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Note: This story was originally published in the Pacific Northwest Inlander.

15:00, Q1 – 156 yards to go

It's an inauspicious setting to set a record. At opening kickoff at Joe Albi Stadium, the home team’s student section (Mead), celebrating Senior Night, looks anemic. The visiting team’s side is even worse.

Besides the actual game itself, the running subplot involves Gonzaga Prep’s standout running back Bishop Sankey, who entered the game with 3,782 career rushing yards, 155 behind the all-time Greater Spokane League record of 3,937. One could safely assume that Sankey, averaging 253 yards per game, would be able to surpass it.

Sankey runs it up the middle following a G-Prep interception on the first play of the game, spins to avoid a defender, keeps churning, breaks free and sprints down the field for a 56-yard touchdown.

14:32, Q1 • 100 yards to go

Sankey says he knew about the record before the game, but it wasn’t the most important thing on his mind.

“Each game, I just try to help my team as much as I can,” he says. “I’m just trying to get the longest runs I can, trying to score every time.”

It’s pretty clear to everyone — people in the stands, his coaches on the sidelines, the other team’s defense — that the best way for G-Prep to win is to put the ball in his hands. Even if you know what’s coming (and since Sankey had 41 carries en route to 359 yards, it wasn’t exactly a secret), it’s still really hard to bring him down.

Sankey’s picked up gains of four yards here, six yards there, in between giving the ball to other backs a few times and G-Prep airing it out. His second TD comes after he runs right, head-fakes and dips in and out of the defense before finding the goal line.

1:46, Q1 • 49 yards to go

It’s difficult to ascertain at first glance what exactly makes Sankey such a great runner. He’s fast, but not the fastest; he’s not particularly tall, at 5-foot-9, but he’s solidly built. Really, it’s a combination of things.

“His vision is great, his explosiveness, his power, is phenomenal. He’s got great balance,” says G-Prep’s head coach Dave McKenna. “I mean, everything’s pretty good.”

Sankey keeps whittling down the magic number: pounding it up the middle for 12 yards; dragging a player who’s caught his jersey for five yards before going down. Then, needing 7 yards to break the record, he sees a hole and dives through for an 8-yard gain.

5:21, Q2 • -1 yards to go

The record is announced over the PA system, and the fans give him a standing ovation. McKenna calls a timeout to talk things over.

“I just wanted to congratulate him and tell him it was a huge achievement, but it wasn’t about him — it was about his teammates as well. He understood that, and wanted to get the W,” McKenna says.

Sankey proves it by going out and scoring his third TD of the game on the next play. He got the next two yards, the score and another 201 yards, to boot. G-Prep won the game, and a spot in the playoffs, 35-21.

Even though Sankey’s on the verge of setting more marks, for most rushing yards in a single season at the GSL and state levels, he says he’s focused on something else: next week’s game against Ferris, ranked No. 4 in the state (G-Prep is No. 6). About setting records, he has one philosophy.

“I was just trying to take it each game, each carry at a time,” he says. “If it happens, it happens.”

This piece was originally published in the Pacific Northwest Inlander.

Minor league baseball. Even the name sounds so ... inferior.“Minor league” has that connotation in today’s parlance: cut-rate. Second-fiddle.

Not good enough.

Most often, when people refer to something as “minor league,” it’s with the assumption that things aren’t ever going to get any better: a permanent state of mediocrity. When you’re actually referring to minor league baseball, though, there’s another word you should add to the end of the last definition: not good enough yet.

It’s an expression that certainly applies to this year’s Spokane Indians, both as individual players and the team as a whole. The Indians opened their season with a pair of four-game losing streaks split by an 8-1 win against the redundantly named Vancouver Canadians.

The reason for their struggles isn’t readily apparent, at least not after watching just one game. No one’s throwing the ball into the stands instead of hitting the cutoff man; the first baseman isn’t striding out to the batter’s box with his helmet on backwards. The troubles start and end with consistency.

“One night you’ll get pitching, but you don’t get hitting. The next night you’ll get defense, but we don’t get great pitching,” Manager Tim Hulett says. “You’ve got to put those things together.”

The Indians certainly have the roster to contend on any given night. Shortstop Jurickson Profar, a 17-year-old prospect out of Curacao, can hit, field and throw — but then, he wouldn’t be playing professional baseball if he couldn’t do that. Hulett says what sticks out are Profar’s game awareness and highly tuned instincts. Especially when you consider he’s only a teenager.

Big 6-foot-2 third baseman Mike Olt provides some power at the plate, says hitting coach Brian Dayette, and Olt backed that up by knocking in a double and a triple in his first three games. In addition to his offensive prowess, he’s also an asset in the field. “For a big guy, he’s got some great feet, some good hands, and he can make some really good plays,” Hulett says.

Pitching coach Justin Thompson mentions Chad Bell, Zack Osborne and Jimmy Reyes as promising arms to watch. Though the trio has combined for zero wins and two losses thus far, Thompson still sees their upside.

“Once we get those guys stretched out and get their pitch count up, I think we’re going to contend,” says Thompson.

Whether pitcher or position player, the most important thing a minor-league player (assuming there are no gaping flaws in their fundamentals) gets out of a season is experience. The more innings they play, the more chances they have to further their development. But when looking at the feeder-system nature of the minor leagues, there would seem to be two conflicting forces driving a given team: getting wins and developing players.

Hulett doesn’t see it that way. “Our focus is on developing winning players, because I think [winning and developing players] go hand-in-hand,” he says. “It’s hard to develop a player who goes through your whole system [and who] loses at every level and then say, ‘Go win at the big-league level.’”

To a certain extent, using the term “minor league” in a derogatory tone makes sense even in a baseball context: As a whole, the team’s never really going to get all that much better. But that’s only because when the end of the season rolls around, the best players will be moving another rung up the ladder. The worst will find a different career.

And those who need a little more time will be back next year, ready to mix with another crop of guys starting out from scratch. They probably won’t be that good. At least, not yet.