Lakeside High’s Baseball Team Sweeps Nea Title
Last weekend’s 7-1 and 3-1 baseball doubleheader sweep of Chewelah gave Lakeside High School its sixth Northeast A League championship of the 1996-97 school year.
It’s remarkable, considering that it was just 10 years ago that Nine Mile Falls School District passed a bond issue to build its first high school.
Lakeside has been in existence seven years and will graduate only its fifth senior class this June. It is one of the NEA’s smallest schools. Yet this year, Lakeside teams finished first or second place 11 times, and third twice in the league’s 15 sports.
“Honestly, for me it’s been a number of things,” said Matt Sullivan, the sixth-year baseball coach whose boys cross country team last fall placed in state.
“We have such a terrific group of kids, supportive parents and fine staff that we’ve kind of lucked out,” he said. “Face it. Discipline problems are minuscule. The kids are driven.”
The Eagle baseball team is an example. Sullivan has been blessed with strong pitching from three-sport star George Petticrew and left-hander Kris Granlund.
Guys like basketball MVP Bill Bender, whose dad was in the forefront of Lakeside’s inception, wrestling star Jason Christen, and football player Ian Ashley were instrumental in the Eagles 13-1 record.
That they are multi-sport athletes helps explain why the school has had such season-long success.
“We have a philosophy of sharing kids - very, very few of the best athletes specialize - and sharing facilities,” said athletic director Glen Payne. “I’m angry if they’re not in three sports. Being as small a school as we are, they have to be.”
The high school’s year in sports suspiciously resembles the perpetual success of Mead. It is not by coincidence.
Before the high school opened and students attended different area high schools, most chose to attend Mead, said Payne, who doubled as football coach.
“Our community learned to identify with that,” he said “It’s a Mead-type environment.”
Sullivan credits Payne, who from the outset developed Lakeside’s athletic philosophy.
Payne, who will step down as football coach after three straight state playoff appearances, came here from Oroville, Wash., with Lakeside’s first ninth grade class. Previously at Medical Lake, he said he liked the idea of starting a program from scratch.
“Negative thinking carried over through the hallways because there was no tradition,” he recalled. “Now, you never hear that.”
Said Sullivan, “Quite honestly, besides Glen, what we might have done right is get a lot of young coaches hungry for success. They had a lot of energy and were willing to build programs.”
Lakeside will win its second straight NEA All-Sports trophy. Boys teams finished no worse than second in any league sport this year. The wrestling team won state, both boys and girls basketball teams placed at state, and the boys cross country team was eighth.
Seeking similar post-season success now are the baseball team, league champion girls tennis team (which won the school’s first state championship in 1992), league champion boys and runnerup girls track teams, and boys golfers.
“We have as good a chance as any to get to the final four,” said Sullivan of his baseball team. “I don’t know if anyone has two pitchers like we do on the same team.”
But whatever happens, he said, it’s been a heckuva year.
, DataTimes