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A Season of Change
Chapter Three: The Lyncs' Main Man DeHoog had returned, though, and three of the next four years he led teams to the state tournament, earning a top-eight trophy each time. His best shot at the title, almost everyone agreed, had been 1975, when the Lyncs were talented enough, tall enough, athletic enough and, with four senior starters, experienced enough. But that team had lost by two points in the semifinals to eventual champion Cashmere, and only one starter from that team was back -- an anomaly named Glen Dykstra. Raised on a dairy farm in Sumas, Dykstra had spent thousands of silent hours working around cows, breaking up the monotony shooting baskets at the hoop in the barn or the one by the house. He retained the hard-to-get-to-know laconism of that farm boy -- likeable but quiet, friendly but distant. He was the best -- and therefore, best-known -- basketball player in the county, but his name was misspelled "Glenn" all year long in school programs and newspaper stories -- and he couldn't have cared less. Never got around to mentioning to anybody that there was only one "n" in Glen. He knew how to spell it. That was enough. Dykstra looked the part of the basketball star -- handsome and 6-foot-2, dating the prettiest blonde in school, Alice DeJager. But he just wasn't comfortable in a starring role, off the court or on. When he and his cheerleader girlfriend were named the school's "Basketball Sweethearts" at the Valentine's Day assembly, everybody had been shouting Kiss her! Kiss her! Glen had simply blushed and been too mortified to kiss Alice, who had been his steady for nearly two years. On the court, he was a pass-first, shoot-second player, despite the fact that he was by far the team's best shooter. If there was a bur between Dykstra and DeHoog, that was it: DeHoog wanted Dykstra to look for his own shot more, while Dykstra was wont to pass to a teammate with a clearer view of the basket. In one early-season practice, DeHoog put Dykstra out about 20 feet from the basket, just shooting -- while all of his teammate rebounded and passed back to him. "For a good hour," Dykstra recalls. "They'd just throw it back out to me, nobody on me, and I'd shoot. Maybe this was a rebounding drill for everybody else, I don't know." More likely, DeHoog was trying to get his point across. Invariably, though, Dykstra's passes found their mark at just the right time, so DeHoog rarely pressed the issue. Dykstra simply had a feel for the game -- an artistry, really -- that was almost uncanny. Kent Sherwood, now the athletic director at Mount Baker High School but then a sports reporter at the Bellingham Herald, calls Dykstra "the Magic Johnson before there was a Magic Johnson ... Until I watched Magic play, I didn't know how to quantify Glen, and that's what put it into perspective, at that level. He could do everything he wanted to do." That feel for the game came naturally -- but over the course of years. Up until high school Dykstra attended Sumas Christian School, where by the sixth grade he was playing on the school team of seventh- and eighth-graders. Though he lived a good 20-minute drive from most of his future Lyncs teammates, by the eighth grade he was already getting together with many of them for 4-on-4 or 5-on-5 basketball games, learning each other's skills while honing their own. Dykstra would often drive his motorcycle to shoot hoops at the Lynden farm home of Gary Weg, taking the back roads to avoid running into any sheriff's deputies -- since Glen was, after all, too young yet to have a license. After playing until dark, Glen would get a ride from his mom or dad, loading his motorcycle in the pickup for the drive back home. Sometimes the boys would pool their money and rent a gym for the night. "Back then," Weg recalls, "it only cost $10 or $15, and you didn't have no insurance form to fill out. That's basically what we did for fun."
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