Jake Locker just not that good

Pardon me if I am saying something that some folks feels is an upardonable sin. But... But I have been watching Jake Locker for a couple of years now and just don't see the greatness.

CTL Baseball Post-Season Still Wide Open

While things are beginning to take some shape at the top of the CTL with Cashmere certainly sitting in the cat-bird seat, the bottom portion of the district play-offs is still up-for-grabs.

The biggest surprise this year is that Lake Roosevelt is still in the mix this late in the season, just one year out from a season in which they did not win a game.

This year the L/R Raiders have wins against Tonasket and Omak and played Brewster into extra innings in their first match up.

The other big surprise is that the Chelan Goats are getting started so slow. Many people had Chelan contending for the league title. Now, depending on how the last couple of weeks play out there is the possibility of Chelan losing the bottom district position to the Lake Roosevelt Raiders.

Baseball Season!

Don't have all the scores yet but yesterday was sure a wonderful day to be playing America's past-time.

Pateros visited Lake Roosevelt yesterday. Both the girls softball team and the boys baseball team had games.

Girls Softball:
Pateros won. Sorry but I don't have the score.

Boys Baseball:
Lake Roosevelt won the first game of the double header with a score of 4 to 1.

Pateros won the second game by a score of 3 to 1.

CTL/NEA Cross-over Regional Tournament this weekend!

Big games coming up in high school 1A sports. It is the weekend that the CTL and the NEA square off to see who goes into state and at what seeding.

We know that the number 1 seed with either be Chelan or Freeman with the lose between them being the #2 seed. It's just me, but I think Chelan will cut through Freeman like a hot knife through butter. I'll eat my crow in a separate blog post if I am wrong.

Then we have Lake Roosevelt facing Lakeside with the winner moving on to state as the #3 seed. I am predicting Lake Roosevelt.

Finally we have Cashmere facing Chewelah with the winner of that game to move on to play the loser of the LR/Lakeside game. I think that it will be Lakeside facing Cashmere with Lakeside coming out on top.

See the boys regional bracket here.

The girls regional bracket can be seen here.

I don't know as much about the girls teams this year but I know that Okanogan is really strong and deep. I am not going to make any predictions though.

Further down the bracket we have Chelan from the CTL facing Lakeside with the winner moving on to state as the #3 seed.

Tuesday games over Wednesday Round-Up

CTL Boys Bracket
With the CTL boys "play-in" game over and the Tuesday boys and girls games finished the CTL play-off picture begins to take shape. The Brewster boys faced off against Cascade and Okanogan faced off against a surging Cashmere.

Brewster just could not hang with a deeper Cascade team and lost 66 to 47. And Okanogan, who was obviously highly over-rated throughout the regular season lost 59 to 55. Both Okanogan and Brewster are now out of the district tournament altogether. Brewster has become a highly depleted team and it showed. Okanogan seems to have suffered from a very weak non-league schedule. All season long they were given credit in the state-wide rankings for running up the score on 1 and 2B schools.

Meanwhile Cashmere has been surging late in the season and are obviously a better coached team than Okanogan. Cashmere will now face LR in the next round this Friday and if LR has their game face on and play a clean game they should win that game. However if the LR players do not take this Cashmere team serious and give the Bulldogs the feeling that they can win it, then there is the possibility of an upset.

Cascade will face off against the Goats of Chelan in the other quarter final and the Goats, who may be the best team in the state, should easily win that game.

Girls Bracket
Meanwhile on the ladies side of the tourney the Brewster Lady Bears upset the Cascade Kodiaks of Leavenworth. Really pretty stunning actually. That sets the Lady Bears up against a strong Okanogan team.

On the other side Cashmere completely handled the Lady Raiders by a score of 59-39. And it wasn't even really that close.

That is not good news for the Lady Raiders going forward into next year.

