said, ‘Hey, Coach, do we hand out a trophy for this? I remember in high school, we used to get a trophy.’

“And he goes, ‘Oh, sh-t.’ He says, ‘You didn’t order it?’

“‘I didn’t know we needed a trophy,” Bailey replied.

“He goes, ‘follow me’. 

“We go down into the basement of the pavilion, and he opens up this room, and he’s been there for many years, and there’s all these trophies, with dust all over ‘em. He goes, ‘Grab one of those’ and I grabbed one in a hurry, and I didn’t look it over.

“He says, ‘We’ll just give ‘em this for now.’ We’ve got our custodian, and he’s trying to polish it off and clean it up for us.

“So the game was about ready to end ... and as I was looking at the trophy about ready to hand it to ‘em (Kellogg), it’s one of those trophies that holds the ball up in the air with one arm and hand. Well, the whole arm was cut off. And the trophy was from like 1979.

“And that’s what I ended up giving Kellogg for a tournament trophy,” Bailey recalled. “The newspaper was there taking pictures, parents were there taking pictures, and I never said anything until everybody left, and I went up to the coach and said, ‘I’ll bring you a new trophy eventually.’

“That week I called Gary Everson (whose company makes trophies and other awards) and ordered a trophy, and went to Coeur d’Alene and got it and took it over to Kellogg and delivered it.

“They never noticed it.”

THE BIGGEST fear of bus trips?

A crash.

John Adams was a senior on the Coeur d’Alene High football team in 1957 when the Vikings traveled to Silverton to play Wallace.

“It was a cold and rainy night and as I recall we lost the game,” Adams said. “We were headed home on the big yellow school bus, raining fairly hard, and as we came over a little hill just past Kellogg our driver spotted an accident ahead of us. He hit the brakes and our bus went into a slow — or so it seemed — sideways skid.  The bus continued to skid until it got to the edge of the highway and then tipped over and slid down the embankment where it came to rest on its side.

“A couple of the coaches sitting in the front were cut by breaking glass and along with the rest of us were thrown around the inside of the bus,” Adams continued. “We had a lot of bumps and bruises, but being ‘tough’ football players we survived quite well.”

He said the players and coaches crawled out the escape hatches on the top of the bus, and out through the rear, emergency, exit door. Some of the players, tired after playing a tough game, removed seats from the bus so they could lay down until help arrived. They grabbed the large blue blankets used to keep them warm on the sidelines and layed down on the seats in the ditch, covered by the blue blankets.

“Well, a lot of our fans were heading back to Coeur d’Alene in their cars and when they went past the accident scene all they saw was a bunch of ‘bodies’ under blankets near an overturned bus,” Adams said. “You can imagine the stories that beat us back to town. When some of us showed up at the local drive-in an hour or two later, our friends thought they were seeing ghosts.”

COACHING AT Bonners Ferry High, pretty much every bus trip is a long bus trip.

Tom Turpin, the longtime baseball coach at Bonners, recalled a bus trip home many years ago.

“We had a pickup truck behind us, constantly flashing their lights at us as if to tell us something was wrong with the bus,” he said. 

The bus driver noticed the flashing lights and pulled over. Turpin told the driver to stay with the team, and Turpin would get off and find out what was going on. 

“I noticed the guy that got out of the pickup truck looked a little shady,” Turpin said. 

Turpin asked the driver what the problem was.

“His response was that one of the boys had mooned them going down the highway,” said Turpin, adding that the driver was able to provide the name of the player doing the mooning. “I said thanks for telling me and I went back on the bus.”

Turpin got back on the bus and everybody wanted to know what happened.

“The next time you moon somebody,” Turpin told his players, “make sure you take your jersey off.”

“Needless to say, the team got well conditioned the next day.”

COACHES: If you are a current or former coach in North Idaho, and have stories you'd like to share of crazy bus trips, humorous encounters with officials (or umpires) or bizarre occurrences during games, feel free to email me at mnelke@cdapress.com

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 208-664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter @CdAPressSports.