R-C Sports Notebook: 3A rising

Granted, the opening weekend of high school football saw some of the Northern 4A's worst teams taking on some of the Northern 3A's best.

But with the exception of Wooster's 33-8 victory over Lowry, the 3A really made a name for itself for the second year in a row.

It can't go without mention that the three 4A teams that lost to 3A teams were all on the block this past summer as the NIAA considered realigning the classes to move five schools down to 3A.

Fallon (38-0 losers to Fernley), Elko (39-6 losers to Spring Creek) and South Tahoe (34-7 losers to Sparks) all suffered through tough openers.

For Fallon and Elko, it marked the second year in a row the schools lost to a 3A school to open the year.

But rather than this being a bash on the 4A schools, I believe this speaks to the increasing parity between the classes.

This is why in our Sierra Nevada Sports Media Poll, we include all classes in our voting.

We have taken some shots in the past about including 3A and 2A teams, but it can't go without mention that the teams that end up ranked in the polls have often proved their mettle already.

Spring Creek for several years has produced one of the top girls' basketball programs in the state at any level.

Or take the Whittell volleyball team as an example. The Warriors are consistently among the top three. Yerington has made large stride in volleyball and basketball in recent years.

Just this weekend, the Truckee boys' soccer team showed up all comers at the Galena Tournament.

The simple truth is, being a larger school no longer means you're any better. It just means you have a larger pool to draw from.

Class doesn't mean a whole lot in the grand scheme of Nevada high school sports anymore.

That being said, expect to see some smaller school in the Sierra Nevada Sports Media Polls this week.

It would appear that the Douglas high volleyball and boys' soccer teams are well on their way to successful seasons, each picking up impressive victories at their season-opening tournaments.

As I've mentioned in this column before, this should be a pretty exciting season across the board.

Despite the 38-15 final score of the Douglas-Reed game Friday night, the Tigers showed a whole lot of promise.

Outside of the disastrous first quarter, during which the Tigers turned the ball over twice while allowing three touchdowns in the course of a little more than a minute and a half, the game was generally pretty close.

Save for a breakdown on Reed quarterback Zack Parker's 68-yard keeper on the last play of the third quarter, the Tiger defense didn't really allow the Raiders to do much.

The offense picked up with a number of methodic drives in the second half as well.

Once the Tigers have a chance to go over the film and iron out the kinks, they should be a pretty formidable opponent.

The last two winning seasons at Douglas (8-3 last season and 8-3 in 2004) opened with a loss to Reed.

Ironically, the last time Douglas beat Reed to open the year (14-7 in 2005), the Tigers went onto to struggle through a 4-6 season.

Perhaps it's that Douglas is able to learn from its mistakes well. Or maybe the Tigers just need a stiff wake-up call before they can really get rolling.

Consider this: I've covered four season-openers for the Douglas football team now, and I have to say Friday night's loss, which came with 12 penalties (eight offsides) a fumble and two interceptions, isn't too much different from the other three.

Through four season-openers, the Tigers are 1-3 having been outscored by an average of 26.8 to 12.5 and giving up an average of 319.3 yards per game on defense. All four games were against Reed " a team that won two league titles and a regional championship during the same stretch.

As long as the Tigers can pick things up in practice and fix their mistakes from Friday night, they could be in line for an extremely successful season.

Reed quarterback Zack Parker was pretty impressive for his first varsity start at quarterback.

Sure, Douglas is rebuilding on defense with new faces at eight out of 11 starting positions, but Parker is quite an athlete.

He has elusive speed and the ability to read his blocks. When he finds a hole, he comes rocketing through it and escaped through the fingers of Douglas linemen several times.

He is accurate with his arm and didn't make bad decisions.

Even having seen only one High Desert League team, he is my early frontrunner for player of the year on the other side.

Is there any better example of our hyper-emphasis on competition in youth sports than the Little League World Series?

ESPN, ABC and the wide world of television families owned by Disney have been televising every moment of the grand-daddy of all youth sports tournaments for the better part of the last month.

Somewhere in the middle of all the crying pitchers, angsty parents, Sportscenter highlights and man-in-the-stands interviews with grandma, you start wondering how network television can hold 12-year-old kids under such a microscope.

There's a fine balance between giving the kids their due and completely over-covering an event.

Keep in mind that the Little League World Series is perhaps the best and most-complete youth sports championship event when it comes to including the entire globe.

There was a time (think 1989 Trumbull, Conn.), when you'd see only the championship game televised on national television.

There was a mystique to it then, this mythical stadium of young heroes nestled in the hills of Williamsport, Pa.

Every Little Leaguer dreamed of playing there, and the greatest past of the tournament is that every player has a chance, albeit a remote one, to do it.

