Thirst for indoor football in Tri-Cities one of best stories of past 21 years

The Tri-Cities region has always had a rabid fan base for football, whether it’s high school, college or professional.

But in the fall of 2004, fans were notified of a new brand coming to town: indoor football.

That’s the 10th story of my 21 for 21 series, which covers the top Mid-Columbia sports stories in the past 21 years.

The Tri-Cities Fever would settle into the Toyota Center for 12 seasons, owned the majority of time by JR and Teri Carr.

The field is shorter than outdoors — 50 yards compared to 100 yards. And it had padded sideboards to protect the players. That didn’t stop them from going over the sideboards into the laps of rabid fans — a key attraction to many people — during the games.

And that first season, 2005, ended up being a doozy.

During that season, the Fever ended up winning its only league title, beating the Rome Renegades from Georgia 47-31 to take the National Indoor Football League title.

That was cool. Even better was the story of the team’s journey to get there.

After a season-opening win, the team started to struggle. The head coach and general manager were out, and a young special teams coach named Dan Whitsett was named head coach.

The team’s original starting quarterback quit, and his backup broke his wrist in the next game. A retired indoor QB named Doug Coleman was asked to come out of retirement to play, and he eventually righted the ship — along with an outstanding defense led by Ron Childs, a linebacker who prepped locally at Kamiakin and collegiately at WSU.

The Fever made the playoffs that season, winning its first game. Then the team went on the road for two consecutive weeks, beating previously undefeated teams in Everett 54-52 (on a long field goal by Drew Dunning as time expired), and then Odessa, Texas, 41-39 (on a last-second end zone interception).

That set up the championship game in the Tri-Cities — the Fever got to host the game because it had the better record than the Renegades.

Rome rallied late in the game to cut the Tri-Cities lead to 33-31 before Coleman fired two TD passes to close out the game.

The Fever spent one more season in the NIFL before moving into af2 for the 2007-09 seasons.

From 2010-16, the team was in the Indoor Football League, led for much of that by head coach Adam Shackleford, who finished with a 50-33 record and two appearances in the IFL title game in 2011 and 2012 (both losses to Sioux Falls).

Those Fever IFL teams had outstanding players such as quarterback Houston Lillard, wide receiver Steven Whitehead, defensive back Lionell Singleton and defensive lineman Jake Killeen.

But the fun ended after the 2016 season, when Teri Carr — citing financial losses the team had — announced the team was going inactive. The team never came back.

In 2019, a man named Kinshasa Martin became an owner of the Tri-Cities Fire, a new team in a first-year league called the American West Football Conference. The team went 0-13, and Martin shut the franchise down before the 2020 season could begin.

There ended up being no 2020 season, thanks to COVID-19. But for 2021 a new team, the Tri-City Rush (owned by local resident Brandon Tate) has been formed and will be part of the AWFC for this coming year.

The team will play its home contests of a 12-game schedule at the HAPO Center in Pasco beginning in May.

Hockey

▪ Former Tri-City American center Morgan Geekie started the NHL season as a member of the Carolina Hurricanes’ taxi squad.

However, Geekie was called up to the big club last Saturday to replace veteran Jordan Staal, who was put on the COVID-19 list.

Geekie played for the Americans from 2013-18, scoring 78 goals and 124 assists in 216 Western Hockey League regular-season games.

▪ According to the MacBeth Report, former Tri-City American Am Kruise Reddick, a center, signed a contract for the rest of the season with Duka Trencin, a team in Slovakia in the Extraliga.

Reddick was with the Americans from 2006-11, playing in 315 games, scoring 91 goals and 174 assists. Last season, with the Guildford Flames in England’s HK Elite league, Reddick scored 11 goals and 30 assists in 46 games.

So far this season, Reddick — who signed the deal around Dec. 31 — has 2 goals and 2 assists in 7 contests.

▪ In November, the New England Hockey Conference announced that, because of COVID, the 2020-21 season and subsequent post-season tournament were being cancelled.

Castleton University, located in Vermont, is part of that conference. And Kennewick’s Ryanne Mix is a member of Castleton’s women’s ice hockey team. Mix is a junior defenseman for the Spartans.

▪ Former Tri-City American Colton Yellow Horn scored 6 goals and 3 assists in 7 games for HSC Csikszereda in the Erste Liga in Hungary and Romania. The team sits eight of 10 teams in the league standings.

College football

▪ Pacific Lutheran University still is planning on a four-game football schedule starting next month, with two games against the University of Puget Sound, and two against Whitworth University. The Lutes have three area athletes on their football roster — all sophomores: Brent Child (Kamiakin), Logan Shimskey (Southridge), and Kord Tuttle (Prosser).

▪ Azusa Pacific University in California announced Dec. 15 that it was dropping its football program after 55 years.

With the school playing in the NCAA Division II Great Northwest Athletic Conference since 2012, and being the only school in California playing D-II, finances just became too much – especially the costs of travelling to find games.

It means that Central Washington University, a GNAC member, has lost two football games a season. The Wildcats will have to look outside the Northwest for more games.

Golf

With the PGA of America recently taking away the 2022 PGA Championship from Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey, that major is now back in play.

Scott Hanson of the Seattle Times mentioned that Sahalee Country Club in Sammamish is a candidate to host that event. Sahalee has hosted the 1998 PGA Championship, and is being considered for the 2022 event.

Also being mentioned, to a lesser extent, is Chambers Bay Golf Course in University Place. Chambers Bay played host to the 2015 U.S. Open Championship..