Liberty standout Maisie Burnham reaches 2,000-point mark in win over Asotin
Maisie Burnham’s 3-pointer from the wing swooshed through the hoop, and Liberty coach Chris Colvin was immediately ready with a timeout.
The significance of the moment wasn’t immediately clear to the Lancers senior forward, who had just scored her 2,000th career point as a high school basketball player on Tuesday night.
But it became so when the accomplishment was announced to the Liberty High School gymnasium crowd.
“She is just one of the team, and she doesn’t ever want to stand out and ever want any extra attention,” Colvin said. “The rest of us on the outside, the staff, we’ve been scrambling and trying to make sure that we honor such a great accomplishment.”
After the ovation and a brief presentation, the game went on as usual. Liberty won, 71-38, against the Asotin Panthers and improved to 16-1 on the season.
“I would say that it’s not something that she is focused on, but it’s a nice byproduct of the work she has put in,” said Cheri (Soliday) Burnham, Maisie’s mother who starred as a basketball player at Reardan High School. “It’s a very nice honor.”
Maisie Burnham finished the game with 22 points, all of them in the first half when Liberty took a 47-12 lead. She now has 2,006 points in her career, which Cheri Burnham was quite sure was higher than her own career total.
Liberty coaches knew that Blaze Burnham – Liberty’s former athletic director and Maisie’s father – totaled 2,122 career points. Maisie needs 117 more points to pass that.
Liberty is trying to get back to the State 2B tournament, where it lost last year’s title game to Tri-Cities Prep, 50-42. The Lancers have three more regular-season games before the district tournament and then, potentially, another trip to state.
“The first thing I thought is, you don’t do that on your own,” said Blaze Burham, who played high school basketball at St. John-Endicott. “She’s had many coaches along the way, many players along the way. … Points are points and that’s cool in a sense that you can go back and look at them, but with points comes that somebody has to pass you the ball.”
With another 119 points, Maisie Burnham – who will play basketball at Eastern Washington next season – will break into the top 25 of Washington state’s all-time girls’ high school basketball scoring list. Washington State volleyball coach Jen Greeny – then Jennifer Stinson, who played at Davenport from 1991-95, is the leader with 2,881 points.
But the scoring total wasn’t something Maisie Burnham wanted to talk about after she spent the whole of the second half on the bench, encouraging her teammates and standing for every 3-point shot they attempted in a gym where she will only play one more time.
“It’s sad, but it’s also a happy time because then the fun part happens,” said Burnham, referring to State. “We have lots of unfinished business to do.”