Good Wins And A Great Friend

Good Wins: Winning at both Mount Hood and Portland last weekend put us in a tie for first place in our region and officially guarantees us a spot in the upcoming NWAACC (Pacific Northwest) Championship Tournament. It's our 14th trip to the tournament in 15 years - add the eight straight State Tournaments we played in while coaching at GWC and that equals 22 post season tournaments in 23 years!

Great Friend: Jeff Jones and I have known each other for over 30 years and he has always been a great friend. We played some basketball together and during that time he lead the league in assists - if you were open he fed you the ball over and over and over again. Well last weekend Jeff fed us in a completely different way. On Friday I got a text from Jeff , who is now living in Washington with his wife and family, saying that the Outback Steakhouse in Gresham, OR was expecting our team to come in after our game and that the entire meal was on him! Even though all the players were dressed in our travel sweats we were treated like royalty from the second we walked into the restaurant. To get a good mental picture of our meal you have to imagine kids on Christmas morning combined with termites in a lumber yard! Many of our players had never been to an Outback before and now four days later they are still talking about what (and how much!) they ate!

Earlier in the year something similar happened when we were playing in Northern California. Our team went to eat at the historic Samoa Cookhouse near Eureka and when I went to pay the bill I discovered that it had already been taken care of by Randy Williamson, who's daughter Allissa plays on our team. Years from now no one is going to remember the actual scores of the games that we played those two weekends but everyone is going to remember the fun we had thanks to the generosity of others!

Alumni Game

Had our annual Alumni game yesterday afternoon and as usual it was great to see everybody. It was definitely a sacrifice for some of them to get here - Lindsey Heard came from Portland, Amanda Johnston from Klamath Falls, Kyra (Cleveland) Kaiser from Hillsboro. Denay Martin raced back from Eugene after coaching her 6th grade boys team to victory and Abby Line brought her five kids with her. Kristi Fallin, currently playing at Oregon, drove down to be with everybody even though she couldn't play. After the game our current team, our alumni, Athletic Director Cheryl Yoder, Athletic Secretary Donna McGeehon and her husband Gene all went out to dinner and had a great time. One of the highlights was listening to current player Michiah Baker and Michiah Kaiser (Kyra's husband) excitedly talk about how they had never met anyone else with "their" name before!!

The alumni were not all in college basketball shape but they can still play and I found myself sitting on the bench rooting for both teams. Lindsey Heard even got a black eye and a cut under her eye going after a rebound! Almost everything the alumni did triggered some type of great memory from the past and reminded me of just how much fun it was to coach them!

Even though they couldn't make it down to the alumni game former UCC greats Heidi Buehler, Sarah (Coleman) Blackmon, and Elysia Sechler all came by to see us at some point when were in Portland last weekend. Heidi is UCC's all time leading scorer and could probably still step out onto the court and get 30 if she wanted to. Sarah and Elysia starred on our 1997 NWAACC Championship team and it meant a lot to me that they still feel connected to our program after all these years.