Players left behind, and other oddities on bus trips - Part 1

First in a series

“Where’s Kyle?”

Larry Bieber, longtime coach in the Coeur d’Alene High boys basketball program, recalled one year, when he was varsity coach, the Vikings were headed down to Boise for a pair of early season games against a couple of Boise-area teams.

“We pulled into this rest stop (on U.S. 95, somewhere south of Lewiston),” he recalled. “We were there about 10 minutes, and everybody got back on the bus, we take off, and then one of the kids says, ‘Uh oh. Where’s Kyle?’

“I go, ‘What? We left Kyle back there?’

“We didn’t have cell phones, or anything like that. So I said shoot, we’re too far (down the road) now, we’ll have to get there and then call his parents.”

Bieber said the bus was about 30-45 minutes down the road when one of the players spoke up about Kyle.

“But ol’ Kyle got out there and was waving his hands, and he caught a ride with one of the parents who was following us. It all worked out OK because the people that picked him up got there about the same time we did.”

IN THE 1970s, Sandpoint High administrators and boosters acquired an old Greyhound bus to carry their Bulldog teams to sporting events.

Eventually, they traded it in for another charter bus, the Silver Eagle.

Not having to ride a yellow school bus on those long trips had its advantages.

“It was much better,” said Bill Adams, who coached boys basketball in Sandpoint off and on from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. “We had a little sandwich bar in the back where the kids could get up and make a sandwich ... there was soda, orange juice. and there was a (bathroom) back there, so we really didn’t have to stop. It was pretty convenient, and it was a much better ride.”

Adams recalled the bus hitting a deer on U.S. 95, down on Cocolalla Flats.

“One zipped out from underneath the bridge down there on the flats, and we drilled it right there,” he recalled. “We had to get out and pull it off the road, and down the road we went.

“And a couple of drivers were notorious for getting you there a little quicker than what you normally would think you needed to. ... ‘‘Maybe we ought not to come up behind that guy at 60 miles an hour’ ... but they knew what they were doing.

“It was interesting — when you first got that bus, when you would pull into a town, ‘boy, look at those guys, they’ve got a pretty nice bus and we’re driving on a school bus.’ And that was always nice to say, ‘yeah, we’re on that bus.’”

JIM WINGER, current Lake City boys basketball coach, also recalled traveling to Boise every other year back in the day for a pair of early season games.

“I’ve been stranded three times — twice in Baker (Ore.) and once in La Grande (Ore.) — where we were lucky enough to get a hotel and spend an extra night,” he said. “I know for sure I have fingernail marks in quite a few charter buses on the hand rails.”

“I don’t remember what year it was, but we got snowed in in Baker,” he recalled. “I-84 was closed, but the bus driver thought we could backtrack and go through Weiser, and they wouldn’t let us go through there. And they finally got plows through so we could go through, and we had to come up through the middle of Idaho. And they had to send a bus driver from Spokane to Lewiston because our bus driver had reached his hours (limit), and he met us in Lewiston to take us home to Coeur d’Alene, and we had to take the Washington way, the Idaho roads were too treacherous ... I just remember shiny, black ice and the bus wasn’t going too fast, but it was going too fast for me. Just staring at the road — ‘are we going to get these kids home?’ That was quite a trip.”

FEW TEAMS in this area travel as much as the Post Falls High boys basketball team. The Trojans have made several trips to western Washington and the Tri-Cities area in recent years — and that’s not counting trips to Boise and even to Las Vegas.

“My first year as a head coach, we played three games in the Seattle metro area,” Trojans coach Mike McLean recalled. “On the way home, our charter bus was one of the last vehicles allowed to go over Snoqualmie Pass. As were went, WSP had mandatory chainup area, and our professional driver told us he did not know how to chain up the bus. It was late, after 10 p.m. and we had to get home. So myself, (and assistant coaches) Marc Allert and Bryan Kelly got out and chained the bus up along I-90. None of us had ever chained up a large bus, but we figured it out and got home without any further issues.”

