230 Miles Every Year

CANTON -- Our high school writer Tom Groeschen reports on the Enquirer's HS blog about keeping the state football championships wa-a-a-y up here in Canton and Massillon through 2011. Gresh deals with this stuff far more than I do, and if he says it runs like clockwork, that's good enough for me.

It's still a load.

The reasons given are familiar: The stadiums up here are the right size, their proximity to each other is convenient and practical, the traffic flow is good and blah and blah and blah.

The fact that fans in our area are inconvenienced matters not at all. The notion that a very good event should be spread around a state where HS football is equally fanatic is ignored.

Sorry, but I can't help but think part of it is a big ol' up yours to SW Ohio, which the way some view it, isn't even Ohio at all.

It's funny. When you read in-state publications about travel within Ohio, golf within Ohio, anything within Ohio, most can't say enough about everywhere else in Ohio but our little corner of the state. If you've lived in the Tristate any time at all, you'll hear us referred to as North Kentucky or worse. Hard not to feel like the orphans of the state. Except when it comes to D-1 titles. SW Ohio had won 4 of the last 5 heading into the game tonight.

Stadium size? Really? If you're a kid in these games, do you care? Or would it be better to dress in a locker room at Paul Brown Stadium? No telling if the Bengals would allow a local entrant to use their room, but who knows? And you cannot tell me that you would not get 30,000 to watch a local team play in the D-1 final.

Traffic? Would you rather enter and exit a place surrounded by interstates, or a place surrounded by 2-lanes? Fawcett Stadium here is on I-77, but it might as well be a 2-lane, constantly torn up and slow. And once you get off 77, forget it. Twenty minutes a mile.

They want turf, they want 2 venues, they have PBS and Nippert. And maybe, fans traveling from elsewhere in the state who spend the night can locate a restaurant better than a Bob Evans.

And the weather in Cincinnati would not be routinely dreadful, as it is here. As I type 1 minute before kickoff, snow is falling sideways. Nice.

Even if none of that were true, an event this special has to be shared. Or put in Columbus, where north and south make an equal hike.

Meantime, we feel like 2nd-class citizens. Everywhere but the field.