Tested teams will vie for 1B girls championship

By SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

Teams hoping to bring home this year's Class 1B girls state basketball championship trophy might look and play any number of ways. Tall or small. Walk-it-up or run-and-gun. Physical or finesse.

Sunnyside Christian's Melanie Van Wingerden goes up for a shot as Colton's Courtney Druffel defends in the semifinals of the Class 1B state tournament on Feb. 22, 2007.   KRIS HOLLAND/Yakima Herald-Republic file

But the ones who have a chance at carting off the heavy hardware from the SunDome after the Feb. 20-23 hoops extravaganza will all have one attribute: resiliency.

Rarely does everything go as planned, and responding to the unexpected -- injuries, ineligible players, defeats, blown layups and blown ACLs -- is part of the journey.

Four squads, all legitimate title contenders -- are examples of that resiliency.

NEWHOUSE IN THE HOUSE: With two games remaining in the 2006-07 regular season, then-fourth-ranked Sunnyside Christian lost Emma Newhouse to a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). That cost the Knights their No. 2 scorer, an ace defender, a versatile court presence and an emotional leader.

"She just loves to play ball, and loves the game," Knights coach Al Smeenk says of Newhouse, who was a junior during the 2006-07 season. "When she's there, she really wants the ball."

With Newhouse unavailable, sophomore Melanie Van Wingerden and freshman Hilary Bosma had to pick up the slack -- and both were up to the challenge. They helped the Knights reach the title game before falling to red-hot Sprague-Harrington, and Van Wingerden even made the all-tournament team.

Van Wingerden has continued her excellent play this season, averaging a team-high 14.5 points. And now Newhouse is healthy and scoring at better than a 10-point clip for the Knights, 17-2 and ranked atop the 1B state poll.

But, except for the few media voters in the Associated Press poll who keep voting Sunnyside Christian No. 1, the popular favorites to win this year's title are ...

THE SNOW ANGELS: The wind-driven snows that turned the roads of southeast Washington into an impassable winter wonderland wreaked havoc on the Garfield-Palouse Vikings.

Between a Jan. 26 victory at Tekoa-Oakesdale and the oft-postponed Feb. 6 regular-season finale against Rosalia, the Vikings had 10 days in which they had just three practices and no games. The weather closed the school for several days, and no school meant no practice.

"That kind of hurt us. We lost some of our chemistry," says coach Steve Swinney, whose Knights returned 10 of their top 11 from last year's eighth-place trophy team. "We're struggling to get back to where we were."

Not too much of a struggle, though. The Vikings' talent is evidenced by their summer-tournament drubbing of Newhouse-less Sunnyside Christian and their 17-3 record -- especially when considering that two of the losses came when they were missing five players. They're balanced (five players average in the 8-to-11-point range) and are, yes, resilient.

After getting past Rosalia, the Vikings got a sensational 11-steal, 15-point performance from senior Katie Redman in Friday's overtime league-tournament victory over a solid Tekoa-Oakesdale squad against whom they had split two regular-season games.

That moved them into Saturday night's district tourney title game against ...

THE DEPTH CHARGES: The Colton Wildcats reached the semifinals last year in their first-ever state appearance, when their point guard was second-year starter Courtney Druffel. Although they would lose two senior standouts, coach Clark Vining hoped his team might be able to make another tournament run.

But then, in volleyball, disaster hit. Druffel, their primary ball handler for the past two years, suffered a knee injury (torn meniscus) and would be out for the first six weeks of the season.

And it turned it out to be a good thing for the Wildcats, whose 17-3 record includes their hard-fought, close-throughout, 41-37 loss to Gar-Pal on Saturday night.

"It's probably made us deeper. It actually makes us better in the long run," Vining says, noting that Druffel's absence forced freshman Mikayla Nygreen into the point-guard spot. Another freshman, Mollie Kramer, has become the Wildcats' third-leading scorer and Vining regularly plays nine players -- with Druffel now coming off the bench.

"I wouldn't want anybody to hurt their knee," Vining says, "but having your starting point guard from last year coming off the bench is a nice luxury to have."

But the most resilient contender of all has to be ...

THE REPLACEMENTS: Entiat was probably the second-best team in the 2007 tournament, but nobody realized it because the Tigers were in the losers' bracket by Wednesday night. That's because they drew eventual champion Sprague-Harrington in the first round -- and, as it turned out, gave the Falcons their most competitive game of the tournament. S-H won by 11, then beat their next three victims by an average of 23 points.

Entiat, though, welcomed back only two full-time starters from that team. Then one of them -- stellar guard Kami Yacinich, a second-team all-stater last spring -- saw her season cut short in January by a medical condition.

But did they fall apart? Nope. The other returning starter, Shawnee Ledbeter, became a scoring machine with a pair of 29-point games and a 24-pointer. Jamie Wilson, an off-and-on starter last year, has been a steady 10-to-15 point, 8-to-10 rebound performer. A 5-foot-9 post up from last year's JV, Taylor Montgomery, is contributing 10 points and seven rebounds a night.

And the Tigers are 18-2.

"We're playing better," Tigers coach Julie Cannon says about the way her players stepped up to the challenge of replacing their best player. "People are adjusting to their roles, because we've moved on. We didn't have any choice."

Resiliency.

Can't beat it.