THE FRONT ROW WITH MARK NELKE: July 6, 2014

John Billetz retired recently after spending the last eight years as executive director of the Idaho High School Activities Association — the governing body for athletics in the state — with no regrets.

Well, OK, one regret.

The former Post Falls High principal said he wished he could have had the opportunity to take the job sooner in his life.

“I’m 63 — time for somebody else to take over and drive the ship,” Billetz said recently. “I enjoyed the job; I loved my association with all the schools. If I was a little younger, I would stay. I don’t have any reason to leave; I really, really enjoyed it. Time caught up with me.”

Billetz’ last day as head of the IHSAA was June 30. The following day, former Hagerman School District superintendent Ty Jones took over as executive director.

“I think the thing that really impresses me about John is, that everything he does is for the kids — for the student athletes of Idaho,” said Coeur d’Alene High athletic director Todd Gilkey, who is finishing up a three-year term on the IHSAA board of control. “He’s very passionate about activities, and every decision John made was based on what was best for students.”

IHSAA POLICY is set by the votes of the 15-member board of control. The executive director does not have a vote — though he’s the one that receives the feedback on the decisions, good or bad.

“He’s the conduit of information into that office, and he’s the conduit of information out of that office,” Gilkey said. “Even though he doesn’t get to make the decisions — the board does — he’s the one that has to disseminate that information. He may not agree with the board’s decision, but he’s the one that has to get it out to the public. He’s got to be the good soldier.”

Still, the board often asks him his opinion before it votes.

“Really, you can drive the board,” Billetz said. “I haven’t always gotten everything I’ve wanted. The board really does listen to you and does put a lot of stock in what you have to say.”

One thing he was in favor of that the board voted against was switching boys and girls golf from the spring to the fall.

“I think we need to play golf in the fall,” Billetz said. “I don’t know why we don’t do that. Kids play all summer, they could come right out of summer junior golf, we could actually start golf on Aug. 1, even before school started. We could play August and September, and first week of October, we could have the state golf tournament. The weather’s better, the courses aren’t as crowded ... I really would have liked to have seen fall golf.”

But other than that, Billetz spoke of enjoying his work with ADs and other administrators round the state, putting on state tournaments and being able to make a difference for kids, as well as working through problems and issues.

“You get a lot of credit for a lot of stuff that happens,” he admitted, “but you really set the dates and the times and you hire people like Todd Gilkey, or Tim Cronnelly (Timberlake AD), or Craig Christensen (Post Falls AD), or Jim Winger (Lake City AD), and those guys run the tournaments, and people tell you how great they were. But really, the credit ought to go to those guys.”

BILLETZ CAME into the job with an understanding of how things worked statewide, having worked at Gooding High (football and boys track coach), Burley High (head football coach, assistant principal, then principal), and Minico of Rupert (football coach, athletic director) before being hired at Post Falls.

He was the IHSAA head when the economy plummeted in 2008. Schedules in some sports were reduced by 10 percent to save money, “but we were able to maintain quality programs even though the economy was in the tank,” he said. “Hats off to everybody.”

He said the Youth Endowment for Activities fund, started by his predecessor, Dick Young, who was executive director for 18 years, is going well — schools are starting to get money back from the fund to help offset the costs of travel to state tournaments.

And the state, with a surplus of funds from dues, putting on state tournaments, etc., has been able to give back some of that money to member schools.

“We’ve always said if we ever get a surplus of money we’re not going to let it sit; we’re going to send it back to our schools,” he said.

SEEDING FOR state tournaments has always been a sticking point. Some would like for there to be a way to take the eight teams in a tournament, rank them 1 through 8, and bracket it that way.

“If our member schools come to us and said, ‘Look, we’re not happy, we want it seeded,’ we’d look at it,” Billetz said. “And if we take two teams from North Idaho and, because of the seeding, somehow they come all the way to Boise and they have to play each other in the first round, they just have to live with that.”

What the IHSAA does now is “seed” so a district champ plays another district’s runner-up or worse in the first round. It draws the district champs and sprinkles them through the bracket, then it draws the district runners-up. If, say the District 1-2 (North Idaho runner-up) was drawn to play the District 1-2 champ, the runner-up would be moved to the other half of the bracket.

Billetz said if the IHSAA ever went to a true seeding of a tournament, it would use a computer. But it has never gotten to that point.

“No, our member schools like the way we do it now,” Billetz said. “The only ones that want us to seed are sports guys and parents; our schools don’t want to do it. Coeur d’Alene doesn’t want to come all the way down here and play Post Falls in the first round of the state tournament.”

SINCE THE track is now covered up because of expansion of the football stadium at Bronco Stadium, the IHSAA has had to look elsewhere to stage its state track and field meets. This year, the 5As and 4As were at Dona Larsen Park in Boise, and the 3As, 2As and 1As were at Middleton High.

There has been some talk of trying to have all five meets again in one place, at Dona Larsen. If that were the case, Billetz said a likely option would be to add the 3As, and if that worked, add the 2As, then the 1As. However, he said the smaller schools “love it out at Middleton.”

Billetz said he got calls all the time from places like Coeur d’Alene and Idaho Falls, asking about prying state tournaments traditionally held in the Boise area. Softball and volleyball tournaments are often held in North Idaho and eastern Idaho, but boys and girls basketball have been held in the Boise area since the late 1990s. And they’ll likely stay there a while, since the IHSAA has a five-year rollover contract with the Idaho Center in Nampa.

“We can schedule five years out, and it makes it so nice to know that we’re there,” Billetz said.

He said he would not support a proposal to move, say, the 5A boys basketball tournament up north.

“Where would they have it?” Billetz said, noting that March’s state 5A boys title game which pitted two Boise schools, Capital and Borah, drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 8,000 at the Idaho Center.

Having enough motel rooms up north would be no problem, he said — there’s plenty of motel rooms when state volleyball, softball and soccer comes to town. But there is no gym nearly that big in North Idaho, he said. In fact, in recent years the state has run into problems with overflow crowds at the state 4A boys tournament at Borah High in Boise — and that gym is the biggest in the area at some 3,000 seats, Billetz said.

THIS PAST year, Billetz convinced many schools to use TrackWrestling, a computer program that provided real-time results for wrestling duals and tournaments.

“When kids have a tournament you can follow it online,” Billetz said. “You have matside scoring as soon as the bout’s over. That was a challenge because you get old-school wrestling people, they don’t like to change. We did state wrestling in two days and it was paperless. Kids’ names were up on the board, they could see who was wrestling, who was on deck.”

BILLETZ LIVED in a townhouse in Boise, about five minutes from Bronco Stadium, during his eight years as IHSAA head. His wife, Julie, remained at their home in Post Falls, as she was principal of the kinder center there. For the first six years, they commuted back and forth, until Julie retired two years ago.

Now that John’s retired, they plan to move back to their home in Post Falls, to be close to daughter Megan and their two grandchildren (another daughter, Nichole, is teaching at the community school in Ketchum/Sun Valley, and son K.C. is a businessman in Cincinnati.

“Our home is Post Falls; that’s where we want to be,” Billetz said.

Like Bill Young before him, Billetz said he plans to stay in the background for a while — but be available if his successor needs some advice.

“John did a lot of good things for the state of Idaho,” Gilkey said, “and I think we got a good one that’s going to replace him in Ty Jones.”

“Without a doubt this was the best thing I could have done,” Billetz said of being the IHSAA head man. “I just wish I could have taken this job a little sooner in my career; I wish it had come open earlier. It’s the best job in the state, I’m going to tell you right now.”

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