Last night— Friday, February 27th, 2026 as of writing— the Montesano Bulldogs lost in the state basketball tournament. It was for Washington’s 1A classification, the class for schools with enrollments between 225 and 449 students. It wasn’t particularly close; the Dogs got blown out 63-38 by Wapato. The game itself also had lower stakes, functioning as a quasi-play-in game. Even in those circumstances, it was still an accomplishment. It was, after all, technically the state tournament.
Montesano is a town roughly a 45-minute drive west of me, quite close to Washington’s Pacific coast. It’s the county seat of Grays Harbor County, part of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula region, which might be my favorite part of the state. It is extremely rural, with the largest city in a region larger than multiple US states barely in the mid-20,000 range. It is also Washington’s Appalachia and, probably for the first time by any journalist, I don’t mean so derogatorily.
This is a region dominated completely by logging pretty much from the outset, and its early industrial history was beset with conflict. Outside of West Virginia and Colorado, the Olympic Peninsula saw the largest volume of radical labor action in the country. It was here, and not far from Montesano in the mills and docks of nearby Aberdeen and Hoquiam, that saw massive over-representation (in terms of relative population) in the Washington sections of both the American Socialist and Communist Parties well into the 1930s, as well as votes at elections.
When the logging industry collapsed in the 1980s following new trade deals for cheaper lumber from Asia, the area was plunged into a deep, deep depression that it is just now, very slowly, starting to crawl back from. For years, Aberdeen resembled Martinaise, the bombed-out neighborhood that’s the setting for the video game Disco Elysium. Though it’s been carried by the Republicans in the last three general elections after snapping the longest unbroken streak of county hold by the Democrats in the entire country, the stereotypes of rural conservatism don’t exactly apply here as neatly as they might elsewhere. Union membership is still high, and the region’s labor history was something meticulously kept and maintained until it was lost in a fire several years ago.
We often hear that community is a big value in rural areas, but here there’s less of the sniping and whispering that dominates a lot of small towns; it does really feel like a true community. Despite the intense sociopolitical environment of today, the community always comes around for basketball.
Montesano losing in the tournament might be a footnote for everyone else, but a short time earlier, they made it to the district final for the first time since 1976. It was a front-page story in the newspaper.
I don’t care that the state legislature named pickleball the “official” state sport, basketball is the people’s choice. In terms of what communities actually rally around here, especially in the rural East and Southwest, as well the Native American reservations and urban schools and neighborhoods with significant non-white populations, it’s basketball. The stories I could tell about Washington high school basketball this year alone could fill whole articles themselves.
I’ve always been a football girl but my family was a strange place when it came to sports. Baseball is my mother’s favorite sport, and while I don’t have him on record saying it, my father’s favorite sport is basketball, purely from impressions. I was kind of an odd one for picking football, at least at the time. We watched the Seahawks get refballed in Super Bowl XL, and the NFL sometimes, but college football was the predominant form of the sport that my family watched until the Legion of Boom years.
You could chalk it up partly to all of my elementary school classmates loving football, and me picking it up entirely through peer pressure, and partly to my grandfather, who did the local radio broadcasts for high school sports for decades. But we always watched the World Series, and we always watched March Madness, no matter who was playing.
It’s through this I discovered John Feinstein as a child. Besides John Facenda and Harry Kalas, the legendary voices for NFL Films in the 1970s and 1980s, I do not think there is another person who has had an impact on my relationship to sports as large as him.
I played flag football in middle school, partly because it was cheap and partly because my parents didn’t want me playing tackle. And even though playing was itself exhilarating, even in middle school I felt that just watching the other games, just standing or sitting on the sideline, felt different. There was an almost indescribable sensation that came with watching other kids play football on a sunny, cold Saturday morning in October. Even in early high school, before we moved away from the elementary school where the YMCA would host flag games, I would bike over and see if games were playing. It was at that point, after playing, after reading, after absorbing some of the best sports cinematography ever made that was NFL Films in the 70s, I knew I wanted to write about sports. If I couldn’t play it (I dropped football after sophomore year, something in hindsight I deeply regret), I wanted to be involved with it to the maximum extent possible.
