After 44 years of coaching, Bob Ames isn’t given to gushing about his players at Bellingham’s Meridian High School. Unless that player is quarterback Simon Burkett.
The help-wanted ad went up last week on the Eastern Washington University web site. Two-thirds of the way down the list – just below ads for a custodian and food service manager – is the intriguing title of “Director of Intercollegiate Athletics.”
Eastern Washington’s motto this week: two for the road. For several reasons, the Eagles could use a sweep this weekend at Sacramento State and Portland State.
Only a week ago, Bogdan Bliznyuk moved to the top of the EWU men’s career scoring list. Now Delaney Hodgins is just 15 points away from breaking the record set two years ago by her sister Hayley, who will be in attendance along with the entire Hodgins clan from Pasco.
In the past year, Jake Wiley has learned much about basketball, life and himself. Most of all, he discovered that he loves peace and quiet – a rare commodity in New York, where Wiley spent the last six months making some noise in the NBA and the G-League.
Saturday was Alumni Night at the Whitworth Fieldhouse, with the reasonable expectation of some entertaining basketball. The alums got even more than that, as the fourth-ranked Pirates outlasted Puget Sound 111-97 in a game that left the spectators as exhausted as the players.
There will be more games like this for Eastern Washington, with hard-nosed defense, multiple lead changes and clutch plays at the end. Saturday afternoon’s Big Sky Conference encounter with Northern Colorado had all of the above, plus some unlikely heroes who led the Eagles to a 67-65 win at Reese Court.
Longtime athletics administrator Lynn Hickey will serve as interim athletic director at Eastern Washington University, president Mary Cullinan said in a release Friday morning.
Bogdan Bliznyuk scored 28 points and his first basket, a pretty 3 from the corner a little over a minute into the game, made him the all-time leading scorer at Eastern Washington, which went on to defeat North Dakota 95-71 Thursday night in Cheney.
The ball was ripe for the taking, and the Gonzaga women seized it with both hands. In fact, eight different players had a hand in Saturday’s turnover-fest, making it all the easier to take a 71-44 West Coast Conference win over Santa Clara at the Kennel.
Sometime next week, Eastern Washington University president Mary Cullinan is expected to publicly announce formation of a search committee and an interim athletic director to replace the departing Bill Chaves.
Thursday’s game at Saint Mary’s is the Bulldogs’ first major West Coast Conference test of the season. A win over the Gaels would keep GU (13-4 overall and 6-0 in the WCC) alone in first place.
Last March, in the final game of the regular season, Eastern needed a win at last-place Northern Arizona to earn a share of the Big Sky Conference title. Instead, the Eagles lost 91-75 to finish second behind North Dakota.
While his current employer was making tentative plans to search for a successor, Bill Chaves was introduced Tuesday as the new athletic director at the University of North Dakota,