Allert, of course, is now the girls basketball coach at Post Falls High.

“I have discovered that there is a difference between riding with girls teams and boys teams on a bus,” he said. “Not nearly as much singing on a boys bus.”

NOT ONLY did John Drager coach football, boys basketball and track and field at Mullan High for some 40 years, he also, literally, drove the bus.

“One time we were going down the road between Kellogg and Coeur d’Alene, and there was a big meat truck coming this way,” Drager recalled. “He was going east, we were going west, and he passed us, and he had a big, full windshield.

“Pretty soon the guy turned around and he was just flying after us. He pulled over and wanted me to pull over. He got all mad and said, ‘Somebody threw a tomato.’

“I said to the kids, ‘We’re not leaving until I find out who did it.’ And Don Almquist said, ‘I didn’t throw one; I dropped one out the window.’

“And the kids told me he just rared up and threw it as hard as he could.”

DAVE FEALKO coached Coeur d’Alene High’s girls basketball team in the 1980s and early ’90s, before finishing up his coaching career at Lake City.

“Going to the state tournament down in Boise one year, we went through Oregon, and we came down through that area that was real narrow, and they had big medians and there’d been a wreck,” he recalled. “An apple truck had wrecked. I had a couple of managers that wanted to go down and look at it and we’re sitting around waiting, and it’s kinda icy. ... and they come back carrying a case of apples.

IN THE 1980s, Clark Fork High had some pretty good boys and girls basketball teams — good enough that bigger schools in the area wanted to play the Wampus Cats.

That meant a few more longer road trips in the winter.

“Probably the harriest one we had was a trip to Northwest Christian,” recalled former Clark Fork boys basketball coach Lewis Speelmon. “I remember even calling Tom Sherry at KREM-2, because he was the weather guy that everybody listens to. I couldn’t get a hold of him so I called ISP, and they said as far as they know, the highways would be open. We went through Priest River ... and we played three games, I think -- JV boys, varsity girls and varsity boys. We got beat, but they were all good games.

“So we headed back, and our bus driver, I can’t remember his name but he must have been about 4-foot-11, he even had a 4-inch block of wood on the gas pedal. So we start back, and of course it’s snowing, and we’ve got about 12-14 inches of snow that night across the whole area. It’s right at freezing, so that wet snow is hitting the windshield, and it’s freezing. So (assistant coach) Bob Hays has got his hand out, through the window behind the bus driver, trying to keep the ice off the windshield there, and I was working the other side, whenever we slowed down.

“Of course, we come out of Priest River, and here’s like four or five trees across the road. we were lucky there was still just enough loggers — this is like 11 o’clock at night, or maybe closer to midnight. They got their chainsaws out, cutting up the stuff, the kids are out of the bus helping them throw the stuff out of the road. So we get to Sandpoint, and there was an ISP behind us, and he actually followed us all the way to Clark Fork. We were going through snow drifts out in the Sunnyside area, where the wind always blows.”

MOST COACHES up here bemoan the annual trip to Lewiston, because it is often the longest road trip their team makes in the regular season.

But Lewiston makes several trips up to Kootenai and Bonner County each year.

“You get used to them,” said Dave Cornelia, who formerly coached boys basketball and later girls basketball at Lewiston High. “It is what it is and complaining about it doesn’t do any good. I never mentioned it to put the thought in their heads as an excuse. I grew up in Montana where we had two- to six-hour trips for league games. You just had to play. The home team never cares how far the other team had to travel.”

Cornelia recalled a 4 1/2-hour trip from Coeur d’Alene to Lewiston one winter — the trip usually takes a little more than 2 hours.

“Wasn’t sure the bus would make it up the hills, and the door on the bus would blow open from time to time and the wipers didn’t work well on the bus and I had to get out and pound the snow off of them,” he recalled.

There will be more bus trip stories in the coming weeks.

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.