Talking Sports: Racking up the miles

With the Leyton Warriors exit from the state volleyball tournament yesterday morning, the fall sports season for the Sun-Telegraph is now officially over.

Now it's on to basketball and wrestling, and good luck to all.

There was some exciting playoff action for many of the teams in our area. That the Warriors volleyball team was the last one standing is not a great surprise. It was the third year in a row and the fifth time in the last six years the Warriors have made the big dance. Congrats to them for another 30-win season.

In going through the fall schedule for the first time I recognized what many of you may have already known for many years. It may even be a source of some frustration. Western Nebraska teams face challenges unknown to eastern schools.

It's a simple fact of geography that the population of east Nebraska is far greater than that of the west. On a few occassions in this space I have referred to how much more travel there is for kids around here than there was for me in high school.

But how much teams at my high school had to travel isn't especially relevant to anything important. It was just my way of paying homage to the kids, parents and rooters of western Nebraska's student athletes that they would happily endure so much time on a bus. But there is a greater issue here--a competitive issue. And I don't know that there is anything that can really be done about it. It's just the way it is.

A school in Omaha or Lincoln or anywhere else in the eastern third of the state has a much larger pool of competitors within an hour drive. Sidney, for example, can find no Class B school an hour or less away.

It must not have been a pleasant discovery for the Blair Bears football team when they first looked at the Class B football bracket a few weeks ago. The Bears couldn't have been too happy when they found out they had to travel more than 400 miles to Sidney.

But the odds that a team in the Omaha area would have to travel 300 or 400 miles to a playoff game are small. Had Blair been able to defeat the Raiders, they would have had the easy commute to Gretna of 31 miles. By virtue of their victory, the Raiders earned not just a quarterfinal berth, but a 380-mile drive to that city.

When the Scottsbluff gridders lost the district championship game to Sidney, they most likely lost an opportunity to host a playoff game. Instead they had to travel more than 350 miles to York. As Sidney and Scottsbluff were the only two teams from the panhandle represented in the field of 16, they were bound to have to face a long road trip at some point - as least if they had any success. McCook was the only other team from the western half of the state.

But football teams play but once a week. While the Raiders had to travel to Holdrege, Aurora and Gretna they also hosted teams that traveled well over a hundred miles. In addition to Blair, Lexington and McCook travelled to Weymouth Field this season.

For the volleyball teams it's more about competition than travel. Of course western teams routinely have roadtrips exceeding an hour. Beyond that though, eastern teams can schedule a larger variety of schools. They don't have to face the same team four times in the same season. Beatrice, which Sidney faced in the subdistrict tournament, didn't play any team more than twice - and they were district opponents.

"When you're only playing a handful of teams including some that aren't very competitive I think that makes it harder to improve," said Leyton Warriors senior Kassandra Harris. "I'm one for greater competition. I think that would make any team stronger. There's more you could learn against the best competition."

Harris' thoughts make sense to me. Many teams who earn places at state are paired with an unfamiliar opponent. For a team like Beatrice or Giltner, facing an unfamiliar team is a more routine occurrence than it is for Sidney or Leyton.

Imagine though, for the sake of argument, one year out of 10 state volleyball tournaments were held in the west. Scottsbluff would make the most sense. But there would need to be about four large gyms and I don't know how may hotel rooms available in close proximity. Bottom line is I don't know that the infrastructure exists anywhere in the west to accommodate such a large tournament.

As for football, the finals are held in Memorial Stadium in Lincoln every year. I don't think anybody from the west, north, south or east could care less about how long it would take to get there. I expect most Nebraska high school kids would walk to Lincoln if that's what it took for a chance to play in Memorial Stadium. I know I would. At least I know I would walk to Augusta, Ga. for a round of golf.