Beatty’s Been Mead’s Perfect Team Player

In a culture preoccupied with winning, Allison Beatty could be a suitable poster child - if only she was preoccupied with it, too, which she isn’t.

Win she does. Wallow she won’t.

She will show up some mornings at Mead High School wearing a letter jacket so thick with decoration she could pass for a fleet admiral. She will, inevitably, get teased - usually by a football player - for the embarrassment of riches it represents, though embarrassment is not her deal, either.

As for the teasing, she considers the source.

“It’s really funny,” said Beatty. “The most important things we do on our teams are team-bonding things. We really enjoy each other - and the guys make fun of that. They make fun of us staying over at each other’s houses and getting to know each other. But if it works, why not? They want to win, too, I think.”

Go with her on this one, fellas.

After all, Beatty has redefined the perfect 10.

She’s been a member of 10 varsity teams at Mead and all 10 have been Greater Spokane League champions. She has been on state championship teams in two sports - soccer and basketball - and a state champion herself in the javelin, a distinction she’ll try to duplicate within the next two weeks.

Beyond the county line, she has experienced second and third and fifth and sixth. Not here. Here she’s 10 for 10, a record almost preposterous in its perfection.

“But with the coaches I’ve had at the players I’ve played with, I don’t think it’s all that remarkable,” she insisted. “Everybody’s so committed on the teams I’ve been on and every coach I’ve had has been committed to every girl. Only good things are going to come from that.”

But this many good things?

The four soccer teams she played on - she was on the varsity as a freshman, because there was no ninth-grade team at her junior high - compiled a 61-0-3 record inside the GSL. Likewise, Mead track is 24-0 in league duals with Beatty aboard. The basketball team lost just twice in 48 GSL games.

That’s 131-2-3, and all of those Panthers teams went on to bigger and better things at regionals and state.

“We have an advantage in the league,” Beatty reasoned. “People know we win and that’s always in the back of their mind. I know if I’m throwing (the javelin) or playing 1-on-1 against somebody better than me, I’m going to be thinking, ‘Oh, I just want to keep up.’ “If other teams are thinking that, we’re going to have an edge already.”

Adept as she is at explaining away this messy business of winning so much as a right-place-at-the-right-time phenomenon, it’s not a different kind of conceit. It’s just that her pride in these accomplishments takes different forms.

Mead’s state championship in basketball this year, for instance, is remembered for “the faith and confidence the team had in one another.

“The winning was great,” she said. “But just knowing what a team you are, that’s such a great feeling.”

That feeling is harder to duplicate in track, though Beatty and the Panthers obviously try. It is even more of an individual endeavor at the college level, and so there’s some irony in the javelin being where her athletic future is. She’s accepted a track scholarship at Stanford.

The irony? She had to be talked into the javelin by her mother, Barb - who had been told her daughter had the arm for it and that with so few states sanctioning the javelin in high school, “it’s a pretty easy scholarship,” Beatty laughed.

Earlier this season, Beatty got off a throw of 155 feet, 3 inches - best in the nation until Ellensburg’s Molly Monroe reached 159 feet last weekend.

“I was having trouble finding a focus this season,” Beatty said. “She just gave me one.”

She wonders, though, how she’ll handle the narrowing of her athletic focus. Her basketball and track coaches, Jeanne Helfer and Annette Pedersen, were both multi-sport athletes in college - and they wonder, too.

“There’s something about keeping score,” Beatty admitted. “Jeanne and I were talking about when she was at Washington State, even though her coach didn’t want her playing intramurals, she just had to - and she said, ‘I know you, that’s what you’re going to do.”’

She already does. On Thursday nights after track practice, she joins the 4-on-4 runs at Spokane Falls.

The winning will come harder in college, too - though there’s a story that gives you the impression Beatty finds victories in all sorts of places.

“My grandfather has Alzheimer’s,” she said. “He was a pretty good athlete in college. He’s out of it sometimes and doesn’t talk a whole lot, but he got to be there to see me throw at state last year. And after I won, he was talking in full sentences about it - for days afterward and sometimes even now. It was cool to know he found something in that that was exciting and that he could be a part of. That’s a pretty cool feeling.”

In a culture preoccupied with winning, it’s hard to imagine a better one.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review