SPOKANE, WA - Picture two guys hunched in front of laptops for hours, dizzy from staring at schedules and mentally tired from the tough decisions that were set before them.

That was the scene last Sunday in the heart of the Palouse where the BSports broadcast schedule was finally hammered out by Ed Casey and yours truly.

The process was laid out before us, set up by months of schedule collecting and weeks of goal setting. These goals were set up to help us produce a rigid format that our schedule would follow. These goals included:
1)Have a minimum of one game from each district covered during the regular season.
2)No less than 40% of our schedule would consist of B-8 games
3)A minimum of three TV games are on the west side (excluding playoffs)
4)A minimum of three TV games are B-8 games (excluding playoffs)
5)We cover a single school no more than three times during the regular season
6)We do not cover the same team on back to back weeks.

Our first step was to go week by week and select any games that might be of interest, not worrying about location or balancing. We wanted a wide scope here, and we grouped the selected games into East and West pools. We averaged about a dozen potential games a week.

With our East and West Pools packed with potential, the next step was selecting one game a week as our web TV Game of the Week. For this selection we only worried about getting the best game on the air, so again we needed not worry about location, B-11 vs. B-8, nor other balancing aspects. However this process was tougher than expected, especially towards the end of the season. One example was the very last week when Reardan and Colfax played at the same time Tri-Cities Prep faced Touchet.

With our Games of the Week selected and removed from the Pools, we now had to go back and choose our East Side and West Side Radio Games. These games are ones that will be broadcast weekly on our flagship stations in the Spokane and Tacoma areas. This task was equally as difficult and required numerous tough decisions, especially picking from our East Pool. There were just too many good games to get on the air, but after debating and negotiating we were finally able to settle on games to fill out our schedule.

With our schedule filled in, we just needed to make sure it fit the goals laid out above. Easy? Not! What we found after examining our schedule is that we didn't meet any of our goals. . .not one.

What we had to to was go game by game and find the best ways to tweak our schedule to make it fit the parameters set before us. If the decisions before were hard, now they got exponentially harder. Some games that we wanted to do had to be dropped while others had to be switched from radio to TV..

This process lasted for a couple hours, but after our fourth or fifth try we finally got it right. What we found was a schedule that looked so good, so balanced, and so complete that we were proud to put our names behind it. We may have been worried about dropping a few higher profile games, but this led to us expanding our coverage to even more school and even more areas of the state, something that we are proud of and I'm sure our audience will be as well.

We are excited about the season, and hope you are too. There will be coverage of high school football like this state has never seen, and we are glad you are coming along for the ride!