Highs and lows from the week in sports:

How cool was it to watch Joba Chamberlain pitching in the World Series? Pretty cool, especially if you're Harlan Chamberlain.

Father and son shared a big hug after the Yankees' Game 6 win, prompting this blog post at Yahoo.com:

"You see this very simple and very real scene of a 24-year-old pitcher sharing the hug of a lifetime with his dad and you remember that those father-son relationships - one of the only things that really matter - are at the very heart of this great game we love."

Goodbye state volleyball

This will be a melancholy week for high school sports fans as we prepare to say farewell to another state tournament set to leave Lincoln.

Next year, the state volleyball tournament shifts to Hastings and Grand Island, and we'll add another tombstone to the list of events lost in recent years. Wrestling. Soccer. Tennis.

And you can bet basketball won't be far behind if Lincoln voters do not approve the proposed downtown arena next year. If you don't think these events aren't a big deal to our economy, take a look around town beginning Thursday.

Geography lesson

Seven of the eight teams to qualify for the Class A state volleyball tournament are from Omaha or Lincoln. The eighth team, North Platte, upset Bellevue East to win its district.

Disappointed that her team had to travel to Grand Island to play its district tournament, Bellevue East coach Robyn Jensen said in the Omaha World-Herald last week that at least North Platte had farther to travel than the Chieftains.

Well, not exactly. From Google maps: North Platte to Grand Island, 147 miles. Bellevue East to Grand Island, 151 miles.

My guess is we'll hear more of this complaining when the state tournament moves next year.

Plenty of empty seats

If I were a college administrator, I'd be a bit alarmed by all those empty seats showing up at football games.

That turnout for the Baylor-Nebraska game on Halloween was laughable, that is unless you're in charge of a budget and have to consider all the money that was left on the table that day. There were plenty of empty seats at Texas Tech, as well, and Kansas still has tickets available for next week's game against Nebraska.

Colorado offered 2-for-1 specials for its game with Missouri last week, a good idea, but one that threatens to harm season ticket sales. Why buy a season ticket if there's the possibility of getting a discounted seat?

Big 12 soccer snafu

And speaking of financial disasters, the Big 12 brought an extra team to its conference soccer tournament and staged a play-in game after no one could make any sense of the tiebreaker language in the league rulebook.

You'd think if any sport would understand the importance of a tiebreaker, it would be soccer.

Reach sports editor Todd Henrichs at 473-7320 or thenrichs@journalstar.com.