CWAC worth its weight in trophies

By SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

To many basketball programs from other parts of the state, the Central Washington Athletic Conference is that place of “scrappy” teams.

That’s coach-speak for “They’re small, so as long as we play our game and don’t get rattled, we should beat them.”

But here’s the thing: Teams usually don’t beat them.

This year, like most other years, the CWAC — pronounced “See-Whack” within the basketball community — has advanced the bulk of its qualifying teams into Saturday’s trophy round. All three of the conference’s girls teams — Prosser, Ellensburg and Othello — have clinched trophies.

Two of the CWAC’s boys teams, Toppenish and Quincy, will also bring home hardware, with only regular-season CWAC champion Wapato out after Friday’s games. But even the Wolves will take home some consolation; senior Willie Blodgett’s 38 points in their 83-71 loser-out defeat broke the tournament single-game scoring record.

“Everybody always says the CWAC isn’t up to par with some of the west-side leagues,” Toppenish coach JoJo Mesplie says. “But what we have here is an 18-game league schedule where we’re just beating each other up. That definitely gets you ready for postseason.”

The numbers over the years back that up, both on the boys side and the girls side.

Over the last decade coming into the 2009 tournament, 26 of the 42 CWAC boys teams that have entered the tournament have come home with trophies, accruing a cumulative 77-62 win-loss record. But, of course, the CWAC has at times stretched from as far as the Tri-Cities to the Okanogan Valley, and when one includes only those teams from the Goldendale-to-Ellensburg region generically (and incorrectly) referred to as the “Yakima Valley,” the numbers get even better. Those vertically-challenged Valley boys teams — “We’ve always had small teams in the Valley,” notes Mesplie — have a 42-28 record over the last decade, earning trophies in 13 of 19 appearances.

Why are these little guys so successful at state?

“That’s easy. It’s because we beat the living daylights out of each other in the regular season,” says Toppenish senior Patrick Peters, whose team stunned No. 2 Mark Morris in this year’s opening round. “We toughen each other up. Last year, Ephrata was the state champion, and they lost two games in league (to Ellensburg and Prosser). We had one game with them where they only beat us by a point (52-
51). Playing in the CWAC, it gets us all tough.”

It apparently does the same thing even more so with the girls. Over that same decade, CWAC girls teams have gone 92-61, earning 28 trophies in 42 berths. The Yakima Valley teams have, again, fared even better, trophying in 14 of 16 appearances with a cumulative 43-19 win-loss record.

“It’s just a very competitive league,” says Prosser girls coach Mark Little. “There’s a lot of good coaches and good players, and there’s not a lot of easy wins to be had.”

One might have expected some of the CWAC teams to struggle when, three years ago, the WIAA’s enrollment ceiling for the 2A classification rose, dropping larger schools like Squalicum, River Ridge and Burlington-Edison down from the 3A ranks. Two years ago, when East Valley’s girls placed third in the 2A tournament, the Red Devils were the only team in the trophy round that had been in 2A the season before; everybody else had come down from 3A.

But still, the CWAC has flourished. This is the third straight year the league’s qualifying girls teams will all come home with state trophies. Between the boys and the girls, the CWAC’s five-for-six trophy showing is the best of any district; the Northeast District, at three-for-four, is closest.

No other district will earn trophies for more than half its competing boys and girls teams.

“I think a lot of it is that AAU is really so big in this area and so many kids are playing basketball so early,” says Scott Yetter, an assistant girls coach at Prosser. “It gets the kids ready, and then there’s the competition that makes our league so tough. If you don’t show up to play, Wapato, Quincy, Ephrata, any of these teams are going to give you a game or beat you. It doesn’t matter who it is, every game is just so competitive.

“East Valley didn’t even get here (to state), and they would have done just fine here. So would Grandview or Wapato. There’s a lot of teams from our league that didn’t even make it that would have been competitive here.”

Perhaps that’s why so many CWAC games are played in front of jam-packed gymnasiums. Every game is an event, the biggest thing going on in town that night.

Says Patrick Peters, who will lead Toppenish against Clarkston for the fourth-place trophy Saturday, “I wouldn’t want to play in any other league.”