EV girls looking to skip ahead at state

The family feel comes naturally with the East Valley girls basketball team.

A typical lineup features twin sisters Maddie and Skylar Bastin, cousins Hannah and Elle Burland, and Jordan Phelan, whose father is football assistant and baseball coach John Phelan.

They’ve grown up together. Played together. Hung out together. They all started at state together a year ago.

And most importantly for coach Rob Collins’ basketball team, they’ve won together.

“We love each other,” Phelan said. “We genuinely love hanging out together and playing together.”

“I know kids who don’t like going to practice,” Skylar Bastin said. “We love to practice together because we have so much fun.”

The Bastin sisters, Hannah Burland and Phelan are the senior core of this year’s squad, which heads to Ellensburg on Saturday to play what the the WIAA likes to call a first-round state tournament game against North Kitsap. But in reality, it’s a loser-out, winner-to-state game for all the marbles.

The Knights (20-3) have placed at state the past two years, bringing home East Valley’s first two state tournament trophies: a sixth-place trophy from their sophomore trip and a fifth-place trophy a year ago.

This year the team wants to skip that natural progression thing they seem to have going with trophies. No one wants the fourth-place hardware. They want to bypass all that and play for the top spot.

And no one will discount the team’s chances of doing just that.

The Knights are a team of powerful personalities with an unbridled passion for the game. The players laugh together as hard as they play together. And in Collins, the team has a coach who gives them the gift of encouraging those personalities. In fact, the coach revels in a team that is both exceptionally talented and more than a little goofy.

“Yeah, goofy in a good sense,” said Phelan, who coined the term to describe her fellow seniors.

“Hannah is definitely the leader on this team,” she said. “She’s the league MVP, but she’s a little goofy, too, and she loves to laugh.

“Maddie is super-goofy and super-talented. She’ll just scream because she’s having fun, but she’s feisty, too.

“Skylar is spunky and she’s always going. She’s happy to do the little things that makes us go. She’s always giving 110 percent.”

Skylar Bastin agreed with the assessment.

“Hannah is the one to make sure we’re all focused on what we need to do,” she said. “She will rein us in if she has to. But she’s having just as much fun as the rest of us are.

“Jordan? Jordan is a big, giggly girl and we all like to make sure that Jordan is always happy. Because life is so much fun when Jordan is happy.”

What helps keep the team happy is winning, but a recent loss has helped put a fine point on the team’s focus for the final push toward the state finals.

The Knights faced Clarkston at home for Senior Night, the final home game of the regular season.

And lost for the first and only time in the Great Northern League this season.

“It was embarrassing,” Hannah Burland said. “I’m not even sure what happened. But by the time you play someone for the third time in league, they know you. It’s almost like they’ve been hanging out at your practices, they know you so well.”

And, truth be told, a loss when it doesn’t really count and doesn’t interfere at all with your postseason is a good thing.

“I think it got all of our attention and got us refocused on the playoffs,” Maddie Bastin said.

When it comes to the postseason, the Knights are battle tested.

Last year, instead of traveling to Ellensburg to kick off the playoffs, the team traveled to the West Side to face Liberty High of Issaquah at Renton High School.

“We got behind by like 20 points in the first half,” Phelan recalled. “But we didn’t panic. The coaches didn’t panic. And we came back and won the game.”

In fact, the Knights won by 21 points, 71-50.

“It’s important that Coach Collins doesn’t panic, that he has that much confidence in us as players,” Skylar Bastin said. “We do not want to let each other down. But we also don’t want to let our coaches down, either. They all believe in us.

“In fact, there have been times he’ll tell us something in the huddle and it will turn out to be wrong. But he trusts us to recognize it and fix it. That’s so cool.”