Timberlake boys make best of break in schedule

It happens this time of year.

Sometimes it’s because schools are taking finals, and don’t want to play this week. Or sometimes teams just can’t make the dates fit for each other.

Kootenai’s boys, for one, went 10 days between games. Others went a week between games.

Scheduling happens.

But what the Timberlake High boys basketball team has gone through the last six weeks is almost unheard of.

When the Tigers take the floor Friday at Post Falls Middle School vs. Genesis Prep, Timberlake will end a streak which saw the Tigers play just once in a span of 37 days.

“I joke around with Tim Cronnelly (the former Timberlake athletic director, now in his first year in the same role at Lakeland) — the boys would like to toilet paper his house because of the longer break,” first-year Tigers coach Michael Scott said.

THE SCHEDULE was already set when Scott and new athletic director Jim Simpson took over this summer.

On Dec. 20, Timberlake dropped its Intermountain League opener to Kellogg to fall to 4-3 on the season.

Timberlake’s next scheduled game was Jan. 14, a 51-46 IML home win over Priest River.

The Tigers were slated to play at Bonners Ferry three days later, but bad weather postponed that game to Feb. 7.

That left Timberlake’s next game as Friday against Genesis Prep.

“It really hasn’t been so bad,” Scott said. “This is such a good group of guys, even if we were practicing or not practicing, they would still be together.”

Timberlake has played in a holiday tournament in years past, but didn’t this year, creating essentially a two-week break. And a game with Moscow, originally scheduled for the first week in January, was pushed back into February at the Bears’ request. And the Tigers couldn’t find another game to replace that date.

You can only practice so much, so Scott has tried to break up the monotony. Sometimes they do conditioning drills, sometimes they do shooting games, or ballhandling games, or rebounding games, trying to make the practices competitive.

“They don’t go half speed,” he said. “They love to compete.”

One of the shooting games is called “21 cones.” Cones are placed at the other end of the court. Two teams of four shoot at one end, and when a basket is made, that player races to the other end to grab a cone. The first cone — the purple cone — is worth three points, and the other cones are worth one. The purple cone often ends up as the tiebreaker, because of its increased point value.

“Sometimes they go so hard after that first cone,” Scott said. “I have to hold the first cone, to make sure nobody collides.”

(Envision the opening to the old XFL games, where one player from each team, stationed at opposite ends of the field, raced to see who could grab the waiting football sitting at midfield. That seemed like an entertaining way to start a game — until players started getting hurt smashing into each other in pursuit of the ball.)

The Tigers practiced nearly every day they normally would have over the holidays. Even at that, Scott said he had players calling or texting him to open the gym so they could get some shots up.

Scott’s son Keegan, a former Timberlake High star who is now a redshirt sophomore guard at NAIA The Master’s University in Santa Clarita, Calif., sometimes joined the current Tigers in the gym over the holiday break.

“We joke about it every practice — we’re getting closer (to playing), we’re getting closer,” Michael Scott said.

Oddly, Timberlake’s girls are also in the midst of a scheduling quirk. Due to a postponement and another schedule change, the Tigers will go two weeks between games before traveling to Coeur d’Alene Charter on Saturday.

THE FLIPSIDE to all this inactivity — at least games-wise — is that starting Friday, Timberlake’s boys are scheduled to play 12 games in 22 days, wrapping up the regular season Feb. 17 at Priest River.

With that in mind, Scott has worked a lot on conditioning in practice. Many of the players also ran cross country for coach Shawn Lawler, “so they’re fit,” Scott said.

“Twelve games in 22 days is going to be taxing on us, but we’re fairly deep,” he said. “We go at least nine deep. We’re as conditioned, or better conditioned, than if we were playing all the time.”

When the season started, the first-year coach said he didn’t know what to expect from his new team. After a few games, he had an idea.

Then came the break in the schedule, and he’s back to wondering what kind of team he has.

“It’s almost like a new season,” he said.

“I hope the same team shows up in 2017 that I had at the end of 2016, because that team was starting to look pretty good.”

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