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| Published March 5, 2004 :: Home 
Roger |
Leopards Overcome Any
Football Lag, Prove They Belong at State By any standard it’s an exceptional group. Good athletes, great kids. Strictly defined, however, most would agree that Zillah’s basketball Leopards are mostly a group of football players playing roundball. Playing it well, mind you, enough so to have won 19 of 24 games, claimed a district championship and advanced to the Class 1A state tournament quarterfinals. And in that encounter Zillah did what it typically does, producing the type of all-out, baseline-to-baseline intensity its coaches smile about even in defeat. “They’re a very good team,” Doug Burge said of N.W. Christian on Thursday, a team his Leopards had lost to 51-44. “There’s a reason they’re 25-2. But I told our kids I was as proud as I’ve been of them all season as far as their effort was concerned.” With this group, of course, effort rarely has been a problem regardless the sport. Shane Stonemetz, Kelly Anderson, Duran Torrez, Justin Ross and Drew Affholter, Burge’s starting five, all were mainstays on coach Terry Duncan’s football team that went 12-0 and advanced to the state title game before falling to Archbishop Murphy. From a purely basketball perspective, though, the Leopards were so committed and so competitive last fall that they probably reduced their basketball potential. From a purely basketball perspective, they might have become too good at football for their own good. Although Zillah usually makes the playoffs in football, it rarely extends its season into December as it did last year. So basketball practices, for the whole team, started later, schedules were altered and it took the players longer to evolve from football players into basketball players, and longer to gel as a basketball team. There was also senior Nick Collins, who missed the 13 games while recovering from a football-related back problem. Consequently, a Leopards squad with most key components back from last season’s state qualifier, did things that were unexpected. It lost its first league game, at home, to White Swan. It lost its last league game, at home, to a Goldendale team which didn’t make district, finishing an uneven regular season with a 15-5 record. Burge and others who had patiently waited for things to fall into place then began to wonder if they ever would. And suddenly the school’s record 13-year state tournament qualification streak seemed in jeopardy. Then, in Zillah’s first district tournament game at Dayton, it happened. Having struggled for much of the game, the Leopards exploded for a 21-1 second-half run that culminated in a 46-28 victory. Next came a semifinal victory over Granger, which had beaten Zillah twice, and then a championship win over White Swan. “The game at Dayton, during the run we put together, we played really good defense and did the things we’ve tried all season to do,” Burge said. Torrez, a football fullback and the basketball team’s leading scorer at 15.8 points a game, said it took awhile for players to find and become comfortable in their roles. “I think early in the year, we had different people trying to do too many things,” he said. “Once we got things straightened out, we started playing a lot better as a team. But it was difficult, after football. We were playing nonleague games in the middle of our league season and different things like that. The adjustment was tough.” But one that was made nonetheless. “We were starting to wonder,” Burge said. “For awhile people were questioning whether we’d even get here.” They did. And even though Zillah’s basketball Leopards lost Thursday, they showed they belonged. Even if they are mostly
football players.
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