A history lesson on Battle for the Paddle

With the fourth installment of Battle for the Paddle set to begin today, it felt like the perfect time to give everyone a refresher on the spirit competition and how it came to be.

When Kris Knowles took over as SHS athletic director about eight years ago, the annual rivalry game for Sandpoint was Moose Madness with Bonners Ferry.

The spirit and love for the rivalry students and fans showed was undeniable, but there was one problem. Bonners Ferry is a 3A school while Sandpoint is a 4A, pinning a smaller school against a bigger school.

Down south in Rathdrum, 4A Inland Empire League rival Lakeland was experiencing a similar issue facing 5A Post Falls in the annual Prairie Pig spirit competition.

So Knowles and Trent Derrick, the Lakeland AD at the time, got together and came up with the idea to create a spirit competition with similar sized schools and a league foe.

“We got to talking and we said, ‘gosh our rivalry games aren’t really rivalries so why don’t we look at doing something with Lakeland and Sandpoint,’ and it just kind of evolved from there,” Knowles said.

Then came the process of deciding a name for the spirit competition. Leave it to the students at the respective schools to come up with a name that was just as catchy and rhythmic as Coeur d’Alene and Lake City’s Fight for the Fish and represented the lake squeezed between both towns.

Battle for the Paddle was the perfect name and its stuck ever since.

Knowles said the spirit competition was created to foster an environment that made kids want to pack the high school gym and show school spirit and throughout its existence, the students have bought in.

“Our kids are pretty prideful, they’re spirited,” Knowles said. “This is a good opportunity for them to get out and show it.”

Knowles has noticed over the years that students who typically don’t attend sporting events tend to fill the bleachers during for Battle for the Paddle and some students have even told him the competition is reminiscent of Homecoming week.

The boys and girls basketball games and wrestling dual that will take place between the two schools on Friday night, won’t necessarily impact the winner of the Battle for the Paddle spirit competition. But which ever school comes out victorious in each of the matchups will certainly have a leg up when some of the spirit events happen throughout the night.

A rap battle, a lip sync competition, multiple decibel readings and performances from the cheer teams are just some of the events that will happen tonight to determine which school has the most spirit. There will also be a raffle at halftime of the boys basketball game to decide the winner of a free car from Parker Subaru.

In the first three years of Battle for the Paddle, the winner has been the school with home court advantage. The Bulldogs will need that pattern to continue in order to reclaim the paddle tonight in front of roughly 1,600 people at Les Rogers Court.