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Finding non-league opponents could be challenging

Tim Martinez: High schools

The Columbian
Published: December 6, 2010, 12:00am

State champions were crowned in Washington for football last weekend.

Claiming championships were Ferris of Spokane (4A), Bellevue (3A), Tumwater (2A), Cascade Christian (1A), South Bend (2B) and Lummi (1B).

Only two of those six state champions had a direct link to Clark County or Greater St. Helens League teams.

Bellevue beat Union way back on Labor Day weekend, and Tumwater beat Hockinson on Oct. 1.

Meanwhile, over in Oregon, five state champions were crowned last week. Four of those teams had links with local teams.

Class 1A champion St. Paul had a non-league win over King’s Way Christian; 2A champ Scio beat Woodland; 3A champion Rainier lost a non-league game to Columbia River; and 5A champion Sherwood beat Skyview.

Now, you may have heard that in Oregon they have a power-rating system that seeds teams for the postseason based on those ratings.

These ratings are based on wins and losses, as well as the strength of a team’s schedule.

So every coach in Oregon is required to report their game results to the OSAA, Oregon’s version of the WIAA.

However, teams in Washington don’t have that same requirement. The WIAA used to record and post results all scores and league standings on its web site for sports like football and basketball.

But because of staff cutbacks and the difficulty to compiling all of those results — believe it or not, it can be difficult to find scores to every game played in the state — the WIAA discontinued that practice last year.

That being the case, officials in Oregon don’t have any place to go to find win-loss records for Washington teams. So basically, when an Oregon team plays a Washington team, it basically counts as a non-game in their power-rating system.

So every one of those state champions actually took a hit in their seeding for the state playoff because they played teams from Washington.

That fact is making some Oregon schools to rethink their schedules for the 2011-12 school year. And that may pose a problem for teams in Southwest Washington to fill out their non-league schedules.

It’s a bigger problem when you only have five teams in your league, like the 4A and 2A GSHLs.

It’s an issue that either Oregon teams will need to figure out, or teams in Southwest Washington will be taking some longer road trips for non-league games next year.

• • •

You can’t listen to high school basketball games on the radio in Clark County, but you can watch some games on TV.

Really.

Tonight’s boys basketball game between Fort Vancouver and Hockinson will be shown live on Channel 29 on Comcast cable. Scott Thompson, head coach at Fort, said it’s the first of six Fort games that will shown on the public-access channel this season.

• • •

You may have noticed three of our Fall All-Region packages were published in The Columbian last week.

Look for All-Region packages for football, girls soccer and girls swimming to be published this week. We don’t select All-Region teams and athletes of the year for boys tennis and boys golf until after the state tournaments are held in the spring.

• • •

The winter sports season continues with mostly non-league action this week.

In girls basketball, Skyview and Prairie renew their rivalry tonight at Prairie. Because Prairie’s season-opener against Lakes last week was postponed until this Friday, tonight’s game is the new season opener for the Falcons. This will be Skyview’s third game of the season.

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On Wednesday, Camas and Union renew their brief yet spirited rivalry with a non-league boys/girls doubleheader at Union starting at 5:30 p.m.

On Friday, the 4A GSHL opens league play for boys and girls basketball. Skyview faces Heritage, with the girls playing at Skyview and the boys at Heritage. Battle Ground and Evergreen has girls/boys doubleheader starting at 5:30 p.m. at Evergreen.

Ridgefield and Ilwaco open their 1A Trico League schedules with a doubleheader at Ilwaco on Saturday.

In wrestling, La Center and Prairie will host invitational tournaments on Saturday.

Tim Martinez is the assistant sports editor/prep coordinator for The Columbian. He can be reached at (360) 735-4538 or e-mail at tim.martinez@columbian.com

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