John got that feeling. The “in-the-moment” feeling. In a way, it’s a grace that he passed away before the mid-majors he so loved were completely hollowed out.
The only regret I have about my time at Hustle Belt is that I wasn’t able to go to a game, although I came close twice. And even then, an early-season buy game against Washington, and a very weird mid-season tilt in Pullman against a Washington State team struggling with the realities of being independent, don’t have the same energy as a conference matchup, I know that from experience. Just once, I wanted to experience what Feinstein described being in the Palestra was like.
I was pulled to the MAC because of the same reasons that I was pulled to stories about high school basketball: it is a conference full of Montesanos, programs representing communities for whom they are the centerpiece.
My first MAC game was the fake spike game between Western Michigan and Toledo in 2020, which I wrote about for my Hustle Belt audition piece. It will not see the light of day, and in retrospect it’s amazing it got me a job. It’s full of every bad sportswriting cliche in the universe, on proud display. I’d like to think I’ve improved since then.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, the NFL made a series of extremely important decisions. The NFL at the time of the 1930s was largely provincial, with owners acting like feudal lords. But things were changing that would disrupt that provincialism: World War II and the emergence of television.
In all of these decisions, the league’s owners chose to forgo their own benefit in favor of their own Long March, a grueling path towards making the sport #1 in the whole country— something it didn’t attain with absolute supremacy until arguably the 2000s. It’s difficult to read about the state of the league in the 1940s and how it changed through the 1950s and not think about similar developments now to the sport at large.
Former NFL Commissioner Bert bell once said “the league is only as strong as its weakest team.” This maxim led to the creation of the draft, and created organizational principles which now underpin pro sports in America.
This was not a lesson baseball learned around the same time. Instead of embracing the future, baseball owners remained “feast-or-famine”-minded and wholly rejected television for decades, with one owner saying that television audiences didn’t deserve better than the worst view at the ballpark.
When looking at college football now, it’s pretty clear that the sport has chosen the path of baseball, and has repeatedly done so at every juncture where it’s had an opportunity to correct course. Just like baseball milked the dominance of New York City in baseball in the 1930s and 1940s as proof they didn’t need to change, college football powers have used the success of about half a dozen programs as justification for not changing anything about the infrastructure of a sport which affects hundreds— if not thousands— of universities.
Thus, college football has signed its own death warrant. It signed it a long time ago, in retrospect. This sport will, in fact, cease to exist in a matter of years.
People are already going through the stages of grief. They’re angry— assuming they’re not in denial.
College football has not only not abided by Bell’s maxim, it has actively sought to make weaker teams more sidelined and irrelevant to competition. It actively embraced Darwinism. I came to peace with the fact that, due to the new landscape and due to the ongoing assault on universities across the country, Washington State, the program I spent my entire life celebrating, will probably not be playing football in a few years.
It’s a shame that this is how things have to end.
Or is it?
After all, football will continue to be played, in one form or another. A sport can’t just die.
And it’s not like this is completely alien to football itself. Football almost died once before, when it was so dangerous it had dozens of deaths a year. Teddy Roosevelt, fan of the game, gave an ultimatum: change the sport, or be banned.
So, they changed. And everyone rejoiced.
In the case of the entire college football structure imploding, the sport will see an event that could kill it, in its present form. But if it came back cheaper, more focused, and with more of an eye to avoiding the mistakes made in the previous decades, it will be borne anew.
In the same way, so will Hustle Belt find a way to live on despite the emergent changes in the media industry.
History never just ends. That’s probably the most important thing to take away from all of this. Like a phoenix, football— and Hustle Belt— will return from the ashes of wherever this current epoch is heading.
And that’s not too bad a sendoff, now, is it?