Six area schools academic champs
Area schools claimed four of the six titles in football when the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association announced its academic state champions for the fall sports season.
Mead is the academic champion in 4A with a 3.443 team grade-point average, the second-best GPA in the sport, with Othello (3.270) claiming the title in 2A, Tekoa-Oakesdale/Rosalia (3.352) in 2B and Odessa (3.430) in 1B.
Two other area schools were also honored. Cheney won in 2A girls soccer with a 3.838, the best GPA in the sport, and St. John-Endicott won in 1B boys cross country with the second-best GPA in the sport, 3.860.
Bowling
Thomas Locke continues to roll the hottest ball on the Junior Bowlers Tour, collecting a second straight title last Sunday at Zeppoz Bowling Center in Pullman.
Locke, who followed a third-place finish in the season-opening event with a win at North Bowl earlier last month, qualified No. 1 at Zeppoz and stopped the playoff run of Jared Giori 199-152 in the finals on a day when scoring was generally low.
Giori had jumped from eighth to fifth entering the playoffs and knocked off three opponents to get a shot at Locke.
Dalton Shears, the only bowler to average 200 the first four games before cooling off to finish second going into the playoffs, finished third; Megan Froman was fourth; and Ryan Gately finished fifth.
Froman had high game for the girls, a 218. Shears led the boys with a 256.
The next JBT is Nov. 8 at Deer Park.
College scene
Four athletes from Whitworth and two from Washington State lead area selections to the ESPN The Magazine/CoSIDA Academic All-District 8 teams in soccer.
Whitworth’s selections were college division first-teamers Miranda Cosand, a repeater with a 3.96 grade-point average, and Lindsey Oakes (3.93) on the women’s team, and repeater Bryan Olson (3.86) and Keith Kirsch of Mt. Spokane (3.77) on the men’s. All are seniors.
The women’s college division second team includes George Fox senior Jenny McKinsey from Central Valley, who has a 3.54 GPA.
WSU landed Kiersten Dallstrea m (3.36) on the women’s university division second team and Maggie Dougher (3.79) on the third team. Both are seniors.
Gonzaga senior Nick Barclay was a men’s university division first-team selection with a 3.46 GPA.
•Brian Sherpe, Whitworth’s sophomore goalkeeper, was the Northwest Conference defensive player of the week in men’s soccer last week after posting back-to-back shutouts in a pair of road matches last weekend.
•Annie Brophy, Notre Dame’s senior golfer from Gonzaga Prep, tied for first in the fall-season- ending Alamo Invitational in San Antonio last week with a 2-under-par 70 in the event that was reduced to one round because of rain. It is the second championship in Brophy’s Irish career.
•Erika Laete of Spokane is one of two starters, and nine letterwinners, returning to the Wisconsin Lutheran women’s basketball team, which has been picked to finish second in the Northern Athletic Conference South Division by league coaches.
Laete, a forward, averaged 6.7 points and 6.3 rebounds last season for the 20-8 Warriors.
Hockey
Dylan Tappe, a 17-year-old forward for the Spokane Braves’ Junior B team, has been called up by the Westside Warriors of the British Columbia Junior A League, his family reported.
Tappe, a junior at Ferris, is second in the Kootenay International Junior Hockey League in scoring with 22 points, including a league-leading 13 goals for the Braves.