The nine boys on the North River Mustangs comprise
three-fourths of the boys in their high school. They're
clean-cut, polite and respectful -- something that's 'hard to find nowadays,' says an admiring opposing coach. And now they're in the Class 1B state basketball tournament, playing just two years after back-to-back winless seasons.

By SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

They live where the blacktop stops, a 90-minute roundtrip drive from the nearest loaf of bread, in a town that no longer exists.

They attend a school in the deep backwoods of Pacific County that has changed so little in its 85 years that a walk through its halls can be an eerie journey into a distant past.

They play on a basketball court 10 feet narrower and 20 feet shorter than regulation size, its walls and pillars so close that the experience can be profoundly claustrophobic and occasionally dangerous.

They represent the smallest public high school and K-12 district in Washington to offer varsity basketball without having to partner with another school.

Opposing coaches speak of their unrelenting niceness in such glowing terms that you expect all nine boys to look and act like Opie. They won their league's sportsmanship trophy three years in a row -- including a season in which they lost every game badly.

They are the North River Mustangs, a team that -- only two years after back-to-back winless seasons -- has made it to the SunDome with hopes of playing for the Class 1B state basketball championship.

And they'll have more than just spectators rooting for them when they open play against Rosalia at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, the first day of the tournament's four-day run. Some opponents will be pulling for them, too.

"They're just such wonderful kids," Oakville coach Jamie Berg says. "Real respectful, they don't talk trash, they just don't go with that kind of thing. They line up and play hard."

They are, in the eyes of one opposing coach, "the real 'Hoosiers.'"

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When Les Lande made the drive 13 years ago to interview for a teaching job at North River School in Brooklyn, Wash., about 25 miles southeast of Aberdeen, he left in what he thought was plenty of time.

He hadn't known, though, about the 16 miles of narrow, winding North River Road on which anything above 30 mph can mean an expensive encounter with deer or elk.

Lande arrived a half-hour late.

"It was so bad and I'd been driving for so long," Lande says, "I thought I'd missed the school."

Not possible. Aside from the occasional homes that dot North River Road east from Highway 101 through heavily logged fir and hemlock forest, there is little to Brooklyn but a grange hall, a tavern, a Bible camp and the school, the latter framed by a white picket fence. No grocery store. No post office. The school, in fact, is listed as being in Cosmopolis, simply because that's the nearest post office -- a 40-minute drive away.

Brooklyn was a bustling lumber camp of several hundred residents back in the 1920s and '30s. Except for the logging trucks that still barrel through, though, the only vestiges of that company-town history are the Brooklyn tavern, open four days a week and only until 6 p.m., and the words "Brooklyn School" over the school's front door.

North River's largest graduating class was only 24 in 1936, but by the early 1970s graduating classes had fallen below a half-dozen students.

Six years after North River reached the Class B state tournament for the first time in 1966 -- and lost both games by an average of 38 points -- school board members decided North River was too small to compete with schools more than 10 times its size and too remote to partner with another school.

They voted to drop varsity athletics altogether.

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Late and all, Lande still got the vacant North River teaching job. In 1997, two years after he was hired to teach history, he became the school's boys basketball coach, coaching the Mustangs against other schools' junior varsity and C-squad teams.

Lande always had one or two decent players, the product of all those North River Road homes with basketball hoops above the garage. But interest among students and parents was minimal. Lande remembers looking into the stands during a home game several years ago and seeing three spectators. Total.

Five years ago, when the school had a particularly large and athletic class of eighth-grade boys coming up, Lande decided to apply for varsity league membership again.

"I knew we'd be good enough to compete by the time they got older," he says.

It wasn't a popular decision in the community. When North River had returned to varsity play for two years in the late 1970s, it hadn't gone well.

"They got clobbered badly every game," says John Barnes, coach of the 1966 state-tourney team and North River's unofficial historian. Playing against teams from schools many times larger, he says, "They just couldn't compete."

And North River Road residents hadn't forgotten that debacle.

"I was hated by much of the community," Lande recalls of the response to his decision. "I was nearly vilified by a lot of people."

The Mustangs' first year on varsity (2004-05) didn't help matters.

"My freshman year, everybody beat us by over 20, a lot of them by more than that," says Loren Pickering, a senior this season and North River's leading scorer and rebounder. The Mustangs had only six players, and they finished several games with just four after two had fouled out.

The next year, North River lost every game again.

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Through it all, though, the Mustangs remained positive. To hear it from people who deal with them on the basketball court, North River's players sound like the very embodiment of sportsmanship, decency and class.

Photography teacher Donna Rager was standing beside superintendent Dave Pickering and his wife -- Loren Pickering's parents -- after a home game against Oakville when two game officials walked over to shake the Pickerings' hands.

"They told them, 'Your son is the nicest kid we encounter anywhere,'" Rager says. "I just thought that was a terrific endorsement."

The refs aren't alone in that assessment, nor is Pickering the only Mustang held in that esteem.

"They're all just like that," says Berg, the Oakville coach. "All clean-cut, polite, respectful. It's hard to find that nowadays."

What is not hard to find these days is North River fans.

The Mustangs won five games last year, and that tiny little gymnasium in Brooklyn began to fill up. This year, the Mustangs won six of their nine home games, in front of crowds that sometimes neared 150 people.

That may not sound like a lot until you see that tiny gym and realize that front-row spectators who stretch out their legs run the risk of tripping a player on the court. Or until you remember that the Mustangs' nine-player roster comprises three-quarters of the boys in their high school.

After the Mustangs earned their trip to state with a district semifinal victory over Oakville, Barnes and five of his players on North River's 1966 state team came to watch them in their district final, a 49-43 loss to Lake Quinault.

After the game, the players had their pictures taken with the players from 1966. They were two teams that had each brought joy and athletic glory to North River Road, to Brooklyn and the memory of what once was.

Their town no longer exists, but some good things never die.