Jeff Bunch

As the players filtered into town for the Spokane Chiefs' training camp this week, Bill Peters took note of those who had freshly shorn heads. "High and tight, eh?" the coach of the Western Hockey League team said to one of them, with an approving nod and smile.

The Spokane Chiefs hit the ice for the first time on Friday, with the focus on seeing top players from recent bantam drafts and seeing what kind of progress they have made. Up in the stands and the owner's box were a handful of Chiefs' scouts and their new leader, Chris Moulton.

IF YOUR DREAM as a young athlete is to play in the National Hockey League someday, it could happen. But you're going to have to work a little harder if you live in Spokane. That's the consensus of area coaches and other teachers of the game. Lately, more and more parents in the area are heeding their advice and doing just that: giving their kids an opportunity to chase a dream on ice. Nobody said it was going to be easy. There are certain factors which limit the ability of players from the Spokane area to get on to the elite developmental track, not the least of which is geography. The Pacific Northwest is relatively isolated from the hockey hotbeds of the Midwest and the East. Even the burgeoning West Coast hockey scene revolves more around the population centers of California and, to some degree, the Puget Sound.

The Spokane Chiefs effectively fired coach Al Conroy on Monday, refusing to exercise a club option for the second year of a two-year contract. Spokane missed the Western Hockey League playoffs for the first time since 1999, finishing last in the five-team U.S. Division of the Western Conference with a record of 24-38-8-2.

CRANBROOK, British Columbia – In the end, it came down to a great player making a great play. Kootenay's Nigel Dawes scored consecutive goals, the final one breaking a tie with 6 minutes, 27 seconds remaining, to give his Ice team a 3-2 victory over the Spokane Chiefs in a Western Hockey League game on Friday night before a Rec-Plex Center record crowd of 4,657.

With an audience of nearly a dozen 16- to 20-year-old talented hockey players listening intently, former Spokane Chiefs brawler Danny Green shares his testimony. "I'm just a drunken hockey player and if God can do this with me, he can do it with anyone," said Green, a "hell-raiser" from the senior amateur era of the early 1980s. Green has been clean and sober for 15 years and is a pastor at Community Bible Chapel.

Sometimes you can tell it's just not going to be your night. For the Spokane Chiefs, that appeared to be the case from the outset of Wednesday night's Western Hockey League game at the Arena. Spokane, fighting for its playoff life, came out with a full effort from the drop of the puck, but found itself down early. Once they fell behind, the Chiefs lost their heart

For the last 48 years, Joe Bussard has been at every State B basketball tournament. Bussard has a program from every one of them to prove it, but they won't show that he's sometimes had to travel from as far as the Southwestern U.S. to make it some years.

It may not have been the game between the best boys teams, but it was clearly one of the best games of this year's State B tournament: Neah Bay 58, Clallam Bay 57 in overtime. Neah Bay had lost to its bitter rival two out of three times in meetings between the regular season and tri-districts. Then, on Friday, the Red Devils trailed 30-25 at halftime before coming back late in the game behind senior Robert Arnold.

The Portland Winter Hawks just know how to frustrate an opponent. On Friday night, Portland came at Spokane time and time again, both taking Chiefs players off the puck then also taking them on physically, as the Winter Hawks cruised to a 4-0 win over the Chiefs in a Western Hockey League game on Friday night before 7,823 at the Arena.