This just in: Hawks still out in the cold

Pardon me for interrupting my regularly scheduled column.

I have the Great Northern League on Line 1 and the Northeast A on Line 2. Both are curious to find out if Lakeland would like to join their league.

The update out of Rathdrum is the Inland Empire League isn’t interested in Lakeland’s “compromise” to rejoin the league. Lakeland wants to play fewer 5A teams within the league. It is reportedly going to appeal to a higher authority.

A high-placed source in the Boise area tells me that the Idaho High School Activities Association isn’t interested in mediating. It’s not the IHSAA’s place to tell the IEL how to work with Lakeland, the source said.

So to borrow a line from Keith Olbermann, this is Day No. 45 in Lakeland holding its athletes hostage.

Back to our regularly scheduled column.

Change of season?

The IHSAA is considering a proposal to move golf from spring to fall beginning in the 2009-10 school year.

“I think our worst fall (weather) day would have been the best day last spring,” Lake City boys coach Kent Scanlon said.

Better weather is just one of the reasons cited by proponents of the change. IEL golf coaches recently had a scheduling meeting and talked about the proposal.

“We’ve heard rumblings the last six years about it possibly happening,” Coeur d’Alene boys coach Bryan Duncan said. “I was the coach at the meeting that was most against it. I have mixed feelings about it to be honest.”

The proposal was discussed by the IHSAA board of directors at the late September meeting. It was placed on the December meeting agenda for a first reading. If ratified, state would be held one final time in the spring before moving to the fall in 2009.

IHSAA executive director John Billetz said an informal survey of golf courses in southern Idaho show that they would like to see the state meets moved to the fall because of availability issues in the spring.

Billetz believes courses receive less play in the fall than in the spring.

“One of the biggest negatives came from the smaller schools,” Billetz said. “At the smaller schools a lot of the golfers are two- or three-sport athletes who are usually playing another sport in the fall. Moving golf to fall would force them to make a choice that they wouldn’t have to make otherwise.”

So there’s concern that changing seasons could kill golf at 3A, 2A and 1A schools, Billetz said.

Under the current format, the state tournaments are held on Mondays and Tuesdays because courses don’t want to give up revenue they can make on Fridays and Saturdays.

“So if you moved golf to the fall when there’s less people playing in October, we could conceivably hold state tournaments on Fridays and Saturdays,” Billetz said.

One obvious reason Duncan would oppose a change is North Idaho schools wouldn’t be able to play Eastern Washington schools.

“We wouldn’t get the state-tournament quality competition from the Washington schools,” Duncan said.

Duncan understands both sides.

“It wouldn’t take much to persuade me that it should be moved to the fall,” he said. “But if I had a vote, I’d vote not to change.”

Panhandle picks

I essentially hit my season average (.593) last week when I picked six of 10 games correctly. Nice baseball average, but not a percentage that would bring big bucks in Vegas.

Post Falls at Lewiston: The Trojans are playing for their playoff lives. They’ve lost two in a row, and the defeats have been filled with dumb mistakes that they can’t seem to shake.

Post Falls will play better Friday. But there’s one significant problem: The Bengals are fast, the Trojans are slow. Lewiston 33, PF 20.

•Other games: Coeur d’Alene 27, Shadle Park 13; Lake City 24, Meridian 21; Moscow 27, Lakeland 23; Timberlake 21, St. Maries 13; Kellogg 20, Bonners Ferry 12; Orofino 20, Priest River 13; Wallace 24, Lakeside 18; Kootenai 48, Mullan 22.