Spokane Shock Weekly Update: it's gametime!

Remember all the fuss made about the start time during the World Series last year? It was mostly from east coasters who were getting sick of staying up past midnight to watch playoff baseball, causing me to laugh at them because when you live on the west coast you really don't have to worry about start time of games since we're three hours behind everyone else.

Meaning that when you wake up in the morning on Sunday during the NFL season, you only have to wait until 10 a.m. for the first round of games to start as opposed to 1 p.m. on the east coast, which stinks because that's plenty of time for your significant other to drop the "honey-do" list on your lap before kickoff. Another advantage of the west coast, is that the Sunday night game starts at 6 p.m. our time meaning that you'll get in bed with plenty of time to sleep before work the next morning.

So as sports fans on the west coast we really can't complain, but since this is a blog, I'm going to. There's been several instances when I think to myself "why the heck did they schedule the game at that time?"

First, some college basketball games have been starting later and later. Gonzaga plays tonight with an 8:30 p.m. start time and that's something that WSU and UW have been familiar with as well. They've even done it on the weekdays which means you're sometimes watching the Cougars and Huskies at 10 p.m. at night.

And when you have to wake up early the next morning, the second half of the game can be tough to handle. But why are they scheduling these games so late? It's certainly not to set themselves up for the East Coast, which is bedding down for the night before the game even started. So are they setting things for the Hawaii Time Zone or something? If you want to watch the game at the bar, you're hitting the louder night crowd that's going to detract from your experience, as opposed to a group of people just wanting to watch the game.

Second, the Spokane Shock have played around with their starting time for games. I believe their first season they kicked off at 7 p.m. on Saturdays. Then they moved their games to 5 p.m. which wasn't late or anything but made me scratch my head a little since a lot of people work of the weekend and it doesn't exactly allow them a whole lot of time to get off work and get to the Arena. It also kind of curtails your Saturdays as well since people have to be ready to head to the game by early afternoon.

But it looks like this season they've moved it back up to 7 p.m. which I think allows for most of the normal fans the best possible start time.

There has been a couple of roster changes, announced by Spokane Shock Director of Communications Kevin Maloney:

The Spokane Shock announced today that DB Brandon Isaac has been traded to the Manchester Wolves for future considerations. In another roster move, the Shock released WR Damon Morton.

The Shock’s roster now totals 34 players; 35 players will be brought into training camp that begins on March 8th.

I love future consideration trades. "We're going to trade you for somebody we don't quite no yet." Really makes a player feel good about himself.

They're also bringing back defensive coordinator Alex Sirianni, who was huge last year for the team. I know it's the af2, but the Shock had one of the best defenses last year, and that squad seemed to be able to make stops when it was needed - except for the final game of the season but we won't mention that game.