District 7 Boys Bracket
Over on the district 7 side of the NEA region Chewelah will face off against Newport on Friday while Freeman will face off against Lakeside on Saturday. The winner between Chewelah and Newport will face the loser of the Freeman/Lakeside game.

The odds are on Freeman getting past Lakeside.

1A Boys Basketball Post Season Shapes Up

First off the Caribou Trail League is looking pretty strong this year. Chelan finished the season a stunning 12 and 0 with Lake Roosevelt coming in a strong second place at 9 and 3. Two of those losses were to power house Chelan and one of them was a very flukey loss to Cascade. LR should have never lost that game but they were attacked by a three headed monster "bad attitude, injury and poor officiating."

A good team can overcome one or two of those adversaries but not all three. As such Lake Roosevelt crushed Cascade when they paid a visit on the last game of the season. Lake Roosevelt crushed Cascade 70 to 56. And the game was not even that close.

LR and Chelan should be able to cruise through the district play-offs with Chelan becoming the number 1 seed and LR becoming the number 2 seed.

Let's not forget that LR beat district 7's best team "Freeman" already this year in Spokane by a score of 46 to 41.

Looking at the regionals bracket both Chelan and Freeman will likely be the two teams moving on to state from their respective districts with Lake Roosevelt hooking up with a very weak "Lakeside" 8/12, "Chewelah" 13/8, or "Newport" 8/14. Thus making LR the #3 seed team to state from this region. It is a really screwy formula because it is very likely that the CTL has at least the top TWO teams in Chelan and LR.

Meanwhile Cashmere or Cascade will face off to be the #3 team from the CTL sent to the eastern regional tournament. I think that either of those two teams could very easily defeat the #2 and #3 teams from the 7th district (Chewelah, Lakeside, Newport.), thus giving the CTL 3 teams to state.

I will end on this. That is that all the pundits have been overlooking LR all year. Even in the CTL most folks seem to be enamoured with Cascade and Okanogan for some reason. In all the state rankings that I have seen those two teams (and Freeman) have been continually ranked higher than LR dispite the fact that LR has already beat Freeman once.

If Chelan did not have one of the best teams in state high school history, this could very well be LR's year to go deep into state.

----

Girls 1A
Just a note, I am not as familiar with the girls 1A ball right now. I do know that LR made it to their district play-offs by the skin of their teeth and with the coaching being new and in somewhat disarray will have a hard time getting past the first night.

However the Okanogan girls are very strong this year and some folks think that the CTL could be bringing home a trophy this year via Okanogan or Chelan.

Great story on WSU's Reggie Moore and getting ready for UW

The Spokesman Review has a pretty nice write up on WSU's new guard Reggie Moore and the tension is building for the big WSU vs UW match up.

Cashmere upsets Cascade (Boys basketball)

The Cashmere Bulldogs worked out an upset win over neighboring Cascade with a 78 to 57 victory last night. From the Wenatchee World website.

Pedro Farias and Wes Worthen combined for 53 points as the Bulldogs first went through, then over, the Kodiaks defense.

“They got to the basket pretty easily in the first half, and they shot the lights out in the second half,” Kodiaks coach Paul Fraker said. “You’ve got to give them credit. They shot the ball really well.”

Farias knocked down four 3-pointers on the way to a game-high 29 points, while Worthen had 24 points and seven rebounds for Cashmere.

“They were giving us open shots, so we might as well take them,” Farias said.

Cascade never led in the game, and pulled even just once, on a pair of free throws by Evan Parton that made it 29-all with 3:02 left in the first half.

Non-league games impacting rankings

I was just curious as to why a team like Okanogan was ranked so high in the state basketball rankings for so long yet the LR Raiders have only just now breached the top ten. So I took a look at the non-league schedule for the Ok Bulldogs and the LR Raiders and found my answer.

The difference is the non-league games at the beginning of the season. Who did the Ok Bulldogs play in their first three nl games?

