THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: Reminders of the old days, in high school and college

Shawn Amos stood on Viking Field on Friday night, having just coached his Coeur d’Alene High football team to within one game of another outright 5A Inland Empire League championship, with a convincing victory over the defending league champs.

But the veteran Viking coach beamed like a proud father when asked about a visit by Carroll College’s football team to the Coeur d’Alene High earlier Friday.

The NAIA Saints, from Helena, Mont., stopped in Cd’A on the way to Saturday’s game vs. Eastern Oregon University in La Grande to get off the bus for a bit after a four-plus hour trip (279 miles), stretch their legs and go through a light practice before getting back on the bus for another four-plus hours on the bus (288 miles) en route to eastern Oregon.

The reason for Amos’ pride, as well as Carroll’s visit to Coeur d’Alene? Six former Vikings are now on Carroll’s roster. Four of them are on the travel roster; five of them were there when the team stopped in Coeur d’Alene.

“It’s so fun,” Amos said. “And our kids get to come out and watch practice, and meet the coaches, and we get to see all of those kids doing so well there. Carroll has become a good mutual-respect (situation). They like our kids — when they’re good enough to play — and our kids like going to Carroll. The coaching staff is awesome; they treat the kids right. It’s just a great fit for us.”

Of the six, four were part of Carroll’s travel roster for the Eastern Oregon game — junior quarterback Jack Prka, redshirt junior wide receiver Jake Brown, redshirt freshman linebacker Gunner Giulio and redshirt freshman offensive lineman Wyatt Sandford.

The other Viking/Saints are freshman linebacker Branson Whitby and redshirt freshman Jaxson Washington; Whitby made the trip home and was at Friday night’s Viking game.

YOU HEAR of high school teams doing this all the time — stopping off at a college campus to break up a long bus ride, get out and run around a bit. Plus, it gets players on a college campus, in case they might be interested in that sort of thing in the future.

For Carroll, Amos said the Saints have stopped off at Coeur d’Alene High a couple times before — a way to break up the trip to Eastern Oregon, or when they play at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, or at College of Idaho in Caldwell.

This time, Coeur d’Alene got to show off its new artificial turf field. Carroll still plays on grass, though the Saints have plans to get artificial turf installed for next season.

“All of those (former Viking) kids were saying, ‘We didn’t have all this when we left,’” Amos said.

Led by Prka, Carroll is 6-0, 4-0 Frontier Conference after Saturday’s 14-6 win at Eastern Oregon.

“It’s awesome,” Amos said. “It’s great to see those guys, and it’s cool for our kids to watch a college practice. We’re super proud of those kids, and honestly, they’ve gotten the best of our best, and this is one of them,” Amos said, before taking a moment to share a hug with Whitby, who was standing nearby.

A SELLOUT crowd at Saturday night’s Idaho-Montana football game at the Kibbie Dome in Moscow brought back memories of some of the old Idaho-Montana clashes of the 1980s and early 1990s.

But it also brought back some memories from the last time Idaho sold out a home game.

In 2010, also in front of the ESPN2 cameras, Boise State and Kellen Moore came to Idaho and beat the Vandals 52-14 in what was basically a quick and polite pummeling. It was 28-0 after one quarter, and 38-0 at the half. Attendance was listed as 16,453 in the 16,000-seat Dome.

(The week before, Idaho lost 63-17 at home to a Nevada team quarterbacked by Colin Kaepernick.)

It would turn out to be Boise State’s last visit to Moscow; the Broncos jumped to the Mountain West Conference in 2011, Western Athletic Conference football dissolved after the 2012 season, and the Vandals (after one year as an independent) ended up back in the Sun Belt.

Since then … well, you know the rest.

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 X (formerly Twitter) @CdAPressSports.