My two cents - Double booking the big grid date left a lot of debris around the state

What was the connection between the Starting Gate Restaurant in Auburn, the cold confines of Martin Stadium in Pullman and Ferris High School football fans on the morning of Dec. 5?

Well, actually there was no connection, but let’s just go over this for a wrap on the high school football campaign of 2010.

The Starting Gate on Auburn Way is a 24-hour restaurant which is more like a diner. It offers a full breakfast menu, reasonable prices and usually unsolicited views on Boeing/sports/politics from the clientele. Many of the early birds smoke, so they stand outside and wait for the delivery of the Sunday morning papers.

The Starting Gate is an automatic pre-dawn Sunday breakfast choice for a weekly sports reporter, such as myself, who wants to depart the big town, Tacoma, for the spaces of Eastern Washington after a stay in an inexpensive motel room in the Emerald Downs neighborhood.

The Starting Gate smokers on Sunday, Dec. 5, reported the Seattle Times man had arrived, but the Tacoma Tribune man had not. One purchase of the Times (eight quarters), one veggie omelet and two verbal exchanges later about the lowly state of the Mariners, and the weekly sports guy takes a look at the Seattle Times.

The Times sports page, of course, features a six column top picture of the UW Huskies celebrating their 35-28 win over the WSU Cougars in the Apple Cup. One fact that stands out in the lead story by Bob Condotta is that the Apple Cup was played in “front of 30,157.”

Condotta didn’t dwell on that number, but a little approximate math suggests the Apple Cup was also played in Martin Stadium “in front of” vacant seats, maybe about 25 percent.

A lot of factors could have caused this. One of them, of course, had to be the two-day event in the Tacoma Dome just down the road from Auburn and the Starting Gate Restaurant.

The state Gridiron Classic, the capstone of the fall high school football season for all divisions, has been traditionally booked on the first weekend in December. The date is actually locked in because the WIAA has to go through an actual playoff season which starts three weeks earlier.

For reasons dutifully explained, but perhaps not fully explained, the Apple Cup was bumped back to the same first weekend in December. The state’s two major football programs booked their big show on the same date as the high school championships.

An interesting statistic not available would be the number of tickets unsold for each event because the conflict with the other event. A guess here would be the Apple Cup sustained the most damage. The WIAA’s Tacoma Dome show is essentially an event for the players, their fellow students, parents and fans.

Those people, like the Colfax fans, followed their teams to Tacoma and abandoned any plans they might have had for attending the event in Martin Stadium.

Of course, both events have a following of fans not directly related to the players on the turf, and those people had to decide which direction they wanted to go.

The double booking also presented a dilemma for the sports editors around the state. Who gets the top ink? If the local high school team ascends to championship glory in the Tacoma Dome, will their achievement bump the Apple Cup coverage?

For the last two weeks in its sports letters space, the Spokesman Review has included letters from Ferris High School fans who were miffed because the Saxons 24-16 championship win over Skyline wound up on Page 5 of the Dec. 5 Sunday sports section. The Ferris-Skyline battle was viewed by most Colfax grid followers because it preceded the Colfax-South Bend battle.

It’s not the intent here to join the critics from Ferris, or possibly the critics from Colfax who watched the Bulldogs in their own championship battle.

There’s only so much space on a front sports page, and editors and writers of the state’s dailies were working under a lot of pressure before deadline Dec. 4. The pressure was compounded in newsrooms where towns had local entrants in the high school title games.

Editors at the Spokesman and Seattle Times probably made their decisions based on overall readership. Although Ferris fans and parents, and Colfax fans and parents, were more interested in the fates of their teams at Tacoma, the majority of readers for those daily papers lacked a direct high school link and were possibly more interested in the Apple Cup.

As a footnote, both the Seattle and Spokane papers made essentially the same call. The Times sport front ran a bottom corner intro picture showing a Skyline player and coach dealing with defeat at the hands of the Saxons. The Times, by the way, didn’t get to the high school finals until Page 10.

The Review did run a small picture of the Ferris celebration on its Sports front with a reference to the stories on Page 5.

Now, if the athletic directors at both universities had given a little more consideration to their change of the Apple Cup dates, the high school Tacoma Dome stories would have probably received better play, maybe even the front page envisioned by Ferris fans.

Also, Martin Stadium might have had a capacity crowd instead of a three-quarter crowd.