I think I’ve gone to watch four Metro basketball games in the past few weeks and all four games were decided by double figures. Which reminds me of two football seasons ago, when the first three games I covered for TDN were all shutouts. Not a lot of late-game thrills.
The most recent was the Roughriders of Roosevelt taking care of the Chief Sealth Seahawks on Friday night, which I wrote about here. Not the most exciting game in the world, but it did feature two of the more historically interesting girls basketball programs in Seattle.
Roosevelt is, I would venture a pretty strong guess guess, is the only girls basketball team in Metro to have a documentary made about them that was featured at the Toronto Film Festival. That would be “The Heart of the Game,” from 2005, the story of the school’s 2004 state title team led by basketball star/teenage mother Darnellia Russell and her coach, Bill Resler (who, fun fact, taught my mom in tax law at the UW). I’d give it a hearty recommendation, but I’d recommend just about any basketball documentary ever made, so maybe the endorsement’s not worth that much.
Then there’s Chief Sealth, which in 2005 and 2006 fielded one of the greatest collections of talent in state history. Regina Rogers and Charmaine Barlow went on to play at the UW, Nia Jackson starred at Oregon, and Christina Nzekwe was a UCLA Bruin. (It’s probably weird I can remember those names off the top of my head ten years later.) The only problem was that Seahawks coach Ray Willis had stacked his roster by misbegotten means, and Sealth’s two state titles were soon stripped by the WIAA for illegal recruiting. But man, those teams sure were good.