Bainbridge’s Erin Kinney and South Kitsap’s Alissa Buss had big seasons to help Linfield reach the NCAA Division III softball playoffs.

Kinney, a sophomore third baseman, earned first-team Northwest Conference honors after hitting a team-high .403 with a .441 on-base and .604 slugging percentages. Kinney hit four homers and drove in 30 runs for the Wildcats (31-12), who will play in a regional tournament on May 11-13.

Buss, a speedy shortstop, was a second-team NWC pick. Buss is hitting .392 with a .447 on-base and .445 slugging percentages. Buss has three doubles, three triples and had 15 RBI for Linfield, which won the NWC Tournament after finishing fourth in league play.

Also

Texas Tech: Lea Hopson (sr., Sequim/Southern Idaho) i shitting .326 with 11 home runs and a team-high 37 RBI for the Red Raiders (25-26).

Jamestown (N.D.) University: Emma Keller (fr., North Kitsap), a part-time starting outfielder, hit .329 with five doubles and a home run for the Jimmies (36-14), regular-season North Star Athletic Association champs.  Backup second baseman Kalea Chapman (jr., Juneau, Alaska/Olympic College) hit .241 for the Jimmes, who lost in the finals of the conference tournament to Dickinson State and are waiting to see if they get an NAIA at-large tournament berth.

Pacific Lutheran: Makayla Bentz (fr., Sequim) appeared in nine games, all in relief. She was 1-1 with a 7.44 ERA in 16 innings.

Concordia (Portland, Oregon): Rylleigh Zbaraschuk (so., Sequim/Washington) hit .300 for Concordia (40-16). The outfielder started 20 games.

NWAC

Olympic College: Center fielder Sam Gorham (fr., Olympic) is hitting .494 for the Rangers (17-10) with 3 HR, 21 RBI, 18 BB and 10 stolen bases. … Outfielder Tiffani Ferrell (fr., Central Kitsap), a late addition, is hitting .474 with a home run, 11 RBI after seven games. …. Mariah Frazier (so., Port Angeles) is hitting .444 with 3 HRs, a team-high 24 RBI and has seven stolen bases. She also made the NWAC’s all-academic team. … Pitcher/outfielder  Christina Bigelow (so., Olympic) is hitting .270 with a home run and is 8-4 with a 4.03 ERA in 78 innings pitched. … First baseman Miranda Holt (so., North Kitsap) has five HRs, three doubles, 17 RBI and is hitting .250 for the Rangers.

Edmonds: OF/3B Madison Wood (fr., Klahowya) is hitting .341 with five HRs and 29 RBI for the Tritons.

At least six golfers who have passed through Gold Mountain on their way to successful PGA careers were playing in the Masters the past two days.

You probably have heard of some of them.

Justin Spieth is having a historic tournament, setting a record for the lowest score through 36 holes (64-66—130). Spieth’s connection to Gold Mountain? The lad from Texas won the U.S. Junior Amateur  in 2011.

Dustin Johnson set a Masters record with three eagles on Friday enroute to shooting a 67. He’s tied for third at 137, a really good score, but seven back of the Spiethmaster. Johnson was at Gold Mountain in 2004 when he tied for seventh in the Husky Invitational while playing for Coastal Carolina.

Jonas Blixt is tied for 19th after rounds of 72-70. Blixt was a senior at Florida State when he passed through Gold Mountain for the NCAA regionals in 2008. Blixt tied for second with Spieth at the 2014 Masters, which was won by Bubba Watson, and was fourth at the 2013 PGA Championship.

Keegan Bradley won a PGA Championship in 2011, the same year Spieth was running the table at the Junior Amateur at Gold Mountain. Bradley played his college golf for St. John’s and he found his way to Bremerton for the 2006 U.S. Amateur Public Links. He lost in the second round of match play. Bradley is tied for 27th at Augusta after rounds of 71-72.

Florida’s Billy Horschel also lost in the first round at the 2006 APL. He missed the cut at the Masters, as did Luke Donald, a native of England who was playing for Northwestern when he finished in a four-way tied for second at the 1998 Husky Invitational. Donald was the PGA Tour’s Player of the Year in 2011, when he won four events and wound up as the No. 1-ranked player in the world. Horschel tied for fourth at the 2013 U.S. Open and made 23 straight cuts at one point during that season.

Did you know? The University of Washington will host the NCAA West Regionals on May 14-16 at Gold Mountain.

The Washington State Hall of Fame announced its class of six inductees on Thursday morning. Here’s the press release:

Chris Chandler and James Edwards, who starred at the University of Washington then went on to long pro careers in football and basketball respectively, are among six individuals voted this year into the State of Washington Sports Hall of Fame.

