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| Published March 5, 2004 :: Home |
They Got Next A 6-foot-8 man-child from Russia. A chip off the old block. And a little brother who’s about to make everybody forget big brother. Put it in basketball parlance: They got next. For three years, the Class 1A basketball landscape has been dominated by David Pendergraft, who was already 1A’s best player as a Brewster sophomore and is now in his final state tournament before moving on to Gonzaga. So when will 1A players next turn up on the radar screens of major-college recruiters? They already are. Artem Wallace of Toledo can count on another year of nationwide scrutiny. Michael Taylor of Brewster has two more. And Jeffrey Downs of Bellevue Christian can expect three. Fans can catch all three of them in 1A tournament action Friday at the SunDome. Onalaska coach Dennis Bower remembers traveling to Ocosta this winter to scout a Toledo road game and seeing a scout from the University of Kansas in the stands. “We’re thinking, how in the heck did he find Westport, of all places?” Bower says, though he definitely knew why they were there: Wallace, a Russian-born 17-year-old who already has the 6-8 body of a prototype Division I power forward. Toledo coach Scott Merzoian remembers that trip as well, and having gotten the call from the Kansas recruiter who wanted to see that game. “I was pretty amazed,” says Merzoian, whose team outlasted Life Christian 52-40 on Wednesday behind Wallace’s 21 points and 13 rebounds. “I said, ‘Are you sure you want to go to Ocosta to see us play?’ He was going ‘Where is that located? What airport should I fly in to?’ It went pretty well and we won the game, but that was pretty impressive that they’d fly that far out to watch us play.”
The recruiter wasn’t going there to see Wallace; he was going there so that Wallace would see him, would be reminded the Kansas was interested, to keep the Jayhawks in the player’s mind. It’s been that way since last summer, when Wallace — already turning heads in Northwest recruiting circles — turned in a dominating performance at a high-profile all-star camp in Southern California. Now some recruiting Web sites have pegged Wallace as the class of 2005’s top power-forward prospect on the West Coast, and the microscope on him has become a telescope now that national powers are watching. On Wednesday, Merzoian got a pre-game call from a Kansas coach who wanted him to tell Artem the Jayhawks were rooting for him. After the game, Merzoian got corralled by both Gonzaga head coach Mark Few and an assistant from UCLA for a long heart-to-heart before he even got to have his post-game chat with his players.
“He is just a force,” says Onalaska’s Bower. “We don’t have anybody in our
league who can match up with him. He’s 6-8, he’s real strong — about 220,
225 And Wallace is barely 17, though he’s been through more in his life than many people twice his age. He’s from metropolitan St. Petersburg, Russia, where, while he was still in his preteens, his mother met an American from Toledo — Gail Wallace, who owns a successful truck-stop business. Because Artem — whose last name then was Terechov — was already playing basketball and was quite tall for his age, his mother thought it might be good for him to spend a year as an exchange student in the United States, playing the American game with American boys. Wallace helped arrange that at Toledo. Just days before Artem was to leave for the United States, though, the boy’s mother died of a virulent form of cancer that had been diagnosed less than a year earlier. Since his father had been out of the picture since he was a child and his grandmother couldn’t raise him, Artem was a de facto orphan. Ultimately, the Wallace family adopted him. “He’s been through so much,” Merzoian says. “He goes from a metropolitan city in one country to this little rural community on the other side of the world, he’s this big-time basketball recruit, loses his mother, and you’d never know it to look at him with his teammates. He’s just one of the guys. There hasn’t been one day when I’ve seen him in a mood when he’s down.” And his long-term prospects, at least in terms of a college education, are very up. So, too, are those of Brewster’s Michael Taylor, who is easily the most-monitored sophomore in the 2004 1A ranks. A surprisingly steady freshman starter on the Bears’ 2003 championship team, he’s now a budding superstar as a sophomore, averaging 13 points, eight rebounds and seven assists — numbers that, were there not a Pendergraft and several other solid contributors on the Bears, would almost certainly be higher. “He’s just a consummate team player,” says his father and coach, Tim Taylor. “He does what needs to be done. Obviously, next year he’ll be called on to do more scoring, and he’s capable of going out and getting 25 or 30 if we need it. He’s fine with his role; he knows Davey (Pendergraft) is the main guy and he has no problem with that.” Nor have the big-school scouts had a problem spotting young Taylor. Letters come in every week from places like Kansas, Stanford, Texas Tech, Utah and Washington State. Perhaps it should come as no surprise; it’s in his blood. Michael’s father was a two-time all-state player at South Bend, but is quick to add, “He’s got some good genes from his mom’s side, too.” Indeed: Michael’s mother, Sonya, is a Gebbers, one of the most accomplished athletic families in North-central Washington history. Her brother, Mac, was one of the stars of Brewster’s 1975 Class B title team.
At Bellevue Christian, Jeffrey Downs is also part of a basketball family. His father, Mike, is the Vikings’ coach. His older brother, Daniel, was an all-Chinook League star for the Vikings who now plays at George Fox University. Jeffrey has already set out on a course that — barring unforeseen injury or setback — will almost certainly land him at a bigger school than his big brother. He’s only a freshman and still reed-thin, but this year the 6-foot-4 forward broke the Bellevue Christian school record for most rebounds in a season (he’s over 200; the old record was 199) and in a single game (19), in addition to scoring 14 points a game. “No one had ever come close to averaging a double-double for me before,” says Mike Downs, who’s in his 23rd year as a head coach. “He’s a maniac on the boards. He pursues the basketball as well as anybody I’ve ever coached.” One play in the Vikings’ league playoff against King’s was a microcosm of Jeffrey’s season. He blocked a 3-point shot attempt by Knight all-stater Chris Faidley, wheeled and chased the ball down as it bounded toward the baseline, getting a hand on it just in time to save it inbounds to a teammate. “He’s a silent assassin,” Seattle Christian coach Roger DeBoer says of the young Downs. “You’ll think he didn’t do that much against you, and then you’ll see the stats and think, ‘He had 21 (points) and 13 (rebounds)? Really?’” In a regular-season game against Brewster, Downs held Pendergraft to nine points until a late-game technical on Mike Downs, at which Pendergraft made two free throws to reach double figures. And just who does Downs remind his father of? This is where it all comes full circle. “He reminds me of David Pendergraft,” Mike Downs says, “when Pendergraft was a freshman. Both 6-4 and lean. Both real skilled.” Jeffrey Downs. Michael Taylor. Artem Wallace. They got next.
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