Ryan Selland has shooting touch
Mt. Spokane High School’s Ryan Selland is the basketball equivalent of a full-grown golden retriever who thinks he belongs on your lap.
The Wildcat senior is a pure shooter in a football body who has fooled many an opponent during his last three seasons on the Mt. Spokane varsity into thinking they could give him free looks outside the 3-point arc.
Well, not so much any more. As Selland said, “Give me a little space, and I’ll wing it. I’ll shoot it from wherever.”
Coach Bill Ayers said Selland has a shooting touch as pure as any player he’s ever coached, and that the hard work he’s done to stretch his range has paid off.
“He’s extended his game,” Ayers said. “He can really go deep, but when we need a bucket inside, he can still post you up. And if his defender goes out too far on him, he’s quick enough to take it to the hoop.”
This season, Selland has performed at a high level despite a family crisis which has both troubled and inspired him. His 10-month-old brother, Luke, was born last spring with a nonmalignant but invasive brain tumor which required recent surgery in New York. The surgery was successful, Selland says, and Luke is recovering well.
“That’s a relief for me,” he said just 48 hours before leaving to meet his family for a few days. “It’s been very stressful, but Luke is also my inspiration. When things get hard, I think of him, and it pushes me to be a better person and a better player.
“I try to play for him, and my teammates have been great. It makes the usual basketball ups-and-downs seem pretty insignificant.”
Ayers remembers that Selland made an impression on his Mt. Spokane teammates right off the bat, at the beginning of his freshman year.
“The kids were putting together their fall league teams and trying to figure out who were going to be the captains. Ryan stepped right up and volunteered even though he was one of the youngest kids there. It was obvious right away that he was going to be a role model, not just a contributor,” Ayers said.
Selland is demanding of his teammates, Ayers said, but holds himself to even higher standards.
“He can get in a kid’s ear or pat them on the butt, whichever they need, ” Ayers said. “That’s an amazing trait, and the kids respect him because he works so hard and treats everybody fairly. When he came here, he’d been treated a little special by some of his other coaches, but we told him not to expect that here, and he told me he didn’t want to be treated any differently.”
Selland remembers it the same way.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s the best player on the team or someone who never plays, I push them to be the best they can. I set a high standard for myself – when I get on guys, I expect myself to do that much and better. That pushes them, and it pushes me.”
Selland was an early bloomer who, he said, was always the big guy when he was younger. But he blossomed into a more complete player when, as he put it, “I had a couple people tell me I needed to learn how to shoot.” Since then, he’s never stopped.
But ask him what he feels best about this season and he talks about his defense.
“Coach Ayers is always telling me I need to work on that,” he said. “I’ve made progress this year, and he’s giving me chances to prove myself by guarding better players.”
“There’s an old saying,” said Ayers, “that if you go for the sun, you can always grab the moon on the way down, and that’s Ryan. He never has the attitude that we can’t win and always finds a reason why we need to compete and to motivate himself.
“He’s the kind of kid that in a few years when I look back at him, I’ll think fondly of him, his coachability and his love for the game. He loves everything about basketball: games, practices, his teammates. He just loves the atmosphere.”
And with the season winding down, Selland and fellow captain Jordan Poynor have daily conversations about how they’d like to see it end, at the Washington 3A state tournament.
“I want to go out with a bang,” he said, “and take my team with me. One thing for sure, I’ll go down shooting!”