The others are figure skater Rosalynn Sumners, women’s basketball phenom Joyce Walker, the late Post-Intelligencer sports columnist John Owen and legendary racing shell builder George Pocock.

 “This is a wonderful class for our hall of fame that started in 1960,” said executive director Marc Blau. “It was selected by a panel of experts, many of them sportswriters and broadcasters, from throughout the state.”

Chandler, who earned letters in five sports at Everett High School, was MVP of two bowl games as a Husky. In his 17-year NFL career he passed for 170 touchdowns and more than 28,000 yards. He led Atlanta into the 1999 Super Bowl after a 14-2 regular season record.

Edwards, a 7-footer from Roosevelt High School, played 19 seasons in the NBA following an All-American career as a Husky. He won two NBA championship rings with Detroit (1989, 1990) and one with Chicago (1996). He scored 14,862 points and collected 6,004 rebounds in his pro career.

Walker is considered one of the best female basketball players in state history. She led Garfield to a state championship and in the 1980 tournament opener outscored the entire Renton team with 40 points in a 68-35 victory. She starred at Louisiana State where she averaged 25 points, played in Europe and later was one of the first women to play with the Harlem Globetrotters. She is the girl’s basketball coach at Garfield and formerly assisted at Kingston.

Sumners, who grew up in Edmonds, was world figure skating junior champion in 1980, U.S. champion in 1982, 1983 and 1984 and a silver medalist in the 1984 Winter Olympics.

  Owen was at the P-I for 36 years until 1993 and seven times was named state sportswriter of the year. He was sports editor as well as columnist for much of that span and also wrote a popular food column “Intermediate Eater” that he continued to write after retiring. Owen died last year.

Pocock was a native of England and a master boatbuilder who was invited by UW rowing coach Hiram Conibear to establish his shell-building business on campus. He mentored UW coaches and athletes and became famous internationally as a boat-builder and rowing authority. His expertise and contributions to the 1936 UW crew that won the Olympic Gold Medal are described in the best-selling book “The Boys in the Boat.”

 The State of Washington Sports Hall of Fame was started by sportscaster Clay Huntington of Tacoma. The addition of this year’s class will bring the total of inductees to 195. An induction ceremony will be held at Safeco Field prior to a Seattle Mariners game at a date to be determined. Plaques honoring hall of fame members are on display in the Tacoma Dome at the Shanaman Sports Museum.

For additional information visit www.washingtonsportshof.com.

This isn’t anything knew, but it’s a good reminder about a topic that seems to pop up all of the time.

The author of the blog, Mark Rerick, is from Grand Forks, N.D. He’s a coach, an athletic director, and a dad, and his post on his blog about multi-sports athletes vs. one-sport athletes received more than a million views.

Rerick talked with the Grand Forks Herald after his post went viral.

Former Olympic High standout Lauren (Haas) Peters, daughter of Patti and Dan Haas, is being inducted into the Southern Illinois Hall of Fame this weekend.

Haas played softball for the Salukis from 2005-08 and left the Missouri Valley Conference school as one of the top hitters in school history. Haas was the MVP of the conference her senior year after hitting .388 wit 39 RBI. She hit .320 for her career with 24 home runs (fourth all-time at SIU).

Haas was discovered by coaches while recruiting at the annual Colorado Fireworks tournament.

Her former head coach, Kerri Blaylock, said this about the 2008 Olympic High grad:  “You look back in the record books, and she kind of did it quietly. You look back now and you go ‘Wow, she’s in all these categories,’ but I don’t think this was this flashy player. She just did it very quietly. I knew she had a Hall of Fame career, and I’m really pleased that she’s able to make it in. She was one of the grittiest, toughest kids that I ever coached.”

Haas works for the Navy in foreign military sales. She and her husband, Ryan Peters, have a 2-year-old son, Camden, and are expecting their second child in May.

Hass started out as a shortstop and ended up playing first base her senior year.

Her father, Dan, is in his fourth season as the head softball coach at Olympic College.

I get the fact that national letter of intent day is a big deal, but well, why is it such a big deal?

I remember attending a Scripps Howard (the newspaper group that owned the Kitsap Sun in the early 1990s) sports editor meeting one year and talk shifted to national letter of intent day and  how it should be covered etc. I voiced my opinion, wondering if giving 17- and 18-year-olds so much attention was a good idea. The whole recruiting process seemed a bit slimey at the time.

My opinion didn’t go over well. Most of the other sports editors, many of them from newspapers that covered SEC football, looked at me like I had three eyeballs.

Now, it’s become a big business. Fans get all giddy when their favorite universities sign a 4-star running back they’ve never seen play. I don’t fault the kid who are given scholarships, but I don’t see a need to call a press conferences and pull hats out of the air like a magician before announcing their picks. That’s a little overboard don’t you think?

