Curtis boys, Sumner girls repeat as 4A SPSL tourney champs

Cinque Maxwell’s presence on the floor made an impact, but the Curtis Vikings' seemingly long memories didn’t hurt, either, on Saturday night at Tacoma Community College.

Both conditions fueled the Vikings as they fought back from an early deficit, battled closely with the Olympia Bears through the second and third quarters and finally pulled away over the final six minutes of a 63-48 4A SPSL Championship game victory.

It’s the Vikings' second consecutive SPSL championship. A year ago, they parlayed this step into a Class 4A state title.

“We have some grit,” junior Zoom Diallo said. “We were in practice talking about it. Coach just emphasized how they came in our house and they beat us. Really, they kicked our, you know, ‘A’ word. This whole time, we’ve been preparing for Oly. We knew, down the road, if we did our stuff and they did their stuff we were going to see them in the championship.”

That motivating game that stuck with the Vikings (21-3) happened on Jan. 7, when the Bears (19-4) came to University Place for their only regular-season meeting with Curtis and walked away with a 78-69 win.

Maxwell, the starting shooting guard and a defensive stopper, didn’t play against Olympia the first time around due to injury. On Saturday, he harassed the Bears all over the floor and contributed seven points.

“That makes a huge difference,” Curtis coach Tim Kelly said of Maxwell’s presence. “He did a good job. He got [6-foot-7 big man] Andreas [Engholm] in foul trouble, which, he’s pretty good at doing that. He’s pretty crafty. We ran a couple of things for him to take him and he got the foul.”

Even so, for most of the first quarter on Saturday it seemed as though the sellout crowd at TCC might see another whooping. Olympia scored the first eight points of the game before Diallo finally got the Vikings on the board by rolling a shot near the backboard over the rim to make it 8-2 with 4:37 to play in the quarter.

But the Bears continued to build a big lead and when Parker Gerrits scored with 1:26 to go in the first, Olympia led 17-2. The Vikings, though, closed out the quarter with a mini seven-point run of their own to close within eight, 17-9, entering the second eight minutes.

“We were settling for jumpshots. We were settling for one pass and shot, you know,” Kelly said. “And we weren’t making them have to guard us, we weren’t making shots and we weren’t getting to the rim.”

Things turned around when those parts of the Vikings' game returned. Curtis closed the second quarter as they had the first, this time scoring the final 10 points of the period to take a lead for the first time all game on a Diallo basket with 36 seconds left in the first half.

Curtis took that 25-23 advantage into the locker room for halftime. Diallo had just six points at the break, but got things rolling in the third and finished with a game-high 23. He was one of four Vikings to ultimately end up in double-figures scoring.

Down the stretch, Diallo and Josiah Johnson controlled the lane as Curtis put its foot on the gas.

Gerrits scored the last field goal of his 20-point night to tie the game at 44-44 for Olympia with 6:04 to play. Johnson responded 32 seconds later by getting into the lane, hanging in the air and banking home a short shot that gave the Vikings the lead for good, 46-44, with 5:32 left.

Johnson got three big rebounds down the stretch, as well, and finished with 12 total points.

“I wasn’t part of the team last year,” Johnson said. “And I was really thinking about that loss from last time. I didn’t like that feeling so I wanted to do my part to impact the game, whether it was rebounding, getting stops or getting to the basket.”

LATE HEROICS LIFT SUMNER GIRLS PAST EMERALD RIDGE, 50-48

With the shot and game clocks both running down, Olivia Collins took the ball outside the 3-point line, drove left, turned the corner into the lane and tear-dropped the game-winning shot through the basket with nine seconds to play.

Collins’ hoop made the Spartans (16-3) back-to-back SPSL champions after a 50-48 victory over Emerald Ridge - a feat duplicated a couple of hours later by the Curtis boys. A year ago, Sumner beat the Jaguars (15-4) in this same game, 71-61.

This time around, it was close the entire way. The Spartans held two leads of seven points, 13-6 and 15-8, each after two Lainee Houillon free throws with 3:19 and 2:08 to go in the first quarter.

By quarter’s end, the lead had been trimmed to 15-11. Tami Gallo’s 3-pointer for Emerald Ridge with eight seconds to play in the first half gave the Jaguars the lead, 27-26 at the half but Sumner wrested the lead back entering the fourth quarter, 36-33.

Neither team led by more than five points the entire second half. A Houillon free throw with 1:01 to play, the last of her game-high 24 points, tied it again, 48-48.

That set the stage for the Collins play of the game, putting the finishing touches on her 10-point night and giving the Spartans another 4A SPSL title. Naomi Senato led Emerald Ridge with 14 points.

The Jaguars lost point guard Marecia Barnett to an apparent right knee injury less than five minutes into the game. She did not return and her status for the playoffs moving forward is unknown.