After searching for this thing for almost a week now, I finally found it: the home of Saskatoon beat writer Cory Wolfe's online road trip diary. The Blades' trip through the U.S. division is almost over now but it's a good read if you want to catch up on what life on the road with a WHL team is like. U.S. division fans may also enjoy some references to their local arenas and watering holes, etc.
Fact that surprised me: the Spokane paper tracks 160 high school football teams each Friday. One hundred and sixty high school teams? I'm in Calgary, which has just over 1 million people; there are 21 high schools in Calgary. Even accounting for each school having two teams, that's still only 42 teams for a city of one million people. According to Wikipedia, the metro Spokane area has less than half as many people.....so either Spokane has a lot of really small high schools, or they are tracking football teams from a heckuva lot of places outside of Spokane. I knew high school ball was a really big deal south of the border but these are the kind of numbers that bring that fact home. Just me anyway.
2 comments:
Regarding the Spokane paper and the 160 high school football teams. There are 37 games this weekend, according to the online edition of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, which would indicate 74 high schools. There may be some byes, so the number could be a bit higher.
http://www.spokesmanreview.com/sports/preps/football/listgames.asp
Granted, this is still an outsized number given the population of Spokane. However, the Spokesman-Review covers all of Eastern Washington, and northern Idaho. It's not so much the population but the expanse of territory they cover. Also, some of these high schools are so small that they play eight-man football.
I tuned into Friday's local news to catch the Americans highlights. The high school football highlights started at 11:12 and ended at 11:26...and that's in the Tri-Cities. I hadn't heard of about half the high schools mentioned and I've lived here 15+ years. Football is a big draw.
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