When Glen “Bug” Robertson stepped up to the foul line in the closing seconds of his Lummi boys team’s first-round state-tournament game Wednesday, a lot hinged on his foul shots. The result of the game, for one. The possibility of playing for the school’s first state basketball trophy. The weight of dreams.

Every eye on the boys side of the SunDome was on him as he stepped to the line amid raucous screaming and cheering.

Bug — that’s all he’s been called forever, for reasons he can’t remember — wasn’t worried. He’d been there before. He’d made last-second free throws to win a game before. This was no big deal.

But that’s the thing: He WAS there. Lummi WAS there. At the state tournament, in position to win.
And that was a very big deal.

• • •

“Bug says, ‘Basketball is my church,’” says Keith Johnson, who might best be described as a team mentor. “It’s his holy ground. The bad stuff goes away when he’s in that gym.”

The bad stuff? The same kind of issues that affect many reservation kids: drugs and alcohol ... poverty ... lack of guidance. Says football coach and athletic director Jim Sandusky, “I think on my football team, there were two kids out of 30 that had both parents at home. A lot of them are basically raising themselves.”

That Keith Johnson is at every Lummi Blackhawk game, living and dying with every shot, says something about the school’s issues. He’s a counselor at Se Eye Chen Youth Home, a Lummi Nation center that works to keep at-risk youth on the right path.

Johnson asks the 80-some students at the school how many of their friends are in danger of drifting into drug or alcohol problems. “They tell me 80 percent,” Johnson says.

But the tribal and tribal leaders, seeing attendance plummet every year after basketball season — the only sport the school had as recently as six years ago — knew sports could keep more kids on the 21 square-mile reservation out of trouble and in school. That’s why they added football in 2002. A year later, Sandusky — a former CFL and NFL receiver on whose football field, one he built for Ferndale youth sports, the Blackhawks played their games — became the coach and A.D. and immediately started volleyball, baseball, track and fastpitch programs. “This year,” Sandusky says, “we’ve even got 20 kids signed up for golf.”

And that 80 percent number? “I think that’s gone down,” says Sandusky. “And a lot of it is because of sports.”

The Lummi football team made it to the 1B state championship game and lost. The Blackhawks thought they’d let the Lummi Nation down. But when the team bus pulled into the school parking lot eight miles west of Bellingham, they were met by fireworks, a packed parking lot and 300 community members who wanted to share their pride in what the team had accomplished.
“What’s great about it,” Sandusky says, “is it pulls a community together — a community that’s had its share of wounds.”

• • •

Last summer, Darren Johnson, for 11 years an assistant basketball coach at Lynden Christian also in Whatcom County, accepted a counselor position at the Lummi school. At the same he was told that, oh by the way, the school needed a head basketball coach, too.

Johnson understood early on the challenges he faced: He was a white guy replacing a very popular Native American coach who had left to complete his college degree. “People didn’t trust (Johnson), as a team,” recalls Bug Robertson. “But me, as a person, I just thought basketball is basketball.” But a non-native coach? “It was a new experience.”

The new coach had no idea just how much discipline he should demand. “He had to be soft,” says Keith Johnson, “or he would have had three guys turning out.”

And the players and the new coach didn’t immediately gel. After winning two of Johnson’s first three games, the Blackhawks lost eight straight and seemed unhinged. During one game, a player ran off the court in the middle of a play, unhappy over his teammates not involving him enough. In another game, two reserves — deciding it was late enough in the game and the Blackhawks were far enough behind — snuck into the locker room and changed back into street clothes. When four Lummi players fouled out, and those players weren’t available, the team played the final minute with four players.

For Darren Johnson, that was it. He suspended the players, unsure how the rest of the team would react. He needn’t have worried. “They agreed with it,” he says. “We started to turn the corner after that.”

But that corner wasn’t completely turned until the players truly knew he was in their corner. The coach had long begun to suspect that, at some road games — “I’m not going to say where,” he says — the Blackhawks “weren’t getting a fair shake from the moment we stepped into the gym.”
And during a road game late in that eight-game losing streak, one of Johnson’s players was called for a flagrant foul that the coach vehemently disagreed with. “It was a foul, sure,” he says. “But our guy was just trying to keep his balance when he ran into (the opposing player).”

Johnson leapt up, strode over to the referee and said softly, “If that had been a white guy, it wouldn’t have been a flagrant foul.”

The ref immediately issued Johnson a technical foul.

“I felt terrible about (saying) that,” Johnson says. “I felt it, but I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

In the locker room after the game, though, his players asked what he’d said to earn the T. He told them. They looked at each other, wide-eyed. A couple blurted, “All right!” or “Way to go, coach.” And, from that moment on, they knew: Coach, the white guy from Lynden, was one of them.

“I think it was one of those moments,” Bug says. “Me personally, I kind of trusted him from then on.”

• • •

Bug Robertson made those free throws against St. John-Endicott, of course — four straight over the final 39 seconds.

They gave the Blackhawks the win — their eighth in 10 games since the losing streak — and the unfortunate quarterfinal pairing against the team generally conceded to be 1B’s best, Sunnyside Christian. The Blackhawks lost that one — and badly — but will play LaCrosse-Washtucna today with a guaranteed state-tournament trophy going to the winner.

But in a way, the Blackhawks, in only their second state tournament, have already won something bigger.

“They’re like the real ‘Hoosiers,’” says Keith Johnson. “It’s amazing what these kids have been through to get here.”

And Darren Johnson, the white guy from Lynden?
He’s just one of the family.

“When you coach Lummi,” he says, “hey, I AM a Lummi.”

And that’s a nation undivided.