Stinky Sneaker games Friday

These are no ordinary high school basketball game.

And when the annual Central Valley-University high school spirit basketball games, The Stinky Sneaker, moves to the Spokane Arena Friday night, the game will have come full circle.

The event originated more than two decades ago when the Greater Spokane League decided that most of its league games should be played in the old Spokane Coliseum. Like most games featuring teams from the old Border League, CV and U-Hi never needed help to draw fans whenever they renewed the traditional rivalry series.

But getting those fans to travel downtown to see the game in the old barn on Boone Avenue was a challenge.

“I was the athletic director at CV and Bill Ames was AD over at U-Hi,” Jay Rydell recalled. “We decided that we needed to do something to help draw fans downtown to see the game and we looked at things like the Apple Cup (the annual Washington State-Washington football rivalry game).

“I was talking to Bill on the phone and I looked over in the corner of my office at a box full of old shoes. I said ‘Bill, I’ve got it! We’re going to have a Stinky Sneaker game!’ “

And the rest is history.

Rydell even donated the trophy to the cause.

“I used one of my old handball shoes,” he laughed. “I mounted it on a trophy base and that was it.”

The first game was a big success – drawing a crowd in the Coliseum to rival the number who would attend a CV-U-Hi game in Central Valley’s gym.

“It used to be that there could only be one pep band for a game, even at the Coliseum,” Rydell said. “We got permission to have both bands there and that turned into kind of a battle of the bands thing.”

The game evolved over the years. Each school holds a spirit week, picks a theme and stages a production – complete with faculty involvement. In every sense, Stinky Sneaker became more than a basketball game; it became a full-blown event.

The Stinky Sneaker trophy, by the way, goes to the school that best exemplifies the spirit of the event, not the winner of game. Spirit points are awarded or taken away during the night. Negative cheers (Such as chanting “air ball, air ball” when a shot misses the rim) result in negative points.

As both schools moved into new buildings in recent years, the event outgrew its confines – especially as each school added freshmen, making each school almost half again as large as before.

“Adding that many more students made our enrollment 150 percent of what it was before,” Central Valley athletic director Butch Walter explained. “We only have room for about 2,200 people in the gym, and by the time you add in staff and basketball personnel we were actually over maximum capacity.”

“It’s gotten to the point where we’ve had to turn people away,” current University athletic director Ken VanSickle explained. “If you weren’t there by 5 p.m., you didn’t get in. We kept hearing from the community that there were a lot of people who wanted to attend the game, but couldn’t get in. What’s more, it’s been really cold in recent years and we’ve had grandfathers and grandmothers who didn’t come because they didn’t want to wait in line in the bitter cold, especially if there was a chance they couldn’t get in.”

“We’ve had parents of the kids in the drill team who wanted to come see their kids perform and weren’t that interested in the game,” Walter explained. “We did special passes for them. We’d escort them in for the performance and back out again.

“It was at the point where, if a kid from the junior varsity game was going to suit up for the varsity game, their parents couldn’t stay and watch because they couldn’t get back in. We’ve fixed that this year by moving the JV and frosh games to Thursday.”

Moving the game to the Arena solves space problems and opens the game up for even more spectators – allowing each school to bring its pep band.

“The kids stand for both games,” Walter said. “If you were a fan who just wanted to see the game, you wound up having to stand, too. In recent years we’ve had students from other schools who wanted to come see what the game was all about, too, and we had to turn them away because that would be taking seats away from our own students.”

Now, by moving to the Arena, there will be plenty of seats available for anyone and everyone. Especially those fans who could not make it to the gym to line up by 5 p.m.

“We’re hoping to get between 3,000 and 4,000 people out for the game,” Walter said. “Especially because there’s a cost involved in renting the Arena.”