It’S All About The Tradition

It is not so much a debate as it is a lament, answered with a shrug.

Just as when the subject is presidential politics, it’s increasingly impossible to strike up a conversation at the State B tournament without having it steered to the private parts.

To review: There are public schools and private schools, and while the twain meet in the State B with accelerating frequency, there is a grumpy sentiment in various rooting sections that they shouldn’t - even if there is no defensible alternative.

Why, it’s been a couple of millenia since Christianity has been so unpopular - an irony that would be amusing if it weren’t so unfortunate.

Or so tired. Heck, the first private school played in the B a mere 53 years ago.

The operative suggestion, therefore, might be “get over it” - but then, it’s not our deep-rooted farm community being squeezed out of Eden any time some come-lately tuition mill sprouts along Interstate 5.

And it’s not just the privates. It’s the privates and the alternative campuses and the big-city public schools with open enrollment all conspiring, it’s charged, in the death of small-town hoops.

So the arguments - sorry, the laments and shrugs - rage on, to the point where it’s pretty much all Mike Colbrese hears this weekend.

It starts at the 1A tournament in Tacoma and follows the executive director of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association here.

“Their biggest concern is, `What about recruiting?”’ Colbrese acknowledged. “And, yes, they’re right. By rule, private schools are allowed to recruit - as long as they sell more than the athletic program. They have to sell their whole school. By their very nature, private schools have to recruit.

“And the way I defuse the recruiting issue is by saying, `Folks, I get more letters about public schools recruiting than I do about private schools.”’

But if you listen closely enough, it’s not about recruiting, necessarily.

It’s about the B’s very soul.

“The best thing about this tournament is simply tradition,” said Darrington coach Jeff Bryson, in the afterglow of his team’s first-round upset of Valley Christian.

He knew it as a Darrington player years ago and he’d prefer not to let it go. But next year, Darrington moves up to 1A because of a spike in enrollment.

“To be honest with you, the big deal with moving to A is not coming to Spokane,” Bryson said. “It’s the specialness of this tournament. We have so many traditions we’ve developed over here - little things, like where we eat. We have to go to Cyrus O’Leary’s on this day, and we have all these other things we have to do. That’s what the fans are really going to miss - coming over here.”

Darrington is one of those B old-timers working on its second building here. Some of the privates don’t know the old Coliseum ever existed. Some have fans who still can’t find the Arena - which, like it or not, has to be a concern to an administrator like Colbrese, who sees 60 percent of his budget coming from tournament revenues.

You can see in their faces that a trip to Spokane can be just as big a deal for a kid from urban Seattle as to a little acorn from Oakville.

But it isn’t for the kid’s teacher, or the local shopkeeper.

Yet even more private schools join the WIAA next year, swelling the B ranks even as the likes of Darrington, La Conner and Liberty - with 84 State B appearances among them - move out.

Twenty years ago, privates made up 9 percent of the B membership. This year, it’s 33 percent. Ten of this weekend’s 32 state participants are private schools. Only two B leagues - Whitman County and North Olympic - remain exclusively public.

And yet what the crying-shamers just can’t see is that this is the sincerest form of flattery.

Even when tied to a particular church or faith, the privates exist to emulate the values of small-town education - the sense of community that just can’t be captured in the hurly-burly of a metro school.

“We have certain distinctives that we hold to,” said Wes Evans, the principal at Valley Christian the past 11 years. “The sense of ownership and support we get from the people of the church and school is like a small town - like Sprague or Harrington or Spangle or Ritzville. Those towns are 500, 600, 800 people - and that’s what we have at Valley Christian.

“And most of these kids have been in our school since kindergarten or first grade. That builds the same sense of loyalty and community you find in a small town.”

Colbrese sees it beyond the Bs.

“There’s a brand new public high school in Bellingham, Squalicum,” he said. “They have something called a `house’ concept. They’ve divided the student body into thirds - three houses. They’re trying to break down a big school so kids have that sense of community.”

In sheer ardor, Valley Christian’s fans put bigger Valley schools to shame - and in size, it might be a wash.

That kind of spirit is revered in a small town - but reviled if it means the loss of another state berth to a faceless city school from the other side of the Cascades.

A separate tournament for privates, in this state, is neither fiscally prudent nor fair. In the bigger classifications, Colbrese ventured, the privates are actually embraced because “they’ve been part of their leagues so long, there’s more tradition there.”

Above all else, tradition takes time. This is Evergreen Lutheran’s first trip to state. In one incarnation or another, St. John-Endicott has made 39.

No, it’s not the same. The fans can’t talk winter wheat.

And if private schools can’t recreate what the small towns have - those applauded values, the luxury of one-to-one relationships, that sense of community and, in the basketball sense, tradition - they simply won’t survive.

But if they do survive, so will the B.