Regional track meet needs reformatting

It's time for my yearly rant at the high school track coaches in Northern Nevada. These guys need to wake up and smell the coffee.

My gripe is the way the 4A runs its regional meet. In the 4A, the trials are run on one Saturday and the finals on the following Saturday. Ridiculous.

The powers at be need to align the regional meet with the state meet schedule, which means competing on back-to-back days, or at the very least, Wednesday and Friday, which is what the Sac-Joaquin Section does. Heck if the 1A, 2A and 3A athletes can go Friday and Saturday which they did last week, why can't the 4A kids?

Whoever had the idea to have trials and finals a week apart needs to have their heads examined.

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I'm also scratching my head at the way the 4A baseball playoffs were drawn up.

No team had to play more than one game until Friday, so it makes no sense that Galena, one of the host sites, had to play a Wednesday game at Reno when it could have played on its home field. Reno won its opening game on Tuesday so it got to stay home and play the next day. If Reno had lost its opener it would have had to play at Galena the next day. Reno did have to come over to Galena for a Thursday loser's bracket game when it could have played at its own school.

It's not a big deal to mix winner's and loser's bracket games together at a site if the schedule calls for them to play one game only that day.

Personally, and I've said this numerous times, I think Carson and Reno should host the regionals every year because they have lights.

Afternoon baseball, especially at 1 p.m. on a weekday doesn't work. You get no student attendance and you are forcing parents to take more than a half day off work to watch a game. Haven't the parents had to give up enough during the regular season? By starting at 4 and 7 p.m., you get more student attendance and parents may only have to get off an hour or two early instead of four hours early or missing some of the game.

The only other option is to let higher seeds host games on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and then switch to another site for the final two days of the tournament.

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And last, but certainly not least, it looks real good that Carson High will have new football lights installed in time for its first home game which is scheduled for mid-September.

Coach Blair Roman, who is in the midst of holding spring practice three days a week over the next two weeks, said he had just met with Carson principal Ron Beck and was encouraged by the meeting.

"Everything seems to be on track to get it done," Roman said. "I've heard that they could be in place by sometime in August, so we'll see how that goes."

Lights are desperately needed. Football isn't the only sport using the facility. Soccer games are played there during the week and the band practices there a few times a week.

Even though these are lean economic times, football makes a lot of money for the school between gate and snack bar receipts, and football wouldn't make near the amount of money if games were played on Saturday afternoons.