Steve Christilaw: WV can really rain on your homecoming parade

The traditional homecoming football game has been a thread in the fabric of our culture for at least a century.

It’s a rich tapestry. The alumni are invited back, royalty is selected and a week of special celebrations culminates in a huge dance.

Oh, and there’s a football game. Because you can’t have a halftime celebration if you don’t play a football game.

The band frequently puts on a show and the royalty comes out. And before the second-half kickoff the homecoming queen and king are crowned.

Homecoming is pretty much what you get when you let people who don’t care about the game of football schedule and design a celebration around a football game.

Homecoming celebrations are like giving the opposing team inspirational bulletin-board material on steroids. In so many ways, you could not set out to build a better booby trap for a home team if you tried.

Which in some ways makes West Valley’s record in homecoming games that much more remarkable.

The Eagles now are 3-0 in homecoming games this season.

West Valley had its own homecoming in September, clobbering Rogers 55-6 on the Eagles’ home field – on a day when the school dedicated its home baseball field to former coach and WV athletic director Jack Spring.

A week later, they were in Moscow for a nonleague game with the Bears.

“They don’t have a visitor’s locker room for you down there,” West Valley football coach Craig Whitney said. “We had to stand out there on the field while they did a whole (halftime) parade.”

 When a team stands around and watches a parade for its opponent, the odds are good they aren’t standing around thinking about how cool the decorations are.

The Eagles left Idaho that night after thumping Moscow, 42-7.

Friday night, they took their 2-0 homecoming record to Cheney, where the Blackhawks had a huge celebration planned.

Not that Cheney doesn’t put a lot of love into every home football game – they do. They always have a great turnout – not just students and faculty, but the whole community celebrates high school football in Cheney and they are both vocal and enthusiastic.

They were all of that and more Friday night.

Cheney and West Valley battled through a scoreless first half. The marching band put on an elaborate halftime show that incorporated both music and dance.  The royalty was presented and crowned.

Then they kicked off the second half.

And West Valley pulled out a 17-14 win.

It wasn’t that the Eagles had been super fired-up by the halftime celebration. Cheney has a locker room, and they were removed from the festivities. And it wasn’t that the coaching staff made major changes to the game plan.

No, it was more about simply changing cars.

The West Valley offense has a stable of exceptionally speedy players, and they try to get the ball into their hands as often as possible.

But Friday night in Cheney was a damp night and the footing did not make for a fast track.

After a first-half of slipping and sliding around, the coaching staff decided to let quarterback Austin Lee run the ball himself.

“Austin is more of a four-wheel-drive kind of kid and he was able to run the ball,” Whitney said. “If you get us on a dry field, we have some Corvettes, but they couldn’t get started.”

After the final gun, Cheney uncorked its grand finale: A fireworks show.

“They spent all this money on a fireworks show, and we’re standing out here, soaking it in like it’s all for us,” Whitney said, wearing a huge smile while the bursting lights played across the dark on the field. “This is cool.”

It’s like finding money you didn’t know you had, only better.

It’s walking off with the whole show.