Glow of Friday night lights

In March of 1986 the sports department at KXLY TV was overwhelmed with more reporting than they had time for on the air.

There were the final days of State B Tournament at the Coliseum in Spokane. And scattered across the region were the teams in the Greater Spokane League and many others in the smaller schools.

“It’s just basketball everywhere, boys and girls,” recalled Rick Lukens, one of the sports reporters at the time.

With sports director Bud Nameck out of town, Lukens’ co-worker, Dennis Patchin, approached management to somehow give them more time to show all the highlights.

The way Lukens remembers it years later is that the bosses gave it the OK and a tradition was born with the high school highlights program called “Friday Night Sports Extra,” the show name credited to Nameck.

Lukens, Nameck and Patchin were recognized Sept. 28 on opening night of One Spokane Stadium for their decades of dedication to high school sports that now spans some 40 years.

If racing the clock each night on deadline for the 11 O’clock news can be considered fun one time, why not do it on a regular basis?

“We went to the boss again and said, ‘Hey, remember when we did this (for basketball) and it worked really well?’” Lukens said. “We’re thinking we could do for high school football.”

The initial thought was to scour the land for 8 to 10 games, Lukens said. “We ended up doing like as many as 16 or 18,” because some Friday games were played in the afternoons.

And it took a village, well much of the resources of the entire news department at KXLY at least, to race across the region to shoot the video and get it produced in time for the 11:15 airing.

“It became a challenge for us, a fun challenge,” Lukens said. “Dennis would say ‘I think I can get to such and such a game,’” to which he was told “That was halfway to Wenatchee,” but Patchin insisted, “I can do it.”

Lukens recalled the first trip to Inchelium for a game in the afternoon, and you have to take a ferry ride, mindful of the schedules. Friday Night Sports Extra took some of the mundane drudgery out of an always busy newsroom.

“We were excited when we showed up on Friday,” Lukens explained. “It’s almost like you put your game face on at work.” And that vibe was infectious across the newsroom where many wore football jerseys.

But that fever also spread into all corners of the region, especially the small communities where worship under Friday night lights might just have been more fervent than in Sunday church?

“It was so fun to go into especially the smaller towns because they were so happy to see you,” Lukens said.

So much so that Davenport once presented ball caps with their Gorilla mascot to the crew who wore them on the set later that night. And many followed the gesture.

Not to be outdone, Ritzville cheerleaders put together gift baskets and that started another tradition.

Both Lukens and Patchin fondly recollect the story of the coaches while on the bus ride home stopped to feed the team burgers. The timing was somehow perfect for coaches to slip across to a bar to get caught up on scores.

The school and coaches were not named, Patchin reasoned, “I mean, this is the days for the Internet, or cell phones. They wanted to know who the game before they got home.”

What KXLY started, and others have since followed, was a rarity Patchin said. Naturally, there were similar shows in football hotbeds like Texas, but those, too were limited.

“We were by far the first West Coast edition,” Patchin said. And so successful were they in doing it, “ABC to let us delay Nightline 15 minutes on Friday nights.”

Nameck and Lukens have long since left the TV business and retired. But Patchin is still at it.

As the last man standing of the trio of pioneers, Patchin is still found on the sidelines shooting video, but above all continuing to tell stories.

“I played at a small high school in southern Idaho, and we never saw a television camera ever,” Patchin said.

That was something he vowed to correct in a sports reporting career that now drifts back to the 1980s.

“One of the things is we need to make sure we get to Davenport and Colfax and the eight-man schools, because it’s important to those communities,” Patchin said.

It took time but eventually other Spokane stations followed suit with their own iterations on Fridays. “I’m just glad that all three stations are doing it,” Patchin said.

“The most important thing is the legacy has continued through a generation,” Patchin said, halting to consider, “I’m sure there’s been a third generation, because we’ve been doing it for so long.”

“But you know dads were on that show, moms were on that show, because of basketball; daughters have been on the show,” Patchin said.

“I think it’s kind of a cool thing.”

— Paul Delaney is a Free Press Publishing reporter and can be reached at [email protected].