Fast start for Bears all part of the plan

If Central Valley’s seven wins in its first eight Greater Spokane League high school girls basketball games came as a Christmas surprise to Mallory Flesher, she wasn’t letting on. To hear the senior guard tell it, the team’s fast start is all part of the overall plan.

“This is what we expected,” she insists. “This is what we worked over the summer for, and this is what we’ve been working hard for in practice every day.”

The key to the Lady Bears success, she said, is the fresh start afforded the team by first-year coach Freddie Rehkow, the former East Valley coach a former Central Valley assistant.

“We started everything fresh,” Flesher said. “Coach didn’t know any of us or how we played. We started all of our plays over fresh and each one of our players started over with a clean slate, and we all had to prove ourselves. He didn’t know how any of us have played in the past. We could all just show him what it is we wanted him to see now.

“And it’s all turned out really good for us.”

That, she said, is how a team that went 5-15 a year ago matched last year’s win total in its first five games.

For Flesher, the fast start has helped make up for plenty of lost time.

In the second half of the Bears first game with Mt. Spokane last year, Flesher dove for a loose ball and collided with an opposing player. The two of them hit the scorer’s table and Flesher came away with a broken left arm that ended the left-handed junior’s season.

“I was still there for every game and for every practice,” she said. “But it just wasn’t the same. I didn’t feel like I was a part of the team any more. When things got tough, I could tell my teammates to dig down and work that much harder, but who was I to talk? All I could do was sit on the sidelines.

“Coach (Judy) Walters had me sit next to her on the bench and she would ask me what I thought the team should do, so I learned quite a bit. But it just wasn’t the same thing. I wasn’t really a part of the team anymore.”

Flesher worked hard in rehab and was ready to join her teammates for the summer league season. Not all that comfortable as a scorer – she averages just over five points per game – Flesher prides herself on playing aggressive defense.

“It took awhile for me to get my touch back because I’m left-handed,” she said. “But we had a good summer season. We beat Lewis and Clark in the summer league, which gave us a lot of confidence coming into this year.”

Each team was undefeated going into Central Valley’s game at LC, and Flesher said her teammates were confident going in that they could play with the two-time defending state champions.

“We knew they were going to be quick, but we felt we could match their quickness,” she said. “We were probably a little nervous because it was such a big game and it’s been awhile since we’ve played in big games like that. But we were confident that we could play with them.”

The Bears got off to a slow start, staking the Tigers to a 13-0 lead before battling back. Central Valley cut the LC lead to eight points before falling to a 54-40 defeat.

“We look at it this way,” Flesher said. “We started off down by 13 points before we really started playing, and we lost by 14 points. If you take away that start, we played them even the rest of the way. If we do that the next time we play them, it’s a one point game at the end and anything can happen in a game like that.”

A year ago the GSL’s two top teams, LC and University, played each other five times – the final game coming in the state Class 4A state championship game.

“That’s just it,” Flesher said. “We have to play them again in league, we’ll have to play them again in the postseason. Right now, our primary goal is to be one of the two top teams coming out of the league so we can be guaranteed a spot directly in regionals”

Flesher said she was especially pleased with the way her teammates bounced back in their final pre-Christmas game at Gonzaga Prep, crushing the Bullpups 73-41.

“I think that was a statement game for us,” she said. “We got right back after it. We didn’t have a letdown at all after losing a game. That’s what we have to do.”

Flesher credits Rehkow with her team’s positive attitude.

“Every day coach tells us how proud he is of us, and he’s always telling us about the good things we do,” she said. “That has all of us believing in ourselves and in what we can accomplish.”