It wasn't like the Super Bowl or the Olympics, where you first had to be among the most elite athletes of your sport in the world to even have a shot of making it.

If you signed up for the league, made the all-star team and happened to fit in with the right mix of players, there was an honest shot.

But then the year-round aspect and specialization of the game set in. And instead of just televising the world championship, we started getting the national and international finals as well.

The whole series wasn't too far out and before you knew it, we had the regional championships on cable TV.

We did with it what we do with every great championship event " cover it to death.

And as a public, we eat it up.

Each player gets a brief video introduction during the game, getting to say his name and favorite big league player. Expectantly, the Georgia kids seem to like Chipper Jones and the kids from the Japan team prefer Ichiro.

We get side-features on every subject thinkable and countless explanations of the pitch-count rule " Anything to create some drama.

But in creating that drama, the network often ends up indirectly butting heads with Little League philosophies.

ABC even had the gall to run a brief clip on the declining sportsmanship of the Japanese team after a player threw his bat into the ground after striking out and another threw his hands up in the air for being called out at third.

Let's remember for a second that it was in our country that a Little League coach paid off an eight-year old to bean an autistic teammate so he wouldn't be able to play in the next game.

It wasn't even an hour or two later during the U.S. championship that an American player threw his bat into the ground. No sportsmanship (poor or otherwise) montage that time around.

At some point, we have to at least consider that we aren't watching highly-paid or even highly-trained athletes.

As soon as the last pitch of the series is thrown, the players head back and start school worrying more about first-day spelling tests than breaking sliders.

ABC, ESPN and Little League worked out a new television deal this past winter.

While the details weren't released, the last contract was reportedly worth more than $7 million over six years.

Little League answers critics that say the children are being exploited by saying that the kids and parents want to be on television and that their biggest complaint is that there isn't more coverage.

Imagine that. The kids want to be on television.

Take fans of any sport, and their complaint will generally be that there isn't enough coverage of the sport.

Little League is essentially saying that the multi-million dollar deal is okay because the parents and the kids are getting what they want because they weren't getting enough before.

By that logic, they should be able to give the same answer when a parent isn't satisfied that their child isn't getting enough playing time or that the coach isn't leading the team to enough wins. Apparently, the argument that somone isn't getting enough only holds water when there is a million-dollar incentive behind it.

This is our culture in a nutshell: Give anyone more and they will expect more.

How long is it going to be before we have Little League reality shows (can't be that far off, check out CBS' Kid Nation) or corporate sponsorship (How does Howard J. Lamade Stadium at Disney Park sound?)?

It's a dangerous line to cross, catering to what your public wants. That's the catalyst that can push honest sports coverage into sports entertainment.

Do we really want to bring up a generation of players that ends up caring more about the show than the game?

(The name "Biff Martel" became a part of Douglas Tiger football lore when a letter signed by that very named was submitted to The Record-Courier criticizing the team in the late 1980s. We later found out that Biff does not exist. The identity of the letter writer was never discovered, although he was summoned over the PA system during the next Tiger home game. I am not him. I don't know who he is.)

It's a sad commentary that for all of the violent crimes committed by former or current NFL players in recent years, it was crimes against non-humans that have brought the largest bulk of public scrutiny upon what every national columnist seems to be treating as one of the greatest injustices every linked to sports.

There's no question that the crimes Vick pled guilty to are unthinkable.

You can't read through the evidence reports without your stomach twisting loops around itself.

Inhumane, cruel, sick, monstrous. Call it whatever you will, and you'll be pretty accurate.

Dog fighting, as many publications have rightly pointed out, is illegal in the United States.

But so is murder, rape and assault and battery.

Being one of the game's most recognizable names certainly drew more attention to Vick throughout this case, but why hasn't there been as much written outside of sports circles about Adam "Pacman" Jones (who is accused of sparking a shooting in a Las Vegas strip club that left one man paralyzed) or Ray Lewis, who in 2000 was arrested on murder charges and later released after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice.

Jones was suspended from the league and is now involved with a professional wrestling company. Lewis was never suspended, rather fined a record $250,000.

Both men, similar to Vick, were involved in situations that included multiple co-defendants, but they were involved or linked to crimes that actually effected human life.

Where was the outrage then?

It would seem we have begun to collectively value the life of an animal above that of a human.

Eddie Vega, sr., boys' soccer and Brandon Lowrance, sr., football: Vega had a hand in 10 of Douglas' 12 goals over the weekend, dishing out six assists and scoring four of his own as the Tigers ran their record to 4-0 on the year.

Lowrance was all over the field for the Tiger football team, taking his first carry of the season 59 yards for a Douglas' first touchdown of the season and later recording the defense's first sack of the year.