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YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

For four seasons now, coaches and fans and players of teams other than those wearing Brewster uniforms have been enjoying watching Jeni Boesel play ... and waiting for her to graduate, so somebody else could win for a while.

Well, she's graduating this year. She'll be playing next year for the University of Portland. Rachel Crane and Michelle Tostenrude, two other seniors who have been around for the Bears' four-year reign as "The Program" in Class 1A girls basketball, will also move on. So Brewster will fall back into the pack, right?

Not so fast.

Coming into the program next year will be another young gun who could be help Brewster continue to challenge for the title. And it's yet another legacy kid -- born into a basketball family.

Kyla Evans, a 5-foot-9 eighth-grader at Brewster, is the sister of Tyler Evans, a 6-6 junior forward on the Bears' boys team, and the daughter of Tim Evans, a 1970s-era Blaine star who was recently voted the third-best player in Class 1A tournament history in a recent poll by the Yakima Herald-Republic.

Can she be another Jeni?

"They're kind of different," says Bears coach Bryan Boesel, Jeni's uncle. "Jeni's probably a better ballhandler and slicer. Kyla knows the game as well or better than Jeni. She rebounds -- she has arms that stretch from here to Yakima. She knows where the ball is, can get those putbacks, and she'll kill you from the 3-point line. She'll come in and have the same kind of impact as Jeni had.

"If people think we're losing all these seniors this year and are going to go off the map, they're crazy. I hope they think that. Because then we can sneak up on people again."

Even without young Evans, the Bears will have the leadership of four seniors, including explosive Kaylan Crane, who was averaging 13.3 points and 2.7 assists through three tournament rounds, and a promising junior in Chauncy Freels.

Says Boesel, "We have a good team the way it is."

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