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| Published March 7, 2004 :: Home |
Sudden Impact
Biggest difference between boys basketball and girls basketball in high school? No, it’s not the number of dunks per game. (In 1A games, at least, that would usually be a zero-zero tie.) It’s the number of gifted freshmen and sophomores in the girls game. Rare is the freshman boy who even gets into a varsity game on a regular basis, much less starts. If he’s really good, he’s regarded as a phenom, one that people will reminisce about for years — and we’re not just talking about the ones who go on to be all-staters and all-world standouts like Luke Ridnour.
Longtime 1A tournament fans still talk about the floor generalship and heady
play of a Chelan freshman named Greg Talley ... whose only state tournament
was Go to any state girls tournament, though, and there’s a standout freshman every time you turn around. In some games, there are as many freshmen and sophomores getting significant playing time as there are seniors. Saturday’s game for fourth and seventh places was a prime example. King’s, which won the game, got 40 of its 55 points from a pair of sophomores, Sara Mosiman — who earned Chinook League MVP honors this year — and Caitlyn Faidley. Its leading rebounder in the game (with 10) was a freshman, Danielle Clauson. Burbank got seven points and eight rebounds from freshman Lauren Rada — who just two days earlier had turned in a monster 17-point, nine-rebound, four-steal performance. “The phenomenon now is that girls are being thrown into athletics at a much younger age than they were even five and 10 years ago,” said Michelle Baugher, a certified athletic trainer for Wapato High. “In the old days, they were back in dresses and playing with dolls.” Burbank head coach Ken Idler largely echoed that assessment. “I think we’ve just changed the way girls are taught the game, and the age at which they’re taught it,” he said. “Twenty years ago, girls basketball, I don’t think, was taught. It was just something they did. Now we teach basketball, regardless of gender, the same.” Idler pointed out the exceptional athleticism and skill of Mosiman, who had just rung up 23 points on his Coyotes. “She really opened my eyes,” Idler said of Mosiman. “When she did that little reverse layup? That’s something you see in a boys’ game.” The irony in all of this, of course, is that at the very time when the girls’ bodies are beginning to mature, roiling in hormonal change, so many of them are excelling on the basketball court. “You would almost think it would be the opposite,” said Bonnie Smith, a certified athletic trainer with Westside Physical Therapy and an athletic injury consultant working with schools throughout the Yakima Valley. “At that age, they’re maturing and developing. And when their hips are widening, you’d think their balance would be off with their bodies going through their anatomical changes. They shouldn’t have the same speedy reaction they do, because their bodies are changing.” In many cases, of course, the young girls having the most success are the athletic sprites, the ones who have grown up playing sports but haven’t yet grown up. “Genetics is handing them a body, and they don’t know what it’s going to be,” Smith said. “They have to overcome that, plus they have the demands of being an athlete. Some don’t ever adapt to that change — it’s just what their body hands them.” As many young female athletes mature, Smith said, a once-graceful stride can become a little more cumbersome — knock-kneed, no longer straight, as the hips widen — in one girl than in another. Or a girl accustomed to being seen in a little basketball jersey, she said, might resort to poor, slumping posture in a mortified response to her own maturing breasts. “As they reach their coordination younger than boys, they fine-tune their athletic abilities,” Smith said. “And then at the end of their sophomore year, as they go through their changes, their balance can be off, their coordination can be off, their reaction time can be off, even their overall speed changes.”
So teams and coaches are also, to a certain extent, subject to the whims of
their players’ maturation changes. Saturday’s third-place finisher in the 1A state tournament, Napavine, didn’t have a senior on its roster. They bring absolutely everybody back next year. Their leading scorer on Saturday was Raychel Wilson, a sophomore. “You’re seeing a change in the girls’ game,” Napavine coach Shane Schutz said. “I know our eighth-grade program is playing 60-odd games a year. When you’re playing that many games, you’re bound to get better. “For girls’ athletes, you’re really never going to play in front of a crowd bigger than they’ll see here. So for all those young girls out in the stands watching this, they see these girls on this big stage, and they want to be that next phenom. Boys, they’ve got a lot of other choices — wrestling, other sports. “But for girls, this game has just gotten a lot faster and more interesting. And players can have already played so many games going into their freshman year that they’re just ready to go.”
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