Defeat Still Sweet For Sno Team Threesome Paired Shooting Hoops With Selling Snow Cones

They were the first to lose on Saturday but among the last to go down on Sunday, when the novelty of Hoopfest wears off and the grit sets in.

By their seventh game on Spokane Falls Boulevard, the hard mileage of the last two days was etched all over their bodies.

Welts and scratches are the hashmarks of a long run through the losers bracket.

Kevin Rieke sat on a curb, his right ankle propped up and swollen from a sprain suffered in his sixth game.

A deep bruise on Travis King’s left shoulder competed with assorted scrapes and cuts for attention from his pain center. The point guard at Eastern Washington University last winter, King had ripped open his shooting hand hitting the pavement on his way to the hoop.

So what did this team - Ali’i Tropical Sno - do to come down between games?

They went to work.

Sold snow cones - technically shaved ice. Ali’i Tropical Shaved Ice.

Win a game. Go to work three blocks away near the kids courts.

Shave ice, pour syrup, sell snow cones, take a break, win another game.

Go back to work.

King glanced at the blood oozing from the broken skin just under the right ring finger.

“Guess I better wash this off,” he said. “Not too many people want blood with their snow cones.”

Call it concern for the family business.

Ali’i “means king in Hawaiian,” Travis said. “We’re Hawaiian.”

The Ali’i Tropical Sno franchise is operated by retired Ephrata High School girls basketball coach Don King, the father of T.D. and Travis King.

The King brothers were teamed with their brother-in-law, Kevin Rieke, who played at Pacific Lutheran and now teaches at Bethel Junior High in suburban Tacoma. Their fourth was Kevin’s brother, Mike, a senior at Cascade High in Leavenworth.

Together they won five games and sold “about 1,000 snocones,” Travis guessed.

Seven games on the street saps more energy than seven on a basketball court, certainly.

“Falling is part of the game,” King reasoned. “You go to the floor a lot in college but on hardwood, not pavement, where you get cut up.

“Here, even though you don’t do a lot of thinking about it, you have to watch where you jump. You can get undercut. You can’t be as free running and jumping. You play a little closer to the ground.

“The scariest thing for me are those pipes (backboard supports). You get pushed a lot going full speed and you can hit your head.”

It takes a special player to beat tough defense with the drive, as King did throughout Hoopfest.

Still, they lost their 8:30 a.m. wakeup game Saturday by two, dropped into the losers bracket and established an identity in this eighth annual Hoopfest.

They were the Kings of the back door.

They came back at 3:30 to beat Miller Time and returned at 6 p.m. to eliminate a team named Jerry.

Back on the Tidyman’s Court at 8:30 Sunday morning, they ousted Carmels, then derailed the Sharpshooters and HHC Corps despite falling behind 6-1 and losing Rieke.

Down to three players, Ali’i ran out of gas just as it ran into a team as tough as it was - The Hogue Cellars.

The Hogue - Ryan Helms, Tobin Phelps and an amazingly versatile athlete named Justin Guillory, a football linebacker at Eastern Washington University - ended Ali’i’s run through the losers bracket.

They were here a year ago, to work, not play.

“We all came to help out Travis’s dad,” Kevin Rieke said. “We were shavin’ ice, watching games, and said, ‘We could take a 45-minute break every once in a while and play.’ So we decided to get into it this year.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo