Baker's just the right size for the Class 1A tourney

Oregon's littlest high schools ought to travel to a large place to compete for their great prize: a state basketball championship.

But not too large.

(They shouldn't actually travel, though. That's a turnover. Coaches hate turnovers.)

Baker City seems to me the ideal site for this annual event.

Our city is big compared with most of the towns from which the competing Class 1A schools hail, yet by most other standards Baker City's population is quite modest.

It pleases me to know that for players and fans from places such as Spray, population 160, and Adrian, 185, Baker City qualifies as an urban hub — a place where you needn't get out of your car to eat your supper, but you sometimes have to wait on a stoplight.

The contrast isn't so sharp as it used to be, of course.

You still can't buy a Big Mac in Crane, or in Moro or Blachly, but computer processors digest data just as speedily in those places as they do in Portland.

The latest YouTube spectacle appears on a screen in Joseph at the very instant it arrives in Eugene.

No one, I'm certain, drives into Baker City with his mouth agape, in the manner of a hayseed who steers his battered farm truck into Vegas and sees neon for the first time.

Yet Baker City's relatively tidy dimensions eliminate the hassles that teams and fans would endure in a metropolitan area.

Even at our most congested we can't muster anything like a rush hour that would attract the attention of television news helicopters.. In any case, the Baker High School gym is little more than a mile from most of the city's motels, so if your team's point guard lingers a few minutes too long over her pancakes, well, she's not likely to miss the tip-off.

The BHS gym is just the right size, too, for the Class 1A tournament.

It is of course an exciting moment for teenagers when they stride onto the gleaming wood floor at the Rose Garden or Mac Court or Gill Coliseum and hear their sneaker squeaks echo. But the difference between a 10,000-seat arena and the Class 1A schools' home courts is so dramatic that it can distract players.

When you're accustomed to baskets that have as their backdrop a wall unadorned except for a few signs the cheerleaders painted by hand, it can be more a than a little disconcerting to gaze up, as you're preparing to let go on a three-point try, and see a few thousand seats.

The BHS gym, by comparison, is intimate.

Not as intimate as the buildings where most Class 1A schools play, to be sure, but more friendly, and less intimidating, than the coliseums where Kobe Bryant and Brandon Roy perform.

I think the Baker gym feels comfortable for Class 1A players, its accoutrements familiar: bleachers that can be pushed to the wall to make room for dances, rolled up tumbling mats where toddlers learn to do somersaults on weekend mornings, scoreboards that hang from the wall rather than dangle from the ceiling, snack bars where you can buy a hot dog and a soda without rifling through your wallet to find the $20 bill you keep for emergencies.

The Class 1A tournaments warrant scant mention in most Oregon newspapers. As for TV cameras I doubt we'll see any at BHS when the championship games are played Saturday night.

But the absence of media attention in no way diminishes those games, it seems to me.

The games matter to the players, to their fans, to their towns.

To them, the games are a big deal.

And I'm glad that Baker City, a place on which the makers of highway maps bestow a slightly larger dot, is where those games are played.

Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald.