If the chill in the air hadn’t already tipped you off, winter has arrived in Southwest Washington — at least the winter prep sports season.
This week marks the first full week of high school winter sports action, with all winter sports — basketball, wrestling, girls bowling, boys swimming and gymnastics — having events on the schedule.
But before we dive all the way into the winter sports season, we have to close the book on the fall sports season.
Last week, The Columbian announced All-Region athletes of the year and teams in three sports — boys cross country, girls cross country and volleyball.
This week, we announced honors in three more sports — girls soccer, girls swimming and football. All-Region honors for boys golf and boys tennis will be made in the spring after state tournaments are held.
The fan vote for the girls soccer All-Region team closed on Sunday. The fan vote for the All-Region football team will begin on Monday evening, and continue until Friday evening.
Remember, folks, this is an online vote only. Don’t send me an email — I don’t quite get how people can have access to email, but are not able to vote online — and don’t call me with the vote. Those votes won’t be counted.
Embrace technology.
The girls swimming All-Region standouts will be announced in Tuesday’s edition. Girls soccer is scheduled to follow on Friday, and football finishes off the series on Sunday.
We’ve added a few new wrinkles to our All-Region packages, including publishing photos of all of our All-Region team selections.
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You may recall last season how The Columbian made a pledge to cover every girls and boys basketball team in Clark County in Class 2A and above. And we included Woodland, which is just beyond the county borders, in that pledge.
Then we went out and made good on that pledge to see all 30 of those teams. In fact, prep reporter Paul Valencia saw almost all of those teams himself.
Well, we make that pledge again this season, and we’ll even add our 1A teams from Clark County, pushing the number to 36.
Scratch one team off that list, as I helped out Paul by going to see the Union girls basketball team kick off the season with a 53-50 overtime win over Bethel on Saturday night.
So that’s one down, 35 to go.
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Here are some highlights of the first full week of winter sports.
Basketball: There are games every day this week, so there a lot of non-league games to choose from. We’ll highlight an old rivalry: Hudson’s Bay vs. Fort Vancouver. The Eagles and Trappers will play a girls-boys doubleheader at Fort on Thursday with the girls game starting at 6 p.m.
Wrestling: Fort Vancouver is also the site of the first non-league dual match of the season. The Trappers host Heritage at 7 p.m. Wednesday to kick off the season.
Boys swimming: Just about every team in Southwest Washington will jump into the pool on Thursday for the Mark Morris Jamboree in Longview.
Gymnastics: The opening meets are scheduled throughout the day on Saturday at Naydenov, VEGA and Northpointe facilities.
Tim Martinez is the assistant sports editor/prep coordinator for The Columbian. He can be reached at 360-735-4538, tim.martinez@columbian.com or follow his Twitter handle @360TMart.
