Summer offers a lot of opportunity

A GRIP ON SPORTS • Think about this: Either this is the final weekend of the school year or it is already summer for your school-age kids. Whatever, it means, unofficially, summer is upon us. And isn’t that just the best? Read on.

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• What sports did you play in the summer? What did you watch? If you are beyond the age of 40, I’m guessing the most common answer is baseball. (And, if you are around my age, the movie “The Sandlot” rang true to you in a lot of ways.) Under the age of 40, the answer could be anything from baseball to soccer (the U.S. women played a scoreless tie with Sweden in the World Cup last night) to basketball to football. Heck, if you are my lone high school reader, I’m guessing you had football practice last week. And a 7-on-7 tournament just around the corner. That’s just the participating-in aspect of the two-part question. Really, if you are old enough, you didn’t watch a lot of televised sports in the summer. People don’t realize this, but in the late 1970s, CBS showed the NBA finals – the “F” wasn’t capitalized then – in May. And in late night. Yep, the NBA finals were shown nationally on tape-delay. Baseball? Prior to the invention of the superstation, baseball on the tube meant the Saturday game of the week on NBC and, if you lived in a large market, a Sunday game on a local station. Otherwise, nada. So if you wanted to watch baseball, you headed to the local ballpark and sat your butt down on a hard wooden (or aluminum) seat for 2 hours and cheered. Or, if you were a Dodger fan, an hour-and-half, because you left at the seventh-inning stretch. My how times have changed, and I’m not just talking about the subject of the recent Entertainment Weekly. Think about this: This weekend you can watch hockey, basketball, baseball, soccer and golf. And that’s just the live events. If you want to watch a football game I’m sure you can find it somewhere. And there is probably tennis on, if you are that type of person. Just remember this warning: Watch the Mariners’ game at your own peril. I understand the feds are thinking of listing the team as one of the top five causes of depression in the Northwest. Seems about right. After all, they seem hell-bent on ruining our summer.

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• WSU: You like late, late football games? Sorry then. There have been four times announced thus far for the fall and none will start after 5:30 p.m. The most recent addition was the Rutgers game, Sept. 12. It will start at 12:30 p.m. our time. Jacob Thorpe has all the particulars in this blog post . … What percentage of last season’s tackles will each Pac-12 school have to replace this fall? Your answer is here on ESPN.com’s Pac-12 blog. So are other answers in the weekly mailbag . … Oregon’s men repeated as NCAA track and field champions last night.

• EWU: Former basketball player Jade Redmon is transferring to the University of Portland.

• Shock: Being a Mariner fan is tough right now. Being a Mariner fan and a Shock fan has to be hell. The Shock played poorly last night until the second half. Then they turned it on and had a chance to win the game in the final seconds. Except they couldn’t. Again. Jim Meehan’s game story tells the tale. Heck, even the mascot made a huge mistake (pictured). … Arizona struggled a bit but got finally hammered Portland .

• Shadow: Spokane is back at home this weekend.

• Seahawks: The Hawks finally were able to sign Washington wide receiver Kasem Williams , who had to wait until his class graduated from UW before he could turn professional. … Jesse Williams is going to be doing some workouts soon.

• Mariners: We’ve avoided the M’s thus far, mainly because it’s pretty damn depressing. Here they are, facing a reeling Astros team in a key series with their ace, Felix Hernandez going. A great time to kick Houston while it’s down, right? Except the Astros did all the kicking, scoring eight runs off Felix in the first inning. Heck, The King, as he’s known, was able to get just one out, the worst outing of his career. The 10-0 loss sure put a damper on our Friday night. … Nelson Cruz was back in the lineup last night, though it didn’t make any difference. And Hisashi Iwakuma is closer to being back on the mound for the M’s, though by July 5 , when he is projected to be ready, it might be too late.

• Sounders: Tonight’s match with FC Dallas in CenturyLink will feature two teams who are missing some of their star power , thanks to a variety of reasons. The Sounders, however, are in better shape than they were a week ago.

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• Hey, the tennis comment was just a joke. Heck, I’ve been known to stop on the Tennis Channel every once in a while to watch a game or two. A set? Not often. By the way, if you are into golf, or into 3-D, this is pretty cool . Until later …