No, The B Isn’t The Nba; It’s Better

I think what we did back then is better than anything we will do for the rest of our lives and I don’t know if it’s fortunate or unfortunate that it happened at that early an age.

- Marty Wick, member of Brewster High School’s championship basketball team from the 1970s.

Is the B Basketball Tournament only about athletics? No way.

Stop by the Spokane Coliseum. You’ll sense why players remember this weekend for a lifetime.

It’s not the NBA finals. It’s better. These athletes won’t grow up to hawk Nikes on TV; they’ll grow up to be mechanics, doctors, warehouse workers, accountants, farmers, moms, dads. And when they walk into that Spokane arena with their team, their coaches and their school pride on the line, they create something that … well, you need to be there to understand.

Wednesday morning, as the faded old Coliseum hosted this event for the last time, the seats were filling fast when the crowd stood for the pledge of allegiance. An impossibly small ensemble from Almira/Coulee-Hartline belted out the national anthem in a manner more to be expected from a band six times its size.

Once legendary for its contests between crew-cut kids from remote grain-elevator and logging-truck towns, the tournament has changed. Private urban academies have proliferated as confidence in big-city high schools has plunged. So the Tacoma Baptist Crusaders and the Snohomish County Christian Lions have joined the Toutle Lake Ducks, Kittitas Coyotes and Bridgeport/Mansfield Fillies.

Fittingly, the opening game pitted a tall, confident crew from Tacoma Baptist against a scrappy band of farm kids from Almira/ Coulee-Hartline. After a barn-burner that gave both teams a right to feel like champs, the farm kids won. No big-city trash talk. Just good sportsmanship, great basketball. Student bodies that could fit into a single classroom manage to field not only winning teams but also bands, bounding cheerleaders and throngs of leather-lunged fans.

Next year when the surroundings change, will the tournament change? Only for the better. In Spokane’s new high-tech arena with big-screen instant replays and 12,000 seats, fans will watch two games at once, so girls’ teams get the big spectacle, too, instead of a distant community-college gym. There will be ample locker rooms; no more showers in the hotel.

The crucial ingredients - the players, the fans, the supportive Spokane community that respects what small schools represent - will be back. And the athletes will make the memories of a lifetime in a setting worthy of their efforts.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board