This is the time of year for Coach Sly to get some of his weird thoughts on high school sports off his chest.

So Sly's going to pose an outta left field question to you all: Is high school sports better or worse now than it was when you went to high school, whenever that was.

Take all the factors into account ... the specialization, the increased year-round training, the media coverage, the crowds, parent involvement, the coaching, etc, come up with a conclusion, and tell us why you feel the way you do.

In Coach Sly's book, there are a lot of pros and cons to each era, but Coach Sly is going to give the olden days the slight edge. His biggest reasons: too much stock is put these days into jockeying for college schollies as opposed to just playing to play, and too much money is being shelled out by parents who probably could put the dollars to better use. It's a Cold War-style arm's race, people.

One big positive for the current times: girls sports are taken a lot more seriously.

What do you guys think?

Coach Sly was wowed to see St. Charles East reel in Dave Haskins as its new baseball coach.

.500 is impressive enough as a batting average in baseball, but Sly is all the more dazzled when a coach can say he has a .500 percentage of winning state titles as a head coach (Haskins was 1 for 2 on that front at Prairie Ridge).

With North seemingly out of left-handed pitching studs, finally, maybe it'll be East's turn to rule the baseball roost in St. Charles in the near future.

One more thought on this: you know it's a tough time to hire when a guy with these kind of coaching credentials has to go looking all over for a school that will hire him as a teacher, too. Yeesh.

Summer can be a slooooow time of year for us Tri-Cities sports junkies, but Coach Sly always keeps an eye on the coaching changes that come in bulk this time of year.

Just in the past week or two, we've seen a bunch of new coaches hired at St. Charles North, a new boys basketball coach at Kaneland and now St. Charles East has hired Paul Jennison to take over the girls soccer team.

Some more changes are surely going to be coming in the next couple weeks.

Anyone out there know anything about some of these new faces? (OK, Jennison's not such a new face ... he already coached the East boys).

Sly'd love an early scouting report  on anyone in the know about some of these newbies, and also would like to hear from ya'll about which new coach has the toughest shoes to fill.

Coach Sly can tell some of you are wanting to get a jump start on the football talk, and Sly is only too happy to oblige.

After all, Sly knows some of our youngsters are already out there this summer, putting in time at camps and elsewhere to prepare for kickoff in a couple months-plus.

This time of year, there's a lot of guesswork involved, but Sly's wondering if there's any way Kaneland could have the last laugh on the big dogs in the Tri-Cities and steal the last Western Sun Conference championship.

If it was only a matter of skill position players, probably so. Seems like Kaneland might have the most razzle-dazzle guys to work with this season. But with the numbers Kaneland has compared to Batavia and Geneva, up front is usually where that proves the difference.

Hey Kaneland types, how are those lines lookin?

Much of a machine as Geneva has become, you just don't lose the guys they're losing and not feel it in a big way. That doesn't mean they can't find a way to win seven or eight games, but any more than that and Wicinski needs to write a book or something.

Batavia is losing lots on offense but Coach Sly is more curious about the other side of the ball, where there's the most room for improvement. Sly's guessing lots of tackling drills are on the summer agenda.

Sly is pretty sure North's Huxtable is going to be the best back in the area but would love to hear from North fans what else the Stars have to work with.

And East ... new coach and no Wes, but a pretty good group of defensive players comes back. Sly expects coach Fields to field a playoff contender right from the get-go.

Well, lemme have it.

As you all know, it's never, ever too early to talk Tri-Cities football.

10-1?

Yikes!

Coach Sly was hopin' and expectin' a little more from the Batavia baseball team but the Bulldogs ran into a team that was really on its game, and unfortunately couldn't measure up.

Still a great season for coach Holm's squad. The Dogs put on quite a show this spring.

Some great Bulldog careers came to an end today. It'll be interesting to see how they pick up the pieces next season. Might be Geneva's turn to win the conference.

On a happier note, congrats to Burlington Central softball. Sly knows we have some BC types readin' this blog, and welcomes plenty of Rocket chatter.

Tell ya what, Coach Sly would rather jog from Batavia to Burlington and back than get in the batter's box against Mackenzie Scott needing a hit.

That girl can let it fly. Here's hopin' she has two more games in her just like the rest.