Arena display tells story of the B

The week of the B Tournament is an unofficial holiday at many of our state’s smaller high schools.

But, concerned as we are with the education of our youth, we don’t think they should get away without at least one assignment.

How about an English paper, say 400 to 500 words, due Monday. Double-spaced, typed, and, please, watch the spelling.

You want to watch basketball? Too bad. … OK, here’s some help. Call it Cliff’s B Notes.

The thesis: The B is like family, and like any family, there’s history.

Two months ago Loie Davies was sitting at home. The phone rang. Sixty days later, she hasn’t stopped moving.

“Mick (Schultz, the B Tournament director) called and wanted to know if I wanted to put together a display of the tournament’s history,” said Davies, a long-time B volunteer. “The next night my husband (Ted) and I went to Davenport and had dinner with Jim Stinson and we decided what we needed to do.”

What Davies has done, along with Stinson, a former B Tournament-winning coach and its unofficial historian, is on display in the east side of the Arena concourse. Just look for the six chairs from the Coliseum.

The display covers every B Tournament ever played, even those from the Dark Ages (you know, before the tournament came to Spokane for good in 1958).

The loving documentation of the B’s history took all of Davies time the past couple months – “I haven’t been to a basketball game or a play – and most of her living room.

She covered two 5x7 tables with a plywood sheet and then covered the sheet with old newspapers, copies of covers, duplicates of vintage photos. Everything to help B fans take a walk down memory lane.

Her favorite part of the exhibit? The picture of the Mansfield grain elevator with the sign about turning off the lights. See if you can find it.

It’s appropriate that Davies and Stinson put together the display. Their families have been intertwined with the tournament since it was spelled with a little b.

Ted Davies coached at St. George’s. Stinson coached Northwest Christian’s boys and Davenport’s girls in the tournament. Stinson has written a book about the event.

And the two of them have given the fans a visual B genealogy.

Seven months ago, the chance of Republic writing any more B history seemed remote. The two-time champion Tigers were on a bubble, just not the usual type.

“If you had asked me then, I would have said there is just a good a chance of us not playing as of playing,” boys basketball coach John Gianukakis said after his Tigers had stopped Toutle Lake 66-56 in a first-round game.

The reason was simple. Like any family, funds were tight in the Republic school district. Two operating levies had failed. Sports were about to be red-lined out of the budget.

Before the snow fell – and it falls often in Republic – the families in the community had opened their wallets and raised more than $100,000 for a year’s worth of athletics – quite a bit more.

“A small group of hard-working people,” was behind the fund-raising, according to Gianukakis. “I don’t want to mention names, because that wouldn’t do justice to the whole group.”

The group saw the need and filled it. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of anxiety in the North Country.

“They were hard times,” Gianukakis said. “There were a lot of families trying to figure out what they were going to do. It was very trying. Some families thought they were going to have to move if they wanted to play sports, but there were families who couldn’t afford to move. They were stuck.

“It was trying for us because we were one of the families that would have had to move. I’m so glad we didn’t have to. It was best for everybody in the community that it got done.”

The conclusion: The B is just like family. And the family history is worth studying.