THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: Playing through it all at state

A local high school softball coach recently said one of her players was so tough, she would take one off the teeth if it were necessary for her team to win a game.

On Friday, Coeur d’Alene High senior shortstop Skylar Burke literally took one off the tooth.

Burke was fielding ground balls during pregame warmups before the Vikings’ state 5A softball opener vs. Thunder Ridge of Idaho Falls.

“I had a ball take a nasty hop on me, and chipped a little bit of the back of my tooth … on the top row,” Burke said.

Anyone who has watched Burke, a standout athlete in three sports, knew it was going to take way more than a chipped tooth to keep the Viking leadoff hitter out of the lineup.

Which would have been a shame, since Burke put on a defensive show during Coeur d’Alene’s three-game run through the tourney, which ended Friday night.

She made athletic play after athletic play, catching the eye of others, including Timberline coach Todd Amundson, who had two sons go on to play college baseball.

And, keep in mind, softball isn’t even Skylar’s “sport.” She has signed to play NCAA Division I basketball at UC Santa Barbara.

And, she was a pretty solid middle blocker for the Viking volleyball team.

A three-sport standout, a dying breed in these days of specialization — even though college coaches, time and time again, say they prefer their recruits play multiple sports.

That Burke did. She closed out her high school career as arguably one of the top multi-sport athletes in school history.

One who could have played softball in college, had that been her choice.

Anyway, back to the wayward ground ball in warmups.

So of course she played, chipped tooth and all.

“It was a little bit of a joke during the game,” she said. “I used it as a little bit of fuel.”

THEN THERE’S Haylee Smit, the Lakeland High senior pitcher, who threw 25-plus innings in four games for the Hawks, who finished fourth at the state 4A softball tourney at Post Falls High.

Smit, a right-handed pitcher, did this with a broken right ring finger.

“I couldn’t say enough about Haylee, she stepped up and pitched through this whole thing,” Lakeland coach Dwayne Curry said. “My goodness. She’s got about nine different injuries … ”

Nine, Haylee?

“I broke my finger, and I just came back from that a couple of weeks ago,” she said, “and I dislocated my (right) kneecap in Moscow a couple of weeks ago.

Anything else?

“My bicep’s been bothering me, and I’ve just been super sore the last couple of weeks,” she added.

Smit said she broke her finger in early April, when she tried to catch a ball thrown to her by an umpire while she didn’t have a glove on.

She missed a couple weeks in the circle, returning just before districts, and shouldered the pitching load during the postseason.

“The team needed me, and I needed to push through,” Smit said. “It (her finger) is definitely still broken, but it’s not too bad. I just push through the pain.”

Curry understands.

“You just suck it up and go on; it’s her senior year,” the first-year Hawks coach said. “I think she would have cut it off if we would have told her she couldn’t go again.”

Smit said she hopes to pitch in college, and these days is considering Community Colleges of Spokane, or Division I Dixie State (soon to be called Utah Tech University) in St. George, Utah.

In the meantime, Smit can heal her ailing finger and look back to a nice finish to her high school softball career, in which the Hawks brought home a trophy for the first time in nine years.

“It means a lot to our team and our school,” she said.

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 208-664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter @CdAPressSports.