Webber Making Most Of His Return To State B
Playing in a tournament championship game is an unforgettable experience.
Coaching in one is even better.
Jay Webber, a starter on Coulee-Hartline’s 1979 State B Tournament championship team, was back in the finals Saturday night as coach of the Dayton Bulldogs.
“Playing in a state championship game was a thrill,” Webber said, “but you get more out of it as a coach. You’ve experienced so many more things in your life. As a kid you don’t really realize how fortunate you have to be to get to this point.”
Webber was a 5-foot-10 junior with a 7.9 scoring average for the Coulee-Hartline Rams, who lost their season-opener to Brewster before winning 25 straight under coach Dave Olzendam.
It was a great week for Olzendam as well. He took Medical Lake to the State A finals in Tacoma while his one-time guard was leading Dayton to its first State B championship.
Webber’s return has sparked one memory from his playing days - the deadspots in the Coliseum floor.
“It wasn’t in great shape when I played on it,” he laughed. “It hasn’t changed.”
And it never will …
The Coliseum floor will survive the wrecking ball.
Demolition of the building is scheduled to start next month but the Coliseum floor will be saved and stored at the new Arena.
The 40-year-old boards will be dusted off and used at next year’s B tourney, when games are played side by side in the new building, Arena manager Kevin Twohig said.
West Side story II
Three of the top four places in the tournament went to schools from the West Side of the state. That’s a surprise in any year - more so this year because fourth-place Snohomish County Christian defied pre-tourney conventional wisdom.
Snohomish County Christian was a surprisingly aggressive, up-tempo, swarming team, a style familiar to the usually dominant East Side schools.
“We’ve played like that for 10 years,” Snohomish
County Christian coach Steve Hudson said. “It’s just that before we weren’t good enough to make it work.”
Summer on the back burner
Hudson has what today is an unorthodox approach to summer basketball. Let it be.
“Five years ago we were in three or four tournaments in the summer and two or three leagues,” the Sno-County coach said. “It was just bananas. We decided, hey, let’s cut back. We have open gym. We might play in a couple of tournaments. In the summer we go to the Ukraine and help run camps for Ukrainian children.
“We enjoy the summer.”
Leave us B
Adna Pirates coach Jeff Beasley is disappointed that his school has outgrown the B ranks and will play next year as a class A team.
Adna’s impressive list of returnees - 7-foot center Jeff Ellis, athletic 6-footer Mike Brown and point Byron Humphrey - will focus on the A tourney in Tacoma next March.
Beasley, 38, played in two B tournaments with the LaConner Braves ‘73 and ‘74.
After assisting Lyle Patterson at Naselle for five years when the Comets came close to winning here, Beasley became head coach at Pomeroy, where for seven years he tried and failed to bring a team to state.
“I guess I’m a slow learner,” he said, “but this year went real well.”
His Pirates beat Sprague-Harrington in Saturday’s game for third place by frustrating S-H star Ryan Floyd.
“We went with a matchup (zone) on him with the idea of making him give the ball up,” Beasley said. “If he got it back and still beat us, then he’s a great player, but we wanted him to give it up. We didn’t want him to come down and can like he did on Toutle Lake (in Toutle’s tense Friday night win in the semifinals).
“I borrowed the defense from Toutle Lake,” Beasley added. “It’s the defense they used to beat us in the district championship.”
The Pirates gave credit where it was due. They called their Ryan Floyd defense “Toutle.”
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