Granger girls basketball coach Andy Affholter runs his team through offensive drills at the Granger gym Thursday. Affholter has helped take his team to a 9-1 record and made them a top SCAC West contender.   KRIS HOLLAND/ Yakima Herald-Republic

Affholter, Granger girls surging to new heights

By SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

Long before he became the architect of the girls basketball renaissance at Granger, Andy Affholter had a chat with the late Jack Cleveland.

It was at one of the back-to-back state basketball tournaments won by Cleveland's East Valley girls teams. Affholter -- who had been a boys varsity coach for nine years but at the time was coaching both boys and girls at middle school, was curious to hear the Valley coaching legend's thoughts about the differences in coaching girls after a career of coaching boys.

"He said they want to be coached like boys. They want to be pushed," Affholter recalls. "My dad (who coached for many years in Toppenish schools) kind of said the same thing: They want to be pushed, they want you to be intense, and they'll adjust.

"And they have."

"They," in this case, are the Granger Spartans. Affholter became their head coach a year ago and now, in his second season, they are enjoying a year unlike any other in the program's history.

The Granger girls basketball program has been largely moribund for decades. Over the 1990s, the Spartans won three league games ... total. As recently as the 2002-03 season, the Spartans were winless in league play. And this was after ending a 22-year state-tournament drought and finishing the 2000-01 season -- while trophy-less -- with a creditable 13-13 record.

This year? It's the stuff of memories. A watershed season.

Going into what Affholter calls "a really scary weekend" -- games at home against Mabton tonight and at perennial Valley power Zillah on Saturday -- the Spartans are 9-1 overall and 4-0 in SCAC West play.

Affholter, who took five Mabton boys teams to the state tournament in nine seasons there during the 1990s, says it isn't his brilliant coaching. "These," he says, "are special kids. They're sports kids, and that doesn't happen very often, in girls athletics, especially in Granger."

Indeed, the Spartans are a perfect storm of athletic bloodlines. Sophomores Ashlee Reddout, Aja Maldonado and Samantha Zapien -- call her Sam; everybody does -- all come from extremely athletic extended families. If point guard Janae Klarich plays like a coach on the floor -- "She's our eyes," says Jessica Carpenter -- it may be because both of her parents have been coaches.

Cousins Jessica and Emily Carpenter both have fathers who played on the 1978 Granger football team that reached the state title game. So does freshman phenom Italia Mengarelli, who, Jessica Carpenter says, "plays exactly the same way" as her older brother Mario, a four-year Spartan starter renowned for his competitive fire.

"She refuses to lose. Losing is not in her vocabulary," Affholter says of Mengarelli. "And she's not the only one. Sam's like that, Janae, Jessica, they're all like that. I'm just in the right place at the right time. These kids aren't used to losing."

The current sophomore group isn't, that's for sure. They went 9-1 as seventh-graders and 10-0 as eighth-graders, then contributed quickly last year when the Spartan varsity went 15-8 in Affholter's first season.

And they did have to get used to Affholter, who
-- having listened to Jack Cleveland's advice -- pushed them. Loudly. Even while they were still in middle school.

"I coached them both (boys and girls teams) the same style, the same hollering and yelling," he says. "My girls, they're pretty used to my wrath
now. I'm not afraid to yell at them. We may have had a few times when there was a tear or two. But I always tell them, you have to leave your feelings at the door."

Jessica Carpenter, the only senior on the 12-member varsity, remembers when the gruff and ready Affholter accepted the coaching reins from athletic director Scott Rosberg. Rosberg's teams were competitive -- they were 5-5 in SCAC West play in 2004-05 -- but he was, shall we say, not quite as ballistic as his replacement. And that became clear from day one.

"Oh yeah, (Affholter) was a lot tougher," recalls Carpenter. "I remember practices with Mr. Rosberg, and then when Mr. Affholter came in, it was like whoa. He expects a lot out of us, running and running. And if he doesn't feel like we're at the level we want to be at, he really lets us know.

"It was kind of like a reality check for us."

And now, success has become a reality for the Spartans. They have done it with:

1) Balanced scoring. Five different players -- Klarich, Mengarelli, Reddout, Zapien and Emily Carpenter -- have been in double figures.

2) Absolute unselfishness. Reddout has scored as many as 22 and as few as 2; Mengarelli and Zapien have scored as much as 22 and 18 points, respectively, and as few as 6. Whoever is unguarded or simply unconscious -- in the in-the-zone sense -- is going to get the ball every time. One of the team captains, junior Taylor Ely, doesn't start and rarely plays more than a handful of minutes. Problem? Nope. The team's "W" is all she's looking for.

3) Tenacious defense. Six times this year, Granger has limited a team to two points or fewer for an entire quarter. In a fairly close contest against Goldendale (6-1 at the time), the Spartans held the Timberwolves scoreless in the fourth quarter to win easily.

3) Resilience. The Spartans trailed Naches Valley 19-2 ... and came back to win.

4) Toughness. The best example might well be Jessica Carpenter, the team's defensive stopper, suffered a spiral fracture of her right-hand ring finger during a practice. She had Mengarelli pop it back into place, finished the practice and played the next day's game before finally -- with her finger swelling up like a cucumber -- going to the doctor.

The prognosis: out four to six weeks. The reality: out less than two. "My doctor's probably looking at the newspaper and getting mad that I'm
playing," she says with a grin.

Carpenter and the Spartans are definitely playing. They are a reflection of their coach, who wasn't a flashy candidate for ESPN replays in his playing days at Eastern Washington and Central Washington, but got it done with smarts, guts and grit.

Klarich, who often calls out the correct response to every opponent's strategic move even before Affholter does, has his basketball smarts. Carpenter and Mengarelli have his guts. And grit? Affholter has a rule that the Spartans have to do extra running in practice whenever the Spartans
don't get twice as many offensive rebounds as the other team.

After 10 games, they haven't had to do that extra running yet.

Jack Cleveland would have loved that.

Andy Affholter sure does.