THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: Post Falls High grad, now living in Boise area, climbing the officiating ladder

Growing up playing sports in North Idaho, Drake Bowers used to take note of the officials and umpires that were working his games.

“I liked seeing how they worked; how they managed a game,” Bowers recalled.

Little did he know he would become one of them someday.

“There’s so much more appreciation, especially with the shortage of officials that we have now,” said Bowers, a high school (and sometimes college) basketball official, and a 2014 Post Falls High graduate. “We want to make sure that the game continues, right, and that kids can keep playing for years on end.”

Bowers, who moved to the Boise area in 2019 and lives in Meridian, worked the state girls basketball tournament last year. This year, he was selected to work the boys tournament for the first time, starting today at sites around the Boise area.

“I got to work girls state last year, which was a blast, and now I get to work boys state this year,” said Bowers, 26. “It’s just great camaraderie, and I’ve really enjoyed it down here, and so many people have helped me along the way, …it’s just been really cool, how much of a brotherhood, and how much camaraderie there is in the officiating world. So cool.”

BOWERS PLAYED basketball and baseball at Post Falls. In baseball, he was an outfielder on the varsity his last two years. In basketball, he was a reserve as a senior on a Trojan boys basketball team that went to state (the following year, Post Falls won its second state title in six seasons).

“It was pretty cool to go from playing in the state tournament nine years ago to getting to work it,” Bowers said.

After graduation, Bowers was attending North Idaho College and working at Texas Roadhouse when Corey Koski, a teammate on that 2014 basketball team, mentioned to him that basketball officials were needed in the area.

“I thought, ‘Man, it would be fun to still be part of the game,’ because I still love the game, loved any way to be a part of it,” Bowers said.

He worked JV and freshman games in North Idaho for a year. Then, when he transferred to Washington State, he worked games all over southeast Washington for two years.

After graduation, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in finance, it was back up North, where he worked games in the Spokane area for a year.

He hoped to find a banking job in the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene area, but wound up landing one with Zions Bank in Boise, where he is a portfolio manager.

Bowers has also worked some college games, in the Northwest Athletic Conference and the Cascade Conference.

BOWERS RECALLED one game he worked in the Boise area, involving smaller schools, where one of the coaches had never seen him before — and, maybe, wanted to test him out a bit.

“The coach was mad early on the game,” Bowers recalled. “We didn’t have a call on an offensive foul, and he wanted one … ‘He was there, we should have had an offensive foul.’ He was kinda going off on me a little bit.

“I said ‘I hear you, coach, it was a hard play, we just didn’t see enough contact, so we decided not to put a whistle on it,’” Bowers said.

“And we’re going back and forth, 2-3 minutes later, and we got an offensive foul, and I look at the coach and I just said, ‘Well, we got that one.’

“And he just started busting up laughing.”

Years earlier, Bowers was working a small-school game in southeast Washington — where the basketball is pretty good, and the fans are rabid.

“It was a very tough JV game, it went into double-overtime,” Bowers recalled. “I did have a fan come up and approach me after the game, and was pretty confrontational … he just came up and said, ‘You blew this game! You blew this game!’

(Remember, this was a JV game).

“I’m thankful my partner got in the way, and I got off the court safely,” Bowers said. “It was definitely a moment where I went ‘Wow, I never thought I’d have a parent approach me after a game,’ so that was definitely and eye-opener.”

BOWERS HAS been married for over a year — to the former Halei Ungerbuehler, who ran track at Wallace. And he credits her for her patience and understanding while he spends a lot of nights away from home, wearing a striped shirt.

“I definitely want to take it as far as I can take it, and maybe get to the Division I level,” Bowers said of officiating. “It’s very competitive, very difficult. But I want to keep trying to get better. And however high I can get … I at least want to try for it, and enjoy every minute of it.”

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 208-664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @CdAPressSports.