State 1B girls: Neah Bay beats Garfield-Palouse 46-36 for third straight title
Elena Flansburg stood on the court among her Garfield-Palouse teammates, watching as the Neah Bay girls basketball team posed for pictures with another State 1B championship trophy Saturday afternoon.
As she stood there, an idea came to her head.
“I saw Neah Bay jumping around with all their trophies and their girls just super happy, and I just said, ‘I can’t wait for that to be us next year,’ ” the Gar-Pal junior said. “We’re going to be right back here, and we’re going to work toward that next season and hopefully go get that huge trophy.”
Gar-Pal gave Neah Bay a better game than either of the Red Devils’ previous two opponents at this year’s tournament, but the Vikings fell just the same, 46-36 to the back-to-back defending state champions.
Neah Bay became the first three-peat champion in this tournament since Colton’s string of eight consecutive titles from 2009 to 2016. The top-seeded Red Devils finished the season 24-1, their only loss coming to 2B No. 1 seed Rainier by two points.
Gar-Pal, the No. 3 seed, finished the season 24-3, with its only losses coming to 2B Colfax and Yakama Tribal, the team Gar-Pal defeated 64-32 in the state quarterfinals on Thursday.
Offense hadn’t been an issue for the Vikings in their first two games at state, victories of 32 and 28 points, respectively, in which they made a combined 48.3% of their shots.
But against a stifling Neah Bay defense, the Vikings only made 12 of 51 field-goal attempts (23.6%).
Flansburg, one of the team’s three juniors, finished with 10 points on 4-of-13 shooting from the field. Morgan Lentz, another junior, made 4 of 10 shots for 11 points, and eighth-grader Ellie Collier scored 10 points on 3-of-9 shooting from the floor.
“They manned us up,” Gar-Pal head coach Garrett Parrish said. “There is nothing tougher than a good man-to-man defense, and theirs is tough. They are strong.”
Neah Bay erased an early 6-0 deficit with a 14-2 run only to see the Vikings go back ahead 15-14 with a 7-0 run . But that lead was Gar-Pal’s last.
Lent’z third-quarter basket cut the Vikings’ deficit to 25-23, but freshman Caylee Moss hit a 3-pointer and junior Angel Halttunen added a basket to push Neah Bay’s lead back to seven.
The Red Devils never looked back. Junior Qwaapeys Greene – “an outstanding player,” Parrish said – finished with 16 points on 7-of-15 shooting from the field, and junior Wiinuk Martin added 11 points and a game-high 11 rebounds.
Neah Bay made 20 of 51 shots overall (39.2%) and outrebounded Gar-Pal 36-26.
Parrish said that when he addressed his team in the locker room, he told them that this day was in no way a disappointment.
Neither Gar-Pal nor Neah Bay graduates a starting player, and many contributors on each team are sophomores or freshman – or, in Collier’s case, an eighth-grader.
“It was an outstanding season,” Parrish said. “It always stings to lose the last one, but we had an awesome year, and we’ll be excited when next winter rolls around and we get to lace them up again.”
Flansburg said that following the team’s one-and-done appearance at last year’s state tournament, this year’s experience was a whole lot different.
“(This year) we had to get a place, and we tried to go as far as we could,” she said. “We knew we were better than last year, and we wanted to see how far we could go. I’m really proud of what we did.”