1. 2B Entiat (Ok won 52-42)
2. 2B Oroville (Ok won 56-50)
3. 2B Liberty Bell (Ok won 102-28

Then look at the LR first three games:

1. 2A Ephrata (LR lost 54-66. Note Ephrata in ranked top 10 in 2A)
2. 1A Freeman (LR won 46-41. Note Freeman is currently ranked one spot above LR)
3. 1A Chelan (LR lost 77-57)

Then look at some of the other earlier Ok nl games: Ok vs 2B Waterville (85-33), Ok vs 1B Almira (64-49), Ok vs 1B Kettle Falls (80-15).

Compare to LR earlier nl games: LR vs 2A Cheney (LR lost 61-71), LR vs 2A Mt. Spokane (LR lost 58-63).

This just shows how deceptive some of the AP rankings can be. A team like LR might be penalized in the AP rankings, however their pressure cooker nl games will set them up better for season ending tournament play.

Kinda like how the Gonzaga Bulldogs have built their program.

1A BBall Rankings Caribou Trail has 3 in top ten!

MaxPreps 1A boys basketball rankings are out and the Caribou Trail has 3 teams in the top 10.

1. Chelan
2. Vashon
3. Granger
4. Onalaska
5. Freeman (Rockford)
   
6. Lake Roosevelt (Coulee Dam)
   
7. Castle Rock
8. Cascade (Leavenworth)
9. Goldendale
10. Bellevue Christian
    

I saw Chelan play the other day against LR and I just cannot imagine how good a team would have to be to beat them. They are good. Very good.

And Freeman a notch ahead of LR? How, when LR beat Freeman earlier this year?

2B State Basketball Rankings

Jan 24 2B high school basketball rankings (top 15) via MaxPreps.

1. Liberty Christian (Richland)
2. Northwest Christian (Colbert)
3. Pe Ell
4. Davenport
5. Adna
6. Bear Creek (Redmond)
7. Riverside Christian (Yakima)
8. White Swan
   
9. Wahkiakum (Cathlamet)
10. Lind Ritzville
11. St. George's (Spokane)
12. Waitsburg/Prescott
13. Naselle
14. Napavine
15. Colfax
    

Chelan crushes Lake Roosevelt

Well I will say this. That Joey Harris kid from Chelan is the real deal. If there is a team that will beat Chelan at state this year I'd hate to see them.

The final score between Chelan and LR was something like 89 to 52. But it was not even that close.

Lake Roosevelt vs Chelan Tonight

Big game in the CTL tonight. The LR Raiders will be taking on the Chelan Goats. I'm sure that all the punditry will have the Goats winning this game in a walk. However, the Raiders of today are not the Raiders the Goats played at the beginning of the season.

And LR beat Chelan at home last year.

This could probably be the game that decides who is number one in the Caribou Trail. Okanogan will probably drop to fourth place and Cascade will have a hard time getting past LR when the play them at LR's barn later on in the season.

WSU Cougars over USC and a half game out of first

Who would have thought that at this point in the season the WSU Cougars would be only a half game out of first place and looking much livelier than the UW Dogs? I did. I had a conversation with a friend of mine at the beginning of the season and I said at the time that I just did not see what everyone else was seeing in the UofW. Just didn't get the hype (see Okanogan Bulldogs).

Now we will see if the Cougs can get passed the other LA school. The problem for the Cougars this year, I think, is going to be lack of size. They have only one really legit big man and that is Casto.

Lake Roosevelt Raiders move to third in the league

This story was published in the Grand Coulee Star newspaper before the LR Raiders handily defeated the Okanogan Bulldogs on Tuesday the 19th.

The Lake Roosevelt boys swept both games last week, pummeling both the Tigers of Tonasket and the Bulldogs of Cashmere.

Read the rest here...

First Blog Post

This blog is an attempt by me to simply follow and discuss sports in, around and concerning eastern Washington.

I would love to be able to delve into HS Sports quite a bit while also including EWA colleges.

My school is Lake Roosevelt High School and I am a 1983 graduate.