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Stakes of the Game SPORTS EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the conclusion of a two-part series on the Six Iron Lyncs. The story so far: The Lynden Christian boys basketball team -- underrated and underdogs -- has made it through the first two rounds of the 1976 Class A state tournament. The story continues as things begin to turn sour for the Lyncs.
By
SCOTT SANDSBERRY
Chapter Seven: Six Down The church across the street was used to hoopla and sirens. The church had been broken into and vandalized so often that the congregation had put up the money for a state-of-the-art, voice-activated alarm system that both notified police of any trespassers and provided audio. In rooms up and down the hall, players and parents and Lynden Christian supporters were stepping to their windows and looking out to see what was going on. In one room on the opposite side of the hall, the lights were out; roommates Duane VanderYacht and Bryan Korthuis, having stayed in that church breezeway for only two or three minutes, had returned to their room and were in their beds when somebody knocked on the door. It was Gary Weg. "Hey, you gotta come over to our room and see this," Weg announced. "They got a couple of our guys spread-eagled across from the parking lot." "What do you mean, they? Who's they? Who's got our guys?" "The cops, man," Weg said. "Who else?" Sure enough, when VanderYacht got across the hall, he could see the same thing that people were seeing from every window on that side of the Tacoma Motor Inn: Police surrounding, searching and questioning three teen-aged boys, then separating them to interrogate them each individually. Three of them -- Bob Huizenga, Barry Berendsen and Harold Oosterhof -- had still been sitting and talking outside the church. Not smoking any more. Just talking. When they heard the sirens, Huizenga recalls, they just thought Must be police sirens all the time down here in the city. It certainly never crossed their minds that it might have anything to do with them. In fact, as it turned out, the police had no interest whatsoever in high school basketball players with a tiny baggie of marijuana. When they discovered that's all they had -- the searches were merely to see if they had any stolen merchandise from the church -- the officers were only too glad to hand over the boys to the first grownup ready to take responsibility for them. By that time, though, seemingly half the grownup population of Lynden was standing in the windows of the Tacoma Motor Inn, watching the drama unfold below. "I definitely remember being in that paddy wagon, my heart just sinking, knowing the situation we were in," Huizenga says. "You'd look up at these two huge motels ... and seeing all those people looking out the window ... and they're all looking down here. And here I am, just sitting in the pits of hell -- because of what had happened, and knowing the repercussions." The three players were turned over to school officials, and Huizenga -- in whose sock was found the little baggie of weed -- ended up in a room with the coaches, the athletic director and a school counselor. "You could have cut the air with a knife in that room. I'll never forget that," recalls Huizenga, who was doing his darnedest to keep as many of his teammates out of it as possible. "It's not like I could get out of it myself," Huizenga says. "So if there was anything I could do to lighten the load on the other guys ..." But it wasn't working. The coaches knew which two had been with Huizenga when the police arrived, and seemed to know that there were more people involved -- five, maybe even six. The police, thanks to the church's audio alarm, had told them as much. The dominoes began to fall. One by one, the other five were brought in that room, and each ultimately confessed -- some later admitting they did so because they didn't think it fair that Huizenga be the only one penalized. The last to be brought in was Kingma, who returned to the motel when VanderYacht and Korthuis had and was in his room with a couple of girls -- "actually making moves, which I didn't know much about," Kingma recalls with a laugh -- when there was a knock on the door. It was H.T. -- Harold Terpstra, the assistant coach. Kingma was wanted down the hall. When Kingma entered the coaches' room, he saw the five players, the coaches, the administrators ... and knew he was in trouble. When they asked him if he'd been with the other boys, smoking marijuana, he tried to skate at first -- Smoking pot? When? What are you talking about? -- but then, out of the side of his eye, saw Huizenga give him a little smile of resignation and a barely perceptible shake of the head. They know, that look said. "Yeah," Kingma said. "I was in on it." Coach Bill DeHoog hardly had anything to say during all of this. He was simply too devastated.
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