Good Wednesday morning. We’ll have baseball and softball on deck with a dazzling performance by a Cedarcrest High School softball senior pitcher headlining our coverage on the diamond later. First, though, we have our weekly Wednesday segment this morning where we take a look at the going’s on in local girls’ club volleyball in USA Volleyball’s Puget Sound Region and the impact on players and teams from our community.
We lead things off with the Pacific Northwest Qualifier in Spokane. And we have some good news to report. Mount Si High School and the upper Snoqualmie Valley will have representatives this summer at the USA Junior Olympic Volleyball Nationals. Wildcats Taija Wheeler and Keely Walker play for Bellevue’s Northwest Juniors 18U Blue team, and they took second in the 18U American division at the tournament this past weekend, earning them a slot to the nationals. The squad went 6-3 on the weekend facing a group of teams from around the western United States. They fell to a team from Colorado in the title game of the event.
Northwest’s 18U Grey also competed, and that squad, featuring MSHS’s Taylor Christmas, took 21st and won its playoff bracket but did not earn a slot to nationals; those slots only went to the top two or three clubs in a particular division.
Also over there this past weekend were U13 and U14 teams and Mercer Island’s Island Thunder 13U’s, coached by retired Wildcat head coach Bonnie Foote and her daughter Isabelle, a junior this spring at Tahoma High School in Maple Valley, were among the teams entered in those age groups. The team found the going a little challenging, finishing 3-4 on the weekend and in 19th place in their division. They did not earn a berth to nationals.
Tournament caught up in controversial incident involving NCAA women’s basketball regional: The tournament and its exponential growth in recent years has put a strain on the hotel room availability in Spokane at this time of the year, and this partly it appears is playing a role in what is a rapidly growing controversy in Spokane over allegations made by the coach of one of the college women’s basketball teams in town for the NCAA regional tournament, also going on this past weekend at Gonzaga University.
More on this from KXLY. Essentially, what the story is is that the University of Utah’s coach, during her postgame press conference Monday night following their elimination from the tournament by the Bulldogs, alleged that her team, while staying in Coeur D’Alene, ID, about a 30-minute drive east from Spokane, was subjected to racial harassment from unknown individuals while walking to a restaurant near their downtown hotel, an incident which was confirmed to have occurred by officials during a morning news conference yesterday. Officials said the incident took place last Thursday night, and prompted both the Utah team and a second team staying in Coeur D’Alene to relocate to Spokane for their safety. The incident is being investigated by police and no suspects have been arrested to this point in the case.
We first want to take a moment here to condemn these actions by the suspects. Such conduct has no place in northern Idaho or anywhere for that matter. What these players were subjected to was reprehensible, disgusting and deplorable. But we also believe what is equally unacceptable is the lack of proper long-range planning by the NCAA that we believe helped put the players in this unfortunate and unacceptable position.
In an environment nowadays where equity in the men’s and women’s tournaments is a big deal for a lot of people, especially on the women’s side, the idea that the NCAA would house teams this far from a tournament venue, especially women’s teams, we believe is unacceptable. But it appears this may have taken place to some extent because of the lack of availability of rooms on short notice due to both the PNQ visitors and the visitors for the men’s NCAA regional basketball tournament, also which took place this past weekend in Spokane. A defense we heard yesterday was that Gonzaga didn’t know until Sunday they were going to host. Which is true, but we find that to be no excuse. The NCAA has had regionals in Spokane in the past on the same weekend as PNQ, so they should have known going in that hotel rooms would be at a premium. Thus, they in our opinion should have ensured available rooms in the men’s tournament hotels in downtown Spokane for women’s teams should that need have arisen. Contingency planning 101 in our view. Teams should not have been sent to stay in Coeur D’Alene.
So, how does this impact the PNQ? Well, this is a tournament that, as we mentioned last week, has grown to three weekends this year; previously, the event only took place over two weekends. The growth of this event has we think made it now the largest non-Hoopfest sports event on the Spokane sports calendar every year, and one which we think could generate in the neighborhood of $40-60 million of revenue for the local economy over the three-week run of the tournament this year. And as such, hotel availability is going to be strained. So the question could now come up about whether the Spokane area has enough hotel capacity to host this many big events at the same time every year. This could prompt folks to suggest a move of the PNQ to Seattle or Portland, cities which have more available hotel space. Something of course to watch moving forward.
To the NCAA’s defense, the organization has not as far as we know made any official comment about the matter, but we’d anticipate them getting hard questions about this from reporters perhaps as soon as the regional tournaments this weekend. So the fallout from this is probably going to continue for some time.
Elsewhere…..
Regional Power League play for 15U and 16U teams happened locally this past weekend, and it was a big weekend for Valley View Volleyball. Two of the Carnation-based organization’s teams, their 16U Sapphire and 15U Sky, both finished undefeated on the weekend, going 4-0. This should ensure both teams moving up in the league seedings going into the next round of play in a couple of weeks. Sky did theirs this past Saturday while Sapphire did theirs on Sunday. Sapphire has been a great story all season, as the team, coached by Mount Si High School grad Emma Anderson and which includes players from both Mount Si and Cedarcrest on the roster, has gone 11-4 on the season and tested itself against the best quality competition throughout the season at regional tournaments, blazing a trail for other teams within the Valley View program to go down.
Also, Bellevue’s Northwest Juniors 15U Navy, featuring Cedarcrest HS’s Lola Fryc, went 2-2 this past Saturday in the 15U play and sits seeded 39th overall with an 8-7 mark in local play.
On tap
The meat of the PNQ takes place this weekend with most of the high-school age teams (15U-17U) competing over there, so look for a number of teams from our region featuring local players to be competing. These include DaKine’s 17’s, with Isabelle Foote and Mount Si’s Maggie Kamp, and Bellevue-based Sudden Impact 17’s Storm, featuring Wildcat senior Sophie Lobet.
We’ll wrap this up in our weekly segment next week. This has been your weekly look at local girls’ club volleyball in the Snoqualmie Valley Sports Journal.
Snoqualmie Valley Sports Journal 