THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: Pam (and Irene), Willie and horse racing

Sometimes you stumble upon names from the past, and it takes you into the way-back machine ...

IN JULY, Pam Parks will be inducted into the Big Sky Conference Hall of Fame, for her years of service as a volleyball coach and later an administrator at Eastern Washington University. 

But before that, she helped build Sandpoint High into one of the early juggernauts in Idaho high school volleyball. 

How long ago was that?

Pam Parks was there and gone even before I showed up at what was then called the Sandpoint Daily Bee, in the fall of 1982. 

Back in the days of film, and typewriters.

But her legend lived on. 

By then, Parks had guided Sandpoint to its first state title in program history (1980), and a runner-up finish at state, and a 65-10 record in her three-year stay. 

Her last year in Sandpoint, the Bulldogs entered state with an undefeated record — but were upset twice at state. 

That’s what I heard about when I showed up to cover the 1982 team — they were supposed to win last year, and how would they bounce back from such disappointment. 

Apparently, pretty well. 

Sandpoint went on to win the next five state championships, losing only eight matches over that time. 

Irene Matlock, who was Parks’ assistant at SHS, took over as head coach in 1982 and won four straight titles before moving on to become head coach at Community Colleges of Spokane. 

That first year I was there, I kept hearing about a coach whose name sounded like “Pamaneyereen.” 

Turns out, folks were referring to “Pam and Irene,” two coaches known around town simply by their first names, who together steered the Bulldogs toward greatness before the one known as “Pam” moved on and the one they called “Irene” kept it going. 

YOU DON’T easily forget a name like Willie Sojourner. 

Sojourner, also heading into the Big Sky Hall of Fame in a couple of months, was a basketball star at Weber State when our family moved to Salt Lake City in 1970. 

I don’t remember if Weber State games were even on the radio then — BYU was on 50,000-watt KSL, which you can pick up here sometimes, and Utah games were on some station where you had to point your clock radio a certain direction to be able to hear them. 

But any local news story about the school often referred to as just “Weber” ultimately mentioned Sojourner, who led the Wildcats to the NCAAs in all three of his seasons in Ogden (1969-71). The last two years, Weber lost in the first round of the NCAAs to Long Beach State, then coached by a guy named Jerry Tarkanian. 

Willie’s brother Mike Sojourner played two seasons at the University of Utah (1972-73 and 73-74). 

IN THE glut of all the state high school championships being held last weekend, in addition to all the national sports, you may have missed the fact they ran the second race of horse racing’s Triple Crown on Saturday.  

Lotsa people did. 

Lotsa horses, too.  

Only three of the 18 horses who ran in the Kentucky Derby three weeks ago bothered to try again at the Preakness last week.  

Including the winner, Golden Tempo, and most of the other top finishers. 

In the old days, that was the fun part of watching the Triple Crown — can the Derby winner capture the Preakness, then win the Belmont Stakes in three weeks? 

Apparently, that’s just too much racing in a short amount of time for horses these days. 

Trainers and owners would rather skip a Triple Crown race or two so their horses are fresh for the Travers Stakes later in the summer, and the Breeders Cup in October. 

That’s according to our local international horse broker, Ray Hussa, formerly of Coeur d’Alene and now living and working near Houston, Texas.  

If you want to develop a champion in the breeding shed (and make a lot of money as a result), if you win the Derby, you also want to win the other races later in the year, Hussa said.  

“If you use your horse up in the Preakness, he might not win the other races,” Hussa said. “For breeding purposes, he would not be as desirable.” 

Whether it’s for desireable breeding purposes, or just to maintain more interest in the Triple Crown races, it has been proposed that the Preakness be pushed back a week, to three weeks after the Derby. Presumably, the Belmont would remain three weeks after the Preakness, but pushed back a week as well. 

“It’s a wonderful idea,” Hussa said.  

But because it’s hard to change tradition in the horsing industry, “it’s only got a 50/50 chance to fly at best,” he said.  

That’s too bad. 

Another, more radical idea, is to spread the Triple Crown races even more — the Derby on the first Saturday of May, the Preakness on the first Saturday of June and the Belmont on the first Saturday of July. 

“That’s probably the best idea,” Hussa said. 

Folks remember Secretariat, Seattle Slew and Affirmed winning Triple Crowns in the 1970s. Before that, Citation won in 1948, and it was 25 years before Secretariat became the next Triple Crown winner.. 

Some horse won the Triple Crown in 2018, but by then, interest in the three races had dwindled to the point where hardly anybody remembers who it was.  

(Justify). 

Whether spreading out the Derby, Preakness and Belmont a little more would be enough to get the top horses to run in all three Triple Crown races, like the old days, remains to be seed. 

But at least it’s a start. 

It’s about racing. 

But also, it's apparently about breeding. 

Who knew? 

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 208-664-8176, Ext. 1205, or via email at [email protected]. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @CdAPressSports.