Hoops Virtuoso Versatile Senior Becki Huddle Sets The Tone For Lc’s Newest Orchestrations On The Hardwood

It’s Wednesday, just after 5 p.m., inside the Lewis and Clark fieldhouse. The curtain goes up for a final, dreaded number. If this girls basketball practice were a symphonic performance, the Tigers have reached the point where they play Wagner - only this melody is even more excruciating.

Windsprints. The players also call them “suicides.”

Coach Jim Redmon is the conductor, shouting instructions rather than waving a baton. The team pounds out a cadence with its feet, echoing throughout this sweaty concert hall. And out in front of everyone is a diminutive, brown-haired virtuoso. She wins every sprint, the light rhythm of her feet on the hardwood beating in perfect time against the driving music behind her.

Meet Becki Huddle, 5-foot-6 point guard and concertmaster of LC hoops.

“In the women’s game, you can sometimes hide the post players,” Redmon says. “But if you don’t have a point guard, you’re in trouble.”

During the Tigers’ first four outings this year, Huddle has averaged nearly 21 points a game. If the 17-year-old senior maintains the average throughout the Greater Spokane League season, she’ll wind up in second-place on the league’s all-time scoring list behind Dory Reeves, a 1989 LC graduate.

Redmon, who also coaches Huddle with the Spokane Stars AAU team, said she has already developed into one of the league’s most potent, and intelligent, scoring threats.

Take Friday’s 59-50 loss at Pullman. After the game, Redmon might have told you Huddle had probably scored 16, maybe 18 points. But she finished with a game-high 25 points.

“What that tells me is she’s taking shots within the flow of the game,” Redmon said. “One of the knocks on Becki last year was that maybe she tried to do too much.”

As with any good orchestra, there’s a time and a place for soloists. This year, he said, Huddle has transformed herself into more of a role player than just being the team’s main offensive threat.

She dishes the ball to LC’s other players, such as wings Katie Marquess and Danielle Davies, and posts Carlin Oeljin and Mary Thompson. She’s getting her share of steals as well, including 10 against Moses Lake Wednesday night last week.

And Becki still is scoring. In the LC girls basketball symphony - Opus 1995-1996 - that’s music to Redmon’s ears.

For all of Huddle’s on-court accomplishments, she’s always played in the shadow of her cousin, Stacy Clinesmith, the two-time GSL MVP from Mead who now plays at the University of California at Santa Barbara. It wasn’t what you would call a rivalry, Huddle says. Just something she accepted.

“I wouldn’t say it bothered me,” Huddle says. “I was just happy for her. Basketball is basketball, and family is family.”

Despite the fact that Huddle was the GSL’s fourth-leading scorer last year, averaging 14 points a game, she missed a spot on the All-

GSL team and, almost inexplicably, the second team as well.

“I guess my heart just sank,” she recalls. “I do hope to go on to college and play, so that was a disappointment. But I just told myself I’d work hard and try to get it next year.”

Ron Adams, the director of the Spokane Stars AAU teams, has known Huddle for five years. This past summer, he and Huddle concentrated on her ball handling and shooting during camps and practice with the 16-and-under Stars squad, which placed ninth at nationals. But Huddle’s forte isn’t just offense.

“I would say she’s one of the most tenacious defensive players we’ve seen in our program in years,” Adams said. “She has the quickness and speed, but more important, she competes so hard.”

Though LC posted a record of just 7-13 last year - 3-13 in league - Huddle is upbeat about the team’s fortunes this year. The team has a new coach in Redmon, the third in three years at the school. In addition, Huddle said other players have shown a willingness this season to assert themselves in ways that were missing just a year ago.

Opponents who come to play LC expecting the same lighter touch of flutes and piccolos as last season may wind up tangling with a full orchestra - brass section, percussion and all. And Huddle will be playing first chair.

“I think a lot of people will take us lightly,” she says. “But I think we’re going to surprise a few people.”