By SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

For the second year in a row, basketball fans in Entiat have had a reason to look at the Class 1B brackets and groan.

Last year, the Tiger girls won their district, only to find themselves with the unfortunate first-round against a Sprague-Harrington team that had been upset in district play and came in angry, hungry and still the most talented team in the field.

This year, coach Bill Edwardson's Entiat boys won 20 of 22 games and their district crown, and all they have to show for it is a 9 a.m. matchup Wednesday against the No.1-ranked team in the Class 1B ranks, the Liberty Christian Patriots.

Like the Sprague-Harrington girls last year, Liberty Christian was upset in district by Garfield-Palouse with the Patriots' stellar point guard, Jeremy Siefken, out with the flu and several other LC players slowed by the same ailment. The Patriots won their next two games by 24 and 22 points.

"After we qualified on Thursday, I was kind of looking at the brackets to see if I could maybe take a guess at who we'd get," Edwardson said. "I saw that (last year's North Central champ) Moses Lake Christian had gotten a 3-seed out of that area, and I thought, oh man, I hope that isn't a trend that's going to follow through.

"And when the bracket came up and I saw that ... yep, it's the same thing again."

That Liberty Christian-Entiat game at 9 a.m. -- a game of two favorites and potential champions meeting in the first round -- was the talk of the prep basketball chatrooms Sunday and Monday. So, too, was the rest of the loaded upper bracket, which also includes reigning champ Sunnyside Christian (16-5); explosive Neah Bay (18-1); Odessa, a team good enough to eliminate title contender Curlew from the field by beating the Cougars twice at district; and a 17-8 Rosalia squad that reached the District Nine finals before losing to Garfield-Palouse (19-4), the favorite to emerge from the lower bracket.

"To me, it says that whoever comes out of our side of the bracket will have a good shot at winning it," Liberty Christian coach Terry Watson after seeing the bracket. "With our bracket, whoever comes out of it has got to be the favorite."

Rosalia, which will open Wednesday against the tournament's Cinderella team, tiny North River, might well have been one of the toughest teams in the field. But the Spartans suffered a big setback when 6-foot-1 senior Garrett Hartung -- a 9.3-point scorer and an outstanding man-to-man defender -- broke a big toe in the district final against Gar-Pal.

While the upper bracket has the bulk of the team favorites, it also has its share of stellar go-to guys, including Sunnyside Christian's Joel Koopmans, a second-team all-stater last year for whom a typical night includes 17 points, seven rebounds, four assists and a couple of steals; Siefkin, Liberty Christian's game-breaking guard; and Neah Bay's Dominick DeBari, a 19.2-point scorer.

But the lower bracket has the game's most productive go-to guy in Lopez senior Jordan Smith, a 6-1 jumping jack who is averaging 35.0 points, a state-best for all classifications. Smith, who also averages nearly 11 rebounds, will have his work cut out for him today when the 18-2 Lobos face 18-3 Lake Quinault in another intriguing first-round matchup. The Elks controls the key with Casey Elder, a 6-3, 250-pounder who make slow down Smith's acrobatic flights to the basket.