Competing with boys made former Snohomish star tough

Published 7:21 am Thursday, November 29, 2007

SEATTLE — Daesha Henderson once got a broken nose playing capture the flag with her older brother. She didn’t squeal on him, though, when her mother asked her how she broke it. She simply said she ran into something.

Yeah. Her brother’s head.

“He used to beat the crap out of me when we played,” she said, “but I’d never cry.”

Nor did she shed any tears when he accidentally broke her nose. It was a small price to pay to play against boys, her opponents of choice as a young girl.

In fact, the only time she cried was when, after three years of playing basketball against boys, she had to switch to girls’ teams in the fifth grade. She didn’t like it one bit and threatened to quit, but her mother talked her into remaining on the team.

“Thank gosh I did,” Daesha said.

That little girl grew up to be an outstanding basketball player as a young adult. And she attributes the world of hard-knock competition with the boys as the thing that made her the player she is today. Scrappy. Tough. Resilient

Henderson had a number of NCAA Division I schools recruit her, but there also were some that inferred she was too little to play big-time college ball when she came out of Snohomish High School in 2006. They said she was too skinny. That she needed to put on 20 pounds. Which would have been self-defeating. “My game is speed,” she said.

Julie van Beek could see that. She also recognized that Henderson, despite her slight 5-foot-8 frame, was very tough. The head coach of the Seattle Pacific University Falcons, van Beek watched Henderson play a game her senior year in which she got knocked down twice so hard that her head bounced off the floor.

“Her face didn’t change,” van Beek said. “She got up and made the free throws, which was the best answer to what had happened. I thought that showed her character.”

That character, plus considerable skill, convinced van Beek that she had to have Henderson on her team. And so, she offered her a scholarship. And Daesha accepted it.

SPU had her from “hello.”

“Great school. I love the team chemistry. And the staff truly cares about you as a person,” Henderson said, citing the reasons she signed with SPU last year.

Plus, her mother didn’t have to travel very far to watch her play. “She’s my best friend,” Daesha said. “I love her to death.”

Maggie Hinkley is proud of what her daughter has done. In addition to being a valuable player off the bench during SPU’s 20-win season a year ago, Henderson starred in the classroom with a 3.8 grade point average.

The best, it seems, is yet to come. In a preseason exhibition game this fall, Henderson put together a line that would make any coach salivate: eight points, five rebounds, three assists, five steals.She also made some key plays in a 75-67 SPU victory.

And the team it beat? One of those D-I schools that didn’t recruit her, the University of Washington. If the former UW coaching staff thought Daesha was too little to recruit, she showed the new staff that she is too fast — for the Huskies to stay up with anyway.

On a breakaway after a steal that night, her old high school coach, Ken Roberts, observed that Daesha was “dribbling faster than the UW girls were running.”

Indeed, the players on the SPU bench told Henderson afterwards that it looked like the Husky players were running “in slow motion.”

Speed kills.

And the Huskies were clearly out-run. Not by just Henderson, but by the entire Falcon team.

It’s a deeply talented team, as is usually the case at SPU, which is off to a 3-0 start. Seven of the top 10 players return from the team that went 20-9 and won the Great Northwest Athletic Conference championship. The Falcons are favored to repeat.

Henderson is again starting games on the bench, but getting considerable playing time and making efficient use of it, averaging 22 minutes, six points and two steals.

“As I’ve told Daesha, she’s good enough to be a starter, but she gives us great energy off the bench,” said van Beek, in her second season as Falcon head coach.

In high school, they called Henderson the Energizer Bunny. “She never ran down,” Panther assistant coach Keith Gilbertson said.

As a pure college freshman last year, Henderson put up some nice numbers: 109 points, 52 rebounds, 23 steals, 21 assists and just 18 turnovers in 367 minutes. One area she wanted to improve upon was her 3-point shooting (she shot .309).

And she’s done that. “Her three looks pretty automatic,” van Beek acknowledged.

Even if she weren’t an offensive threat, Henderson would be a huge asset to the Falcons as a defender because of her quickness and her anticipation. At Snohomish, she was always assigned to the other team’s best player.

“She could do a pretty good job of taking some people out of ball games,” Gilbertson said.

In that Husky game, she demonstrated just how tough she is and what a team player she is by setting a screen in the free throw lane and taking a charge that left her flat on her back. It was another of those head-bouncing moments.

“She becomes a kid you absolutely love to have on the court,” said Roberts, who called her his favorite all-time player. “She’s the most competitive kid I’ve ever coached.”

She listens and learns, as well. Some kids a coach can preach to until he’s blue in the face. Roberts said he only had to tell Henderson something once and she got it. “And then she did it,” he said.

She does what it takes to win. And in the past five years, the teams she has played on have had that same mind-set, compiling a cumulative record of 105-27.

Hustle. Play defense. Pass the ball. Score.