Don't look now, but the Coleville football team is making quite a charge just outside the county border.
The Wolves, who complete in the 8-man football Western 1A league have quietly put together an unbeaten season and can put the wraps on a league title this weekend with a win at Eureka.
They are the only undefeated team left in 1A play across the state and they are ridiculously young for the amount of talent they are bringing to the field.
As wide-open offensively as 8-man football tends to be, sophomore quarterback Jason Peters has been as next to unstoppable as can be. The dual-threat player torched Virginia City over the weekend for 160 yards and a touchdown on the ground and 172 yards and four touchdowns through the air.
His top receivers, Trevor Anderson and Marco Barajas, are seniors, but the Wolves have a number of potent offensive weapons, including junior Will Goode, Dylan Hudson and Jay Clark.
Coleville is pretty solid defensively as well, led by Sean Sherlock, Kyle Tidwell, Barajas and Carlos Hernandez.
The way things are stacking up, the Wolves could end up making a pretty deep run into the playoffs. We'll just have to wait and see.
The North-South league realignment in the Northern 4A reportedly received positive feedback from the majority of the school principals last week.
The final decision on whether or not Reno, North Valleys and Hug will swap places with Galena, Bishop Manogue and Fallon will be made at the next athletic director's meeting on Oct. 15.
Some schools are in favor of a proposed big school-small school realignment that was defeated 11-4 at the initial AD's meeting, but the North-South alignment seems to be the most pleasing financially and competitively for all involved.
Fallon expressed concern about the travel distances, supposing that Minden and South Tahoe would make for longer drives. An approximate total of the round-trip driving distance, however, would have the Greenwave saving a total of about 174.88 miles per season despite having the extra trip with eight schools in the Sierra League.
Score a couple for the Douglas individual sports this fall.
Amelia Ritger heads into this weekend's regional tennis championships with the top seed in the girls' tennis singles bracket and Robert Shawhan and Keagan Chipp enter the doubles tournament as the No. 2 seed out of the Sierra League. For good measure, the senior tandem of Lauren Seymour and Sarah Barnhill earned a No. 3 seed in the girls' doubles bracket.
Ritger and Chipp-Shawhan duo could end up becoming Douglas' first state qualifiers in tennis in quite some time.
The girls' golf team headed into the first round of the Northern 4A Regional championships as the clear-cut favorite Tuesday and have an honest shot to make some noise at state if things go well this week.
And the Tiger cross country teams has a number of runners that will be among the elite in the region when the championships roll around later this month.
Douglas has been competitive across the board in team sports for quite some time, but this year the Tigers have made a pretty big statement about the improvement of the individual sports programs.
Maybe it's just me, but the anti-flu commercial with the angry mob of sock puppets is the creepiest thing on television right now.
My wife and I just finished watching the first season of "24" on DVD last week and I've decided that I hate the show.
For those who don't know, the premise of the show is a federal government agency tries to prevent an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate within a 24 hour period. The show runs in real-time from midnight to midnight in its 24-episode season.
It's actually pretty intriguing, but it completely unravels in the last two hours of the season.
The show simply wasn't meant to be watched in close succession.
One of the more amusing moments of season came when a high-powered senator arrives at the government office and demands to speak to a prisoner. The episode promptly ends and the next one begins with the senator exclaiming something to the effect of "What is taking so long? This is taking forever." Apparently, the writers of the show forgot the real-time nature of its progression as only about two minutes had passed in show-time.
Another anomaly of the show's premise is that the show characters are able to travel at warp speed around the greater Orange County area, driving to the outskirts of suburbia from central Los Angeles in a matter of minutes during rush hour.
I came to the conclusion that the title "24" isn't actually about the number of hours the show covers, rather the number of people who must die violent deaths to protect the life of the show's main character, Jack Bauer.
The writers also managed to create the most devoid of moral character low-life criminals ever gathered into one group and still make them the most criminally inept characters ever put to screen.
The organization somehow managed to put together intricate prison breaks, sneak bombs on to large passenger jets in the post-9/11 world of airport security, delve their way into the computer codes of the United States government and smuggle guns past the secret service into political rallies, but at season's end, the bad guys managed to kill just about everyone except for their two primary targets.
They also created a daughter for the main character, who apparently was born without a brain. She is kidnapped by a guy who suddenly grows a conscience and helps her to escape. While her father is attempting to get them out of the enemy compound, she tells him there's no one around and there's no reason to hide (despite the sounds of impending footsteps and loud grunts from our merry bunch of similarly no-brained criminals) and stands up to go look for her kidnapper boyfriend. She is nearly picked off by a sniper rifle and dives for cover back under the bushes.
She later tracks her kidnapper boyfriend down, kisses him in front of his actual girlfriend and then gets arrested with Nappy and his buddies while they attempt to close a drug deal.
While in jail, the jealous actual girfriend attempts to pick a fight with Bauer's daughter. She responds by saying something to the effect of "You haven't been kidnapped today and you were born with a brain, so don't mess with me." That's enough to scare the actual girlfriend off and Bauer's daughter manages to get out of jail, where she promptly gets kidnapped ... again.
This is done with the help of a poorly-concocted inter-office mole who actually goes out of her way to help the daughter and Bauer's wife escape the hands of would-be assassins earlier in the season, and later nonchalantly delivers the daughter back into the hands of the enemy and kills the wife in the cliffhanger ending of the season-finale.
We were left with no reason to continue to watch through season 2 and beyond.
Back to the sports world, based on the cumulative votes in the Sierra Nevada Sports Media poll, here are the top-ranked overall athletic programs based on football, boys' soccer, girls' soccer and volleyball so far this season.
1. Douglas, 217 points
2. Truckee, 175 points
3. Reno, 172 points
4. Galena, 171 points
5. Reed, 168 points
