Young Panthers Upset T-Birds

Snohomish coach Ken Roberts convinced his young team that it could win its first-round Washington State 4A game against Mount Tahoma - if it played a certain way.

TACOMA, Wash. - The day after the Washington State 4A tournament draw, Snohomish coach Ken Roberts wrote the names of tournament participants, such as Jackson, that his teams had played this season. He put them on even terms with his Panthers. Then he knocked his team down, listing all the mistakes they'd made against the opponents.

The topper: He wrote a player's name next to each mistake.

Katie Benson of Snohomish fouls Mount
Tahoma's Ghynecee Temple

"Then I let them stew for a while," Roberts said. "After a few minutes, and I hoped someone would, one kid finally went up, erased her name and said, 'I won't make that mistake again.' "

It's an old axiom of sports that players win games, but sometimes coaches do, too. Snohomish's 56-48 first-round upset of Mount Tahoma, ranked No. 5 in the field by HoopGurlz, qualifies as one.

By convincing his players to take responsibility for their mistakes, Roberts got a young team to believe in a game plan that seems like an impossible mission in its first state-tournament game - play deliberately against an opponent that lives its basketball life in the fast lane.

Shockingly, Snohomish, which starts a freshman, three sophomores and only one senior, executed the game plan perhaps even better than Roberts' experienced team that pressed undefeated Garfield in the 2005 championship could have. The Panthers made the run-and-gun T-Birds stroll through a 19-18 first half, so when senior Krista Ecknes (teamm-high 14 points) came off the bench to drop a couple threes that thoroughly preoccupied the Mount Tahoma defense and Snohomish handled the T-Birds' pressure, panick, and a deficit that reached double-digits, ensued for Mount Tahoma.

The only team that had come close to slowing Mount Tahoma was Central Kitsap, which lost a district game 56-42. Roberts happened to witness that game. He also surmised that no one of substance had tried the tactic.

"Kentwood is a very good team and played a very good game against them, but they went up and down with them," Roberts said. "But (Mount Tahoma) never had a good team try to slow them down."

Until Tuesday, when an admitted devotee of the Dick Bennett school of basketball convinced a relatively green group of girls that they could.

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