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Martinez: Missing prep football? Here are some options to help fill the void

High school sports

By Tim Martinez, Columbian Assistant Sports Editor

Published: August 31, 2020, 6:00pm

Camas defender Trevor Bentley barely catches Coeur d'Alene receiver Brett Hunter at Doc Harris Stadium in Camas on Friday, September 22, 2017. Camas beat Coeur d'Alene 28-25. (Samuel Wilson for the Columbian)

The high school football season was supposed to start this week, and that will likely leave a void for many of you.

This weekend likely will be a harsh reminder of what we’ll be missing this fall.

But instead stew in that frustration, I’d like to offer some distractions.

While high school football won’t be played here this fall, it is being played in other places of the country.

The high school football season has started in all or parts of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.

Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi and West Virginia are set to start this week.

So if you can’t follow your favorite local team, start following another favorite team from afar.

If you have friends or family from another state, or maybe there’s a place you’ve visited, you can adopt that team as your new favorite team for the fall of 2020 and follow them.

How?

Well, the NFHS Network provides live webcasts of high school sports all over the country. For a monthly subscription of $10.99, you can watch games from all over the country. There is also an annual subscription rate of $69, which is almost like paying for half the year, and getting the other half free.

But if following a team in another state isn’t your thing, another option is to relive local games from the past.

The Eli Sports Network will present a classic prep football game from Washington state for free each week online. The Week 1 offering will be the 2018 matchup of Camas vs. Lincoln of Tacoma. Games featuring Union, Hockinson, Woodland and Kalama are also on the schedule.

And finally, last week I asked readers to send suggestions of favorite games of the past to relive. You responded by sending in about 30 suggestions. Most of the games suggested come from the past two decades, but some go farther back – all the way to the 1930s.

From this list, we will be taking a different game from the past to spotlight each week of the 2020 postponed season.

We’ve picked out two non-league games to get us started for Week 1 and Week 2, then we’ll move to league games.

Next week, we will put the rest put up for a vote, so fans can help choose what other games we will spotlight.

The top vote-getters will be added to our weekly schedule. But we also will be making selections so that different time periods, leagues and schools are represented.

Next month, we’ll send out requests for your favorite postseason games, which we will revisit in late October through December.

We hope all of options will help make getting through the autumn of 2020 a little easier for prep football fans.

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