It might not have ended as they hoped, but heads were still held high Saturday as the Skyline boys basketball team exited the Tacoma Dome floor.
“Last year we finished ninth in KingCo out of 12 teams,” Spartan junior Kasen Williams said. “To come in next year and get eighth at state — that big of a shift doesn’t happen often. We’re still very happy.”
Skyline — which had never placed in boys basketball, and only made one other trip in 2003 — dropped its fifth-eighth place matchup with Mead, 49-39.
Despite struggling most of the game, the Spartans were in Saturday’s game until the final minute. Trailing by as many as 15 points, 35-20, to start the fourth quarter, Skyline battled back. The Spartans completed a 19-4 run over the next 7 minutes, capped by a Miles Edwards layup with 50 seconds left. The shot brought the score to 43-39.
A Williams’ three-point attempt with 30 seconds remaining would have cut the deficit to three points, but the shot clanked off the iron. Skyline was forced to foul, and Mead converted its free throws, going 6-for-6 in the final 44 seconds.
Prior to their offensive explosion in the fourth quarter, the Spartans couldn’t find any kind of groove. They hit just eight of 28 shots (28 percent) through the first three quarters.
“All the credit to Mead, though, wow,” Skyline coach J. Jay Davis said. “We struggled to get into anything we wanted to run, and it wasn’t us. They did it to us.”
The Spartans trailed 20-15 at halftime. An 11-0 run by the Panthers over the final four minutes of the third quarter, however, put Skyline in a hole they couldn’t dig out.
Senior Cory Hutsen led the Spartans with 10 points and six rebounds in his final game. Senior Miles Edwards scored nine points and senior guard Connor Gacek had eight points.
Mead was by Brendan Myers’ 15 points. Garrett Swanson added 14 as the Panthers captured the fifth-place trophy.
Skyline finished the season with a 22-5 record. The Spartans’ eighth-place trophy was the first ever for the boys basketball program.
“At the start of the season we thought we were going to be pretty good… but we never envisioned this,” Davis said.
Now the third-year coach hopes the state experience becomes contagious.
“It’s cyclical for a lot of programs, but we’d like for it not to be,” Davis said. “We’d like to continue to build on this and make our program one of those programs that people look at and go, ‘God, that’s the way to do it.'”
TOP EIGHT
1. Kentwood
2. Jackson
3. Federal Way
4. Walla Walla
5. Mead
6. Wilson
7. Decatur
8. Skyline
