Familiar name turns
tide for River Ridge

By SCOTT SPRUILL and SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

It didn't take long to get the Class 2A state girls tournament buzzing.

Top-ranked River Ridge was shooting just 20 percent and trailing Lynden by seven in the fourth quarter of the 9 a.m. opener when a legacy of sorts stepped up and saved the day for the Hawks.

Junior Kelsey Russell, younger sister of 2008 tournament MVP Sophie Russell, buried two 3-pointers with 4:41 and 3:42 left and Samira McDonald hit another trey with 18 seconds to go as River Ridge rallied for a 47-44 victory.

Prior to those shots, Russell and McDonald were a combined 0-for-10 from 3-point distance. River Ridge (23-1) survived 19.7-percent shooting.

"19.7 -- I love that," said first-year coach Tom Kelly, "because maybe now we'll start playing well."

Kelsey Russell started as a freshman with her sister on the '08 title team, which beat Ellensburg in the final. That was the second straight state championship for Sophie Russell and the Hawks.

Despite graduating three seniors off last year's title team, Lynden (18-7) was all River Ridge could handle, building a 39-32 lead with six minutes left. Riley Beard, a 6-foot senior post, was a big reason with her 20-point, 11-rebound double-double. Beard was 10-for-10 at the foul line.

MISSING LINKS: One of the top teams in the 2A girls bracket, Burlington-Edison has a 21-3 record and a date in today's quarterfinals against Eatonville, but the Tigers will have to play without one of the best players -- something they have already had to deal with.

Junior guard Kristine Thoe, a 14.0-point scorer during the season, went down with a knee injury in the final two minutes of the Tigers' 60-44 opening-round victory over Clarkston and had to be carried from the court to the trainers' work area. She was taken to see a local orthopedic specialist, and the news wasn't good.

"They're about 90 percent sure it's her ACL," Tigers coach Mike Buckholz said, noting that she was definitely out for the rest of the tournament. "That's our third one this year."

Burlington lost shooting guard Molly Breckenridge, who was averaging about nine points, with a torn ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) just before the end of the regular season. Also out with an ACL injury is sophomore forward Tierra Houston, who is still on the state-tourney roster but, like Thoe, isn't able to play.

NORTHWEST HOOPS: One of the interested observers at the SunDome on Wednesday was Phil Barnhart. Longtime basketball aficionados might know Barnhart as one of the standout players on Cashmere's 1977 state championship team, which a statewide panel assembled by the Herald-Republic in 2003 voted as the best in Class 1A history. More recently, though, he has become known by a growing number of high school players and college coaches as man behind the NorthwestHoops.com site.

Barnhart started the site about nine years ago, he says, as "a labor of love," and to help draw attention to the region's players. "The Northwest was kind of under-recruited when I started," says Barnhart, whose paying customers (at $24.95 a year) now include recruiters from nearly all of the Pac-10 and Big Sky university staffs. During the season he is often contacted by recruiters from out-of-state universities looking to put together a schedule of games they should attend while on a recruiting swing through the state.

Barnhart's site ranks teams, as well as players by position and class year. Among this year's seniors, Barnhart has Ephrata's Patrick Simon as the No. 3 forward for all classifications, with Burlington-Edison's Evan Coulter the No. 5 point guard. (At No. 8: Eisenhower's James Lopez.) He had Squalicum's Keith Stackhouse alternately at No. 4 and 5 among "combo" (shooting) guards last year before Stackhouse had shoulder surgery that cost him nearly this entire season.

Wonder whether Barnhart knows his stuff? Well, his site's rankings picked the final 1A boys' top three -- Cascade Christian, Meridian and Vashon -- in the preseason.

WINNING UGLY: Sometimes even a win isn't enough to please a coach who expects more out of his team. Hence, Fife coach Mark Schelbert's frustration following his team's 58-55 Wednesday victory over Grandview, vaulting the Trojans into a quarterfinal against third-ranked Burlington-Edison.

"I don't know if it was butterflies or we were still sleeping, but we were NOT ready to play today," Schelbert said. "If we don't remedy that, we're going to be on the short end against Burlington."

SHORT JUMPERS: Deer Park's 64-58 first-round victory over Wapato was the program's first boys win at state since 1955. The Stags went 0-2 in six appearances since beating Palouse 77-68 in the 1955 Class B state tournament. ... First dunk of the day went to 6-foot-3 River Ridge guard Joel King, whose reaction to it was so subtle and unexcited -- though it came just a split-second before the buzzer ending the first quarter -- that it was fairly obvious it wasn't his first taste of jam. ... Stat of the day had to be Wapato's Cody Nickoloff, who averaged 3.5 points during the season but on Wednesday shot 7-for-8 from the field, hit his only 3-point attempt and finished with a team-high (and, for Nickoloff, season-high) 17 points. It was only the second time he'd scored in double digits all year. ... Lynden's 39-36 win over River Ridge in the boys tournament was the program's 14th consecutive first-round state victory. ... This is how much Clarkston's Kellie McCann-Smith wanted to get her team to state: The Nebraska-bound guard scored 38 points on 15-for-21 shooting in the Bantams' winner-to-state, loser-out game against Cheney. ... Squalicum's Derek Dickerson made eight 3-pointers and scored a career-high 32 points in Saturday's district win over Burlington-Edison -- three days after having his appendix removed.