But I guess it is the world we live in. As Georgia Tech athletic director Mike Bobinski accurately summarized, “We are a society of gross overstatement and exaggeration,” and that’s no more evident than in recruiting.

I love it how all of the “experts” rank the recruiting classes. It’s like preseason polls. They don’t mean a thing. It takes two, maybe three years to figure out how good your recruiting class really is.

That said, I did a little (and I mean a little) research about this year’s national letter of intent day as it pertains to the Pac-12.

I discovered that Washington out-recruited Washington State big-time in our state. The Huskie signed eight state players; WSU got just one (safety Deion Singleton from Chiawana High in Pasco).

Washington also signed one player from Oregon, which is more than Oregon signed.

The Ducks did sign three kids from our state: OT Shane Lemieux (West Valley-Yakima), OT Calvin Throckmorton (Bellevue) and OLB Foto Leiato (Steilacoom).

WSU also signed five junior college players, same as Arizona. Nobody in the Pac-12 signed more JCs. Washington signed one. The only Pac-10 school that didn’t sign a JC player was Stanford.

USC and UCLA graded out tops in the recruiting game. Washington ranked No. 6 in the Pac-12 by ESPN (No. 28 nationally). WSU was No. 9/No. 57.

Rivals.com had USC No. 1 nationally. UCLA was No. 13, Oregon No. 17, Stanford No. 18, Arizona State No. 20, California No. 29, Washington No. 30, Arizona and Utah tied at No. 41, WSU No. 56,  Oregon State and Colorado tied at No. 70.

One more thing: Snoop Dogg’s been a longtime USC fan, but his son, Cordell Broadus, signed  with UCLA.

And here’s a fun recruiting story from athlon.com: The 2015 Recruiting All-Name Team. 

You’ll have to go elsewhere for the in-depth analysis. And, a day after signing day 2015, you can find several stories about the what colleges need for 2016.

C’mon, man.

Charlie Pierce might be my favorite writer.

He writes about politics and other issues for Esquire.com.

He also writes for Grantland.com, a popular sports and pop-culture blog.

I’m as tired as the next guy about this story about deflating footballs, but this story by Pierce is worth reading.

Here’s the ending:

And, as the sun went down on a long day’s journey into nonsense, I’m sorry, but if you can’t see the humor in this preposterous burlesque, then you’re having nowhere near enough fun in showbiz.

Will the road to the Super Bowl go through Seattle?

I think it will, and we’ll find out later today when the Seahawks play the Rams at CenturyLink. It’s hard to see Seattle having a letdown in this one. There’s too much at stake and they’re coming into the game on a roll, winning their last five games while giving up just 6.6 points a game.

If Seattle wins and the Green Bay-Detroit game doesn’t end in a tie, the defending Super Bowl champs will earn a bye and the home-field advantage. The home-field advantage definitely means more when you’re talking about Seattle or Green Bay. The crowd at CenturyLink makes a difference, and the Packers are a different team at Lambeau Field. Aaron Rodgers hasn’t thrown an interception at home this season.

Here’s a look at the NFL’s playoff scenarios heading into Week 17.

Some links and some thoughts

* Here’s a pretty convincing argument for why former Mariner DH Edgar Martinez should be in the Hall of Fame. 

* ICYMI, Bob Dutton of the Tacoma News Tribune addressed a lot of questions concerning the Mariners in this story.

* Former Kentridge  High and Edmonds CC star Shaquielle McKissic has had a tougher journey than most college basketball played. McKissic’s now a senior at Arizona State.

* Olympic High has won six straight and looks like the Trojans are the team to beat in the Olympic League in boys basketball. Next game: Jan. 6 at Bremerton.

* New England’s the obvious favorite to win the AFC, but I wouldn’t sleep on the Pittsburgh Steelers, which has looked pretty good in winning their last three games. Ben Roethlisberger is getting protection, Le’Veon Bell is the best multi-purpose back in the league and the defense is starting to come together. The Steelers win the AFC North and a bye with a win over Cincinnati today. If the Steelers go into the playoffs with a four-game winning streak and a bye, watch out.

* Pat Forde of Yahoo! Sports is among those who’s convinced Kentucky will be 34-0 when the NCAA Tournament begins in March. The No. 1 Wildcats dispatched No. 4 Louisville 58-50 in a battle of unbeatens on Saturday, and Forde said it should be smooth sailing for Kentucky in the SEC.

Forde writes: Too long. Too versatile. Too deep. Too relentless. Too athletic.

Louisville coach Rick Pintino says: “I know one thing. They’re one of the great defensive teams I’ve seen in my 40 years. They can switch and not cause a mismatch, they can move their feet, they can block the shot.”