Making a permanent impression

Coaches hope the words they use in their pregame chats will stick with their players.

Larry Bieber did that one better, some two decades ago in Sandpoint.

Bieber, the coach of the Coeur d’Alene High boys basketball team, brought a talented Viking team to town — a team that would go on to win the state title.

On this night, Coeur d’Alene was missing its two starting post players to injury.

Before the game, as per custom, Bieber wrote the instructions for his players on a whiteboard in the locker room.

“I can’t remember exactly what I put on there,” he recalled. “Sandpoint was pretty good that year, so I wrote the normal — Play Hard, Play with Pride and Play with Poise — which I put at the top of every board when I was coaching, even softball. That was my mantra.

“Then I had the matchups written down ...

“Got everybody all fired up and we all headed out to go play the game.

“We actually played pretty well,” he recalled.

When the team headed back into the locker room at halftime, Bieber noticed something wasn’t as it should be.

“I said (to a manager), ‘How come you didn’t erase the board while we were gone?’, because I didn’t want everybody to see our matchups if they came in here.

“She said, ‘Because that’s a permanent marker, coach.’

“Oh, crap,” Bieber thought.

“So I tried to erase it ... ” but to no avail.

His manager handed him a dry-erase marker from his briefcase, and he wrote his second-half instructions on the board with that.

Still, it bothered him, because, his first-half instructions were still up there — in permanent marker.

“I don’t want to destroy somebody’s whiteboard, but then again, I didn’t want them seeing what I’d written up there,” Bieber recalled. “I was really frustrated. I tried to let go of it, and not think about it in the second half. We ended up winning the game.

“We go back in, and I noticed part of it (on the whiteboard) was not as dark as the other part.

“I said, ‘Did somebody come in with some kind of lotion that would get rid of it?’, and (the manager) said ‘No, I tried something I’d heard about before — I put the dry-erase marker on there. So she worked on it for about 20 minutes while we were getting ready to go home.”

Bieber said he always carries his own dry-erase markers with him — before that, he always carried chalk. But there was a marker already in the tray when he went to use the whiteboard, so he figured, why not just use that one.

“She took one of my dry-erase markers, and she wrote right over it,” Bieber said of his manager. “And then erased it. And she she got rid of it pretty good.”

BRYAN CHASE is the current boys basketball coach at St. Maries. But it was at Lakeside where he started his coaching career in 1995, as a boys freshman and varsity assistant coach.

He recalled a Lakeside-Mullan boys game in the mid-1990s.

“We go up there and are playing for the district championship,” Chase said. “One of the Nelson twins gets in a fist fight with a Mullan player during the game. Police had to escort us out.”

Years later, after Chase had moved to St. Maries, he recalled a “quad” (JV girls, JV boys, varsity girls, varsity boys) at Lapwai, when he was girls JV coach for the Lumberjacks.

“(Todd) Bitterman and myself got ejected,” Chase said. (Todd) Gilkey got a technical foul too. (Principal Jerry) Bayley had all of us in the office the next day and blasted us a good one.”

BEFORE THERE was a Lake City High, Coeur d’Alene and Sandpoint were quite the rivals.

Jim Winger, now a longtime boys basketball coach at Lake City, started his coaching career at his alma mater, Coeur d’Alene High, in 1992.

His first year, he brought a talented Viking team to Sandpoint — which was by then in its current gym — to take on a talented Bulldogs squad.

Interest was high. The gym was packed, well before the varsity game.

“They shut the gym down in the JV game, there were so many people,” Winger recalled.

Sandpoint televised the game on closed-circuit TV out in the school commons, for those who couldn’t get into — or wouldn’t be let into — the gym.

“They weren’t going to let my mom in,” Winger said. “Well, she won that battle.”

Sandpoint went on to win a thriller in overtime.

“And then when we played them at our place (Coeur d’Alene) in the district tournament, the game was at 7. I got there at 5:30, and the line to get in to that game was out to the street,” Winger said.

In 1999, the four current 5A Inland Empire League schools and the three 4A IEL schools played in one big league, and a seven-team, double-elimination district tournament.

Sandpoint’s boys won at Lake City in the second round. Lake City then eliminated Moscow, and had to beat Sandpoint twice for the district title.

As the higher seed, the games were at Lake City.

Lake City won the first night, forcing an if-necessary title game. Sandpoint traveled particularly well in those days, and both nights the 2,800-seat gym at Lake City was packed.

“And that’s the only time, other than the (Fight for the) Fish game, that that gym was entirely full — both upstairs and downstairs,” said Winger, who started the Lake City program when that school opened in 1994.

The if-necessary title game, of course, featured a wild finish. Tie game, crowd going bonkers, Sandpoint had the ball, turned the ball over near midcourt. A Lake City player grabbed the ball and, with still five seconds left on the clock, heaved a shot from halfcourt. The ball bounced off the backboard right to Jeff Schuh, who was standing near the basket. Schuh calmly laid the ball in off the glass at the buzzer, setting off pandemonium.

“Maybe the best game at Lake City,” Winger said.

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@CdAPressSports.