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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Dave Nichols: Pandemic affecting how high school results are tracked, reported

We’ve heard from several readers over the past few weeks (really all year) that they’ve had trouble finding schedules, scores and recaps for their schools on our websites.

That’s a big problem, because if the sports page isn’t providing the results of the day’s contests, it’s not much good.

But here’s the thing – the schedules, scores and recaps are where they’ve always been. There just might not be as many of them available – for a variety of reasons.

The pandemic has messed with a lot of things in our lives. Unfortunately, the schedules and scores have fallen victim as well, but it continues to be an important function of what we do.

We made an executive decision when high school sports resumed that we would track schedules for the Greater Spokane League, since that’s where the bulk of the subscribers to the print edition live and where we have the greatest chance at optimization, but not for the smaller or outlying schools.

With each league on its own timeframe and so many changes to the daily schedule, it would be impossible to try to keep up. Rather than post incomplete or incorrect information, we just didn’t post schedules for the small schools.

As with every year previous and continuing into the future, we are still posting scores and recaps for every game called in to us. It’s the responsibility of the home team to report results to the paper – for all teams involved – unless there’s a prior arrangement between the schools or the leagues.

That has been without exception. If a coach calls us with a score and/or stats, we will post them.

Because of our printing press moved to Spokane Valley, however, our deadlines have changed, and some results might not make into the print version of the paper. They will still be posted like always on our websites.

If you have been looking for specific GSL wrestling results the past few weeks and haven’t found them, those might be the reasons why. Due to the pandemic, the GSL changed how meets were hosted this year and there was some confusion at the start of the season as to who was responsible for calling in scores.

That confusion has been ironed out. Of the 16 meets Tuesday night, all but four were called in to the paper. Eight of them were early enough to make it into print. It’s not good enough, but there are a lot of factors that go into the score making into the paper.

But as mentioned earlier, everything that gets called in goes online. The scores and recaps go on NWPrepsNow.com and there’s a daily roundup on Spokesman.com/high-school-sports. If you’d like to see Tuesday’s roundup, please visit this shortcut: bit.ly/2S5ajYH. We do this every day there are high school sports.

To find daily scores on NWPrepsNow.com, simply navigate to the page and on the right side (on your phone, it’s right at the top) click on “Today’s games and scores” and find the game you’re looking for. If you’re looking for something in the past, you can search by date as well.

If the score isn’t posted, or the game isn’t listed, it’s either because it was postponed due to COVID-19 issues or we didn’t get the information from the host school.

We’re as hopeful as everyone else that things go back to normal in the fall and we can go back to business as usual posting schedules, results and recaps for more than 80 schools in Eastern Washington and North Idaho.

Until then, for the next few weeks until the end of the season, please be patient with us. If there’s a score or result you’re looking for in particular, please feel free to reach out and I’ll do my best to track it down.