For some, B tourney is not 2B

Change is coming next year to Spokane’s longest-running high school event, the State B basketball tournament.

The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association’s executive board voted Monday to hold the 2B Basketball Tournament in Spokane starting in March 2007, but to send the smaller 1B schools to Yakima.

The 2B tournament, which was created after the WIAA decided to add a sixth high school enrollment classification starting in the fall of this year, is for schools with enrollment of between about 88 and 187 in 10th through 12th grades. It will be held Wednesday through Saturday the first week of March – the same schedule as the current B Tournament.

The executive board, at the same meeting, awarded to Yakima the 2007 1B Tournament, for the state’s smallest schools. It will be held the following week.

The change means many of the traditional B schools that appear in Spokane consistently – including local schools such as St. John-Endicott, Sprague-Harrington, Garfield-Palouse or Tekoa-Oakesdale – will be playing in Yakima if their boys or girls team earns a state berth.

“The community really, really liked the B Tournament the way it was,” said St. John-Endicott girls basketball coach and athletic director Don Kemper. “I believe they were in favor of not splitting (the classifications). It’s going to be a tough change for us.”

Spokane has hosted the state’s smallest schools’ basketball tournament for nearly 50 years, and many of the participants have developed traditions around the event.

“The hardest part, it’s been a tradition for Whitman County forever,” said Ken Lindgren, Oakesdale’s athletic director and a member of the WIAA executive board. “Where do you go to State B? Spokane. And that’s what you associate it with. But it means the tradition of going to Spokane is gone, so I guess it’s time to start a new tradition, moving on to Yakima.”

But that may mean one of the Spokane tournament’s traditional strengths – its attendance – may suffer.

At least that’s the view of retired school administrator Clayton Dunn, who worked at the B Tournament for 26 years and was the tournament director from 1995 to 2000.

“The fans that tended to attend the tournament, per se, versus those who attend just to see their schools, were the people from Whitman County and the people from the Bi-County,” he said. “I can envision the people from St. John, for example, heck, they’re there for the whole tournament. I think the attendance will be materially affected and, in the long run, it will be very difficult to maintain the same success.”

The decision to split the B classification in two was, in Dunn’s view, the bigger mistake.

“Adding another classification made little if any sense,” he said. “The communities that have been the backbone in terms of (B Tournament) attendance are the Whitman County schools, most of them aren’t going to be there.”

But the longtime fans might be. Spokane Valley optometrist Dale Schnibbe, who has attended more than 20 B Tournaments since his Brewster High days, plans to continue to attend.

“I can’t see myself not going,” he said, “but it definitely is going to be different.

“The biggest thing, in terms of frustration, is seeing the teams that have been there for years and years, which you want to see over and over, being moved around in classification. Some of those you can”t help, (but) to lose some of the smaller communities, your three-named schools, I’m frustrated with it.

“It would be nice to have both of them here, if we could do that. I don’t know if there was a way to do that, but it would have been nice.”

That was part of the conversation this week, according to WIAA Executive Director Mike Colbrese.

“There was a lot of discussion about the 1B Tournament and really, with the Spokane Arena only being available for one weekend next year and the fact in the future it would only be available Monday through Thursday, that tournament obviously had to go to Yakima,” he said.

The Arena’s availability is always a question, no matter the event, said general manager Kevin Twohig. But it wasn’t the only problem with the site selection.

“There were conflicts between trying to figure out what the WIAA wanted to site in Spokane and simply our availability to do their event,” he said, citing events like the NCAA basketball tournament and U.S. Figure Skating Championships that will impact the Arena’s schedule next year.

“We can’t always make everybody happy, but we try to always make our prime tenant (the Chiefs) happy, because they are our prime tenant and we have a 15-year lease with them,” Twohig said. “When they make money, we make money. When they lose money, we generally lose money.”

With only one weekend available, the WIAA decided to put the 2B in Spokane.

“As far as the issue of the 1B or the 2B, the board just felt that the 2B was a better fit for Spokane with the size of the Arena and the community,” Colbrese said, before adding that the site may change in the future. “(The board members) are also out discussing with their members’ schools right now whether they believe it would be a good idea to keep those tournaments in those towns or rotate them on a two-year basis between the two communities. The discussion is far from over on the event itself.”

But the discussion is over concerning what other state events will be held in the Spokane area after this school year.

The only other state tournament awarded to Spokane for the four years between 2007 and 2010 is the 2B/1B State Track meet, though a site was not selected. The meet, which will stretch over two days, will either be at Eastern Washington University, site of the current three-day 2A/1A/B meet, or Spokane Falls Community College.

Also, Spokane’s Avista Stadium will serve as a backup for Safeco Field if the Seattle Mariners’ facility is unavailable for the 4A baseball tournament in either 2007 or 2008. Dropped from the WIAA’s schedule is the B volleyball tournament at EWU, replaced by either an all-classification tournament in the Tacoma Dome or a 2B/1B tournament in Tri-Cities.