THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: NIC’s latest move triggers lots of questions

Does anybody really care anymore that North Idaho College is planning to return to the NJCAA after seven years in the Northwest Athletic Conference — even though the Cardinal athletic programs don’t have a guaranteed landing spot yet?

Are you thrilled at the prospect of watching your beloved Cardinal teams competing against many of the top junior college players and teams in the country, trying to get its teams to nationals?

Or, have you gotten used to seeing NIC play in the more regionally based NWAC, where the conference championships are the end of the road, maybe more local kids get to play, and that’s good enough these days?

Or, are you just wondering, given the current circus that is the NIC school board, if NIC is even going to continue to be an accredited college — in which case, who would come to NIC and play if they knew their credits were not going to transfer?

YOU HAVE to admit, there was more of a buzz when NIC played in the Scenic West Athletic Conference, especially when the College of Southern Idaho came to town — especially in basketball, but also in volleyball.

And if tiddlywinks was a sport offered by the Scenic West, an NIC-CSI clash likely would have created a buzz in that “sport” as well.

Long gone are the days when Ricks College in Rexburg would come to town, and NIC students would come dressed as Mormon missionaries.

Not much of a buzz was generated in recent years when the likes of Columbia Basin or Treasure Valley rolled into town.

Community Colleges of Spokane, roughly a half-hour away across that imaginary line, was a natural rival for NIC — maybe even more so when the Cardinals were in the NJCAA, as it was a big deal for the Sasquatch to try to knock off the team that plays in a big-boy league with the likes of CSI and Salt Lake Community College.

But NIC’s men have dominated that matchup with CCS in recent years.

THE BIG question with NIC’s move back to the NJCAA is, if NIC joined the NWAC in 2016 because it was too costly to play in the SWAC, where is that extra money going to come from now?

Instead of short-ish bus trips to Moses Lake, Pasco, Yakima, Wenatchee and the like, now NIC will make longer jaunts to Colorado, southern Utah and Nevada. The shortest trip will be to Twin Falls to play CSI, which is a long trip in the NWAC.

NIC said it is “still figuring out the details and costs.”

Also, who leaves a conference without a definite landing spot in a new conference?

You would assume NIC would end up back in the SWAC, which is the closest region in the NJCAA. But there has been no invite yet from the Scenic West, at least publicly.

Wednesday’s news release announcing NIC’s move noted that NIC and the NWAC had agreed to a “mutually beneficial transition” of NIC out of the NWAC and back into the NJCAA.

Hmmm …

That’s like when you read a news release saying a school and a coach “have mutually agreed to part ways.”

And if you believe that …

Remember, NIC’s men won conference championships in 2018 and ’19 — the Cardinals’ second and third years in the NWAC — then were hit with a three-year postseason ban for violating NWAC rules.

And then there are those who ask, if NIC has this extra money to spend playing in a more-expensive conference, how about using that money to bring back baseball, which was dropped in a cost-cutting move two decades ago.

IF NIC can pull this off, great.

With better players and better teams coming to town, and NIC presumably bringing in better players because it can offer more in scholarships, the buzz figures to return.

I wasn’t here for much of the Rolly Williams regime, but I remember sitting in a packed NIC gym in 1997 when both Cardinal basketball teams qualified for nationals.

NIC’s men again made it to nationals in 2016, following an undefeated regular season.

NIC’s men have held their own against junior colleges throughout the west in recent years, even after returning to the land of partial scholarships in the NWAC.

NIC’s women have been a middle-of-the-road team in basketball in recent years. But it wasn’t too long ago — 2011 — when the Cardinal women brought home an NJCAA title, with a roster including several local players, to boot.

NIC’s softball team won NWAC tournament championships in 2018 and ’19 under Don Don Williams, who started the Cardinal program in 1998.

But the NIC softball team was a factor in the SWAC as well, coming inches from winning the NJCAA championship in 2007.

BACK TO the question at the beginning of this column — what do you think of what NIC is doing with its athletic department?

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.