Local 5A schools hit the (long) road

Some odd-looking road trips dot this year’s local high school football schedules.

That is no more apparent than this week.

On Saturday, Post Falls (1-0) plays Centennial Secondary School of Coquitlam, British Columbia, (a suburb of Vancouver) at Ellensburg (Wash.) High at 2 p.m. That night, Coeur d’Alene (2-0), ranked third in 5A, plays at Skyview High in Vancouver, Wash., at 7.

Tonight, Lake City (1-1) plays Capital (1-0) of Boise at 5 p.m. PDT at Bronco Stadium in Boise. And that’s not the Timberwolves’ only long road trip of the season. After a bye next week, Lake City travels to Snohomish, Wash., on Sept. 25 to play Glacier Peak High.

“We don’t like it one bit,” Lake City coach Van Troxel said of the scramble for games. “We’ve got six teams (in the Greater Spokane League) that we would play that are 30 minutes away, and we’re on a bus eight hours to Boise and six hours to Seattle. But that’s their call.”

In other games a little closer to home tonight, Lakeland plays at East Valley in Spokane, Freeman (Wash.) visits St. Maries and Lakeside travels to Kootenai. All are scheduled for 7 p.m.

Timberlake is idle, then returns to action Sept. 17 at home vs. Lakeland.

Greater Spokane League schools used to help the North Idaho schools fill a game or two on their schedules each fall. But this year, with reclassification in Washington, the GSL consists of 10 teams, and each team’s nine-game football schedule consists of nine league games — even though four of the teams (University, Shadle Park, Mt. Spokane and North Central) are 3A teams, and the other six are 4A.

GSL coaches wanted to keep the nonleague games with Idaho schools, but the principals and ADs voted to play all league games.

“It’s just scheduling in North Idaho,” Post Falls coach Jeff Hinz said. “We’re frozen out of the GSL, we’re frozen out of Montana and, after this two-year cycle, we might be frozen out of Boise and might end up playing each other twice.”

It’s possible for a 3A GSL team, even if it loses to all the 4A GSL teams, to still make the state playoffs with a record as bad as 3-6.

“We’re just hoping those 3As get tired of getting beat up by the 4As and want to stop playing all of them,” Coeur d’Alene coach Shawn Amos said.

In Montana, their schedules are filled with in-state opponents. And there are only a few open dates with Big 9 Conference teams.

The 5A Southern Idaho Conference has left a few spots open in its football schedules to help the North Idaho (and the eastern Idaho) teams fill their schedules. Usually if an SIC team travels to North Idaho one year, a North Idaho team (not necessarily the same one) travels to the SIC team the following year.

This year, Coeur d’Alene plays host to Rocky Mountain of Meridian (Oct. 1) and travels to Vallivue of Caldwell the following week. Coeur d’Alene played host to Moses Lake last week.

Lake City played host to Mountain View of Meridian last week. Its other far-away opponent is Wenatchee (Wash.), which visits Lake City on Oct. 15. Capital, ranked second in 5A, beat Timberline of Boise 45-6 in its opener last week.

Post Falls opened last week at Caldwell, and plays host to Timberline of Boise on Oct. 15.

Right now, the 5A SIC consists of 11 teams, and is split into two divisions — teams play everyone in their own division, as well as a few teams in the other division. But Caldwell is building an alternative high school, and there are rumblings that Caldwell High will petition to move down to 4A in 2012. That would leave the 5A SIC at 10 teams — just the right size for each team to play each other once for a full nine-game regular season schedule.

“If we lose those Boise schools ... we don’t even want to think about it,” Coeur d’Alene High athletic director Todd Gilkey said.

If that happened, the 5A IEL teams would probably play each other twice in league instead of once. But at least they wouldn’t have to play each other in the first round of the playoffs, as they do now.

Post Falls was tipped off on this week’s opponent by, ironically, Lake City, which didn’t have the same open date as the B.C. school did. Centennial Secondary School plays in a league which plays American rules football, and often plays Seattle area teams, so there will be no quirky rules like 12 men on the field when Centennial has the ball, 11 when Post Falls has the ball, etc.

“It worked out good for us, because they were willing to meet us halfway (in Ellensburg) for two years,” Post Falls AD Craig Christensen said. “But it’s a game, and it’s a game we can travel to in one day.

“For us to get passports for 50 kids (to travel to B.C.) would have been next to impossible.”

That game was solidified in March or April, Christensen said.

All three schools save several thousand dollars by not staying overnight on any of their trips — another factor in scheduling. Troxel said Lake City turned down a trip to Pocatello for the Rocky Mountain Rumble — an event LC has played in the past two seasons — because of the additional costs of staying overnight.

Between them, Gilkey and Amos contacted some 10-15 schools before hooking up with Skyview, which will return the trip to Coeur d’Alene next fall. Gilkey said the game was solidified shortly before spring break.

“I usually try to have (the football schedule) done before Christmas,” he said.

Skyview (0-1), a Washington class 4A semifinalist last season, lost its opener 42-28 last week at Sherwood (Ore.), an Oregon class 5A semifinalist.

Troxel said Lake City’s football schedule wasn’t completed until the first week of June.

“Glacier Peak is a one-year deal, so when this game is over, we have to find someone else for next year,” Troxel said.

On the air: The Lake City-Capital and Coeur d’Alene-Skyview games can be heard on the Internet at www.niwebsports.com. Lake City-Capital and Clarkston at Sandpoint (7 p.m.) are on at www.IdahoSports.com.