Late Saturday night, I had to wonder — what did we in the media do before we had things like Twitter and the Internet?
I’ve been doing this long enough that I should know the answer to that question.
But because I’ve been doing this so long, I tend to forget.
Clark County had athletes spread across the state Saturday from Spokane to Lake Stevens to Bonney Lake to Longview competing for berths in this weekend’s state championship events.
And there’s no way we could report on how all of those athletes did without the help of coaches, athletic directors, tournament directors, our colleagues at other newspapers and a few dedicated souls who run certain websites.
Take the wrestling regionals. We had wrestlers in Lake Stevens, Bonney Lake, Centralia and Castle Rock.
Results from those regional meets started to trickle in piece by piece as coaches from Union, Ridgefield, Woodland and Washougal called in results. Then the tournament directors from the Bonney Lake and Centralia regionals emailed us the full results.
But as the night wore on, we were still missing full results from the 4A, 1A and girls regionals.
Then Dave Gilbertson came to the rescue. Gilbertson is a Snohomish County doctor and wrestling enthusiast who runs the WashingtonWrestlingReport.com, a website that posts results, brackets and rankings.
A recent Everett Herald story on Gilbertson led with “He’s not exactly Batman, but Dave Gilbertson is somewhat of a modern-day superhero.”
Well, he was my hero Saturday. Gilbertson’s site began posting results from wrestling regionals from around the state.
And that’s where I found results from the 4A regional in Lake Stevens and 1A regional from Castle Rock.
But eventually time ran short. And that’s why we were not able to get the girls regional results in Sunday’s paper. And that’s something we’ll remedy right now.
Three Clark County wrestlers earned regional titles Saturday in Castle Rock: Mountain View’s Kyra Battara (112 pounds), Union’s Tiffany Hu (118) and Evergreen’s Stephanie Simon (145).
Battle Ground had five wrestlers clinch state tournament berths — Kassi Strano (100), Lourdes Arellano (112), Hannah Vanosdel (137), Victoria Carlson (155) and Mixtly Simon (195) — as the Tigers placed third in the team standings. Mountain View also had a good day with Danielle Higgins (130) and Rose Eram (265) also earning state berths as the Thunder placed fourth.
Other local state qualifiers included Camas’ Taryn Lommasson (106), Prairie’s Quinn O’Bryant (106), Washougal’s Haven Camden (124) and Erin Locke (130) and Columbia River’s Samantha Schoene (137).
Now the risk with trying to run every state qualifier is that you may miss someone. If we did, we apologize. But, as you can see, there are a lot of names.
So that leaves the 2A district swim results in Longview as the only results from Saturday that we were unable to chase down. When we can get them, we will publish them.
State champions will be crowned this weekend in gymnastics and wrestling in Tacoma and swimming in Federal Way.
Basketball
Last weekend I started of list at my desk of 13 boys basketball teams from Clark County and 12 area girls basketball teams that were still alive in their pursuit for berth at state.
As this week begins, the list has been reduced to 12 boys teams and nine girls teams.
Those lists include both boys and girls teams from Battle Ground, which oddly both will open the 4A bi-district games at Kentwood. The boys were originally slated to play Tuesday, with the girls playing on Wednesday.
But to save on gas — and possibly creating a larger rooting section — the Battle Ground and Kentwood teams will play a doubleheader on Tuesday. The girls will play at 6 p.m. and the boys will play at 7:30 p.m.
For a complete look at all 4A and 3A bi-district pairings and 2A, 1A and 1B district basketball pairings, go to The Columbian’s prep sports blog at www.columbian.com/weblogs/highschoolsports.
Tim Martinez is the assistant sports editor/prep coordinator for The Columbian. He can be reached at 360-735-4538 or email at tim.martinez@columbian.com. Follow on Twitter @360TMart
