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| Published March 2, 2004 :: Home |
All Eyes on Brewster
Bears are odds-on favorite for the
2004 Class 1A boys title,
By
SCOTT SANDSBERRY No, really. The Bears are so talent-laden, so well-coached and so highly touted that, should the Class 1A state tournament beginning Wednesday in the SunDome turn out to be anything short of a coronation, they will be viewed as a disappointment. A bunch of underachievers. That's not fair, of course. Like the other 15 teams in the boys' bracket, the Bears are just a collection of kids playing the game as well as they can.
But they have played it so well -- coming out of the gate with back-to-back victories over 4A powers Snohomish and Auburn and losing only once in 24 games, to 3A championship contender West Valley -- that opponents are all but conceding the title to them. "Brewster is in a class all of its own," says King's coach Marv Morris, who knows something about talented 1A teams, having coached the Knights to back-to-back championships in 2001 and 2002. "If I survey all the entire state, I see Brewster up at the top with nobody even to contend with them, and then there's the rest of us. They have the talent, the team play ... they're really a great basketball team. To have a chance to play them would be exciting, to say the least, but I don't see a lot of teams being able to knock them off." Onalaska coach Dennis Bower agrees with that assessment. "Oh yeah, it's theirs to lose. Everybody else is playing for second," says Bower, whose 20-4 team could play Brewster if the Loggers can get past towering University Prep (21-3). Interestingly, the Loggers are the only other team besides Brewster to receive any No. 1 votes from media voters in the AP poll this season -- a circumstance that Bower found humorous. "We got some chuckles over that one, saying 'Oh my gosh.' I don't think I have any relatives voting in the poll," Bower says of the back-to-back polls in which Onalaska got two first-place votes each week. "Last year they (the Bears) pretty much walked through the tournament, and they've got everybody back. There's no way we could match up." See? That's what the Bears have been hearing all year, and why their challenge in this week's tournament is more difficult than some might expect. The weight of being a prohibitive favorite every time you walk on the court isn't an easy burden to bear. "It is a tough deal," says Brewster coach Tim Taylor, whose 23-1 team has been drawing comparisons to some of the best teams in 1A history since its dominating performance in capturing the 2003 title. "We've been dealing with it all year. You know, you almost feel like you failed when you win by 10." And in the bi-district semifinals against Freeman, that's precisely what happened. The Scotties rallied from a 12-0 deficit and very nearly pulled off the upset before falling 59-55. "I'm going to give my team the full credit for that," Freeman coach Mike Thacker says, "because they did play good defense against Brewster." So ... did Freeman expose Brewster as being more vulnerable than people might think? "I don't think anybody is totally unbeatable, let's just put it that way," Thacker says. "That's the thing about the game of basketball: On any night, anybody can win. I don't know if you can say there's a chink in their (the Bears') armor, because they've got a lot of weapons out there. "But if you're going to beat them, you've got to play defense and you've got to get back, because they're very quick and they get up the court very fast." Against No. 2-ranked N.W. Christian in the bi-district finals, Thacker says, the Bears' reigning 1A player of the year, 6-foot-6 Gonzaga signee David Pendergraft, finished two fast breaks in which Brewster made two quick passes and that was that. "Both times," Thacker says, "he scored a dead layin with nobody around him. They get the ball up the floor fast." Brewster is the biggest horse in the lower bracket, with 17-5 Bellevue Christian -- a tough opening-round foe for White Swan (16-7) -- perhaps the most imposing challenger. And Freeman, with its underwhelming 17-11 record, could be a sleeper. The upper bracket figures to be more wide-open, with probably six teams capable of making it through to the finals. All four opening-round games in the upper bracket are intriguing, with the 12:30 p.m. Granger-King's game perhaps the most interesting of all. Like Freeman, the Knights (15-9) have a deceiving record, with most of their losses coming against much larger schools. They played a holiday tournament in Los Angeles in which they played teams from schools with enrollments of 5,600 and 3,600 students, one of which had a front line standing 6-9, 6-7, 6-6. "This year, we're the shortest team in this tournament," Morris says. "But our kids play with a lot of heart. They're playing in a fashion I feel good about; they're not playing selfish at all." Plus, the Knights have arguably the tournament's best pure shooter in Chris Faidley, who tied a state-tournament record with eight 3-pointers in a game last year, and have the experience of playing in a tough league. "Every game is a battle (in the Chinook League)," Morris says, "and I think that makes us better." To win in this tournament, every team will have to be at its best. Because Brewster's already there. "They're pretty motivated,"
Brewster's Taylor says of his players. "They want to be remembered as maybe
one of the best teams ever."
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