To all who are poo-pooing this article because it leaves off everything west of the Mississippi, one third of over 300 million people is no small portion of the population. Let’s face it, compared to the eastern half of the country, the distances in the west are vast; as a native Pacific Northwesterner I’m always surprised at how close things are to each other on the other side of the country. Those drive times from Dayton are a joke compared to the west coast: from Seattle to Portland is three hours, to San Francisco twelve hours, to L.A. sixteen hours. Even Spokane, still in the state of Washington, is a four hour drive.

The topic of distance reminds me of a story I heard while working as a reporter in another Dayton, a small wheat-farming town in eastern Washington. Towns are few and far between on that side of the state, and are often so small that special rules have been developed for playing high school football between teams who can only put eight players on the field at a time.

The story was of a high school coach who’d been recruited from Texas to a school on the west (sometimes called the “wet”) side of the Cascades, where everything is a bit closer together.

In Texas, the teller of this story said, football is more of a religion than a sport, and rivalries are nursed between town a hundred or more miles apart, so I can image the poor coach’s howl of protest when he saw his new team’s travel budget, a small fraction of what he’d had to work with in his previous job. The principal had to talk him down by reminding him that many towns had multiple high schools, and the teams he’d be playing until he got into the regional and state championships were a half hour bus ride away.

The story doesn’t tell how this coach made out with his new job, but I’m sure he and his players were able to spend more time on the practice field than on the bus.