Friends & Rivals

Kristi Kingma was younger than most when she had her heart broken for the first time.

Still in middle school, Kingma was crushed when one of her closest friends and a teammate on the Mill Creek Wolfpack told her she was moving south.

And she wasn’t the only one.

“It was hard,” s

aid current USC star Ashley Corral, whose family moved from Snohomish to Vancouver, when she was an eighth-grader in 2004. “That was a great team, and we’d gone through a lot together. It was the first real team I was ever on.”

Today, for the seventh time since the Corral family left Snohomish County for good, the former Wolfpack teammates will be reunited again on the hardwood.

“It’s gotten easier,” said Kingma, a University of Washington junior who has outscored Corral 98-61 in six head-to-head meetings but has yet to beat her. “Playing her over the years, I’ve gotten used to it. It’s always going to be competitive.”

Kingma and Corral first met as 10-year-olds, when they teamed up for Mill Creek Wolfpack traveling teams that quickly became juggernauts in both basketball and soccer. Corral’s family had just moved from California to Snohomish, and Ashley used basketball to help her assimilate to her new surroundings.

“The Wolfpack was right when we moved there, and I didn’t know anyone,” Corral said last week. “We just meshed. We played really, really well together.”

When Hala Corral, Ashley’s mother, got a job promotion that sent her south to Vancouver in 2004, it broke up the four-year playing relationship.

“I was devastated,” Kingma said last week. “She was one of my best friends, and seeing her move away was tough.”

Corral and Kingma met again on the basketball court of the Tacoma Dome in 2006, when Kingma was a sophomore at Jackson High School and Corral was a sophomore at Prairie. It was a first-round game of the WIAA 4A state tournament, and Corral’s Falcons ended up winning 63-50 on the way to an appearance in the state championship game.

“It was definitely a different experience,” Corral said of facing her former teammate for the first time. “She had a great high school career and was a leader at Jackson. But I was used to either giving her the ball or her giving it to me.”

Said Kingma: “It was tough. Playing against your best friend is tough. You want them to do well, but you also want to win, obviously. I don’t know. Every time I player her, it’s really competitive, and it’s fun.”

The pair had a chance to be reunited in college, but Corral said that was never a serious consideration.

“Kristi has wanted to go to U-Dub since I’ve known her,” she said. “I didn’t know if I wanted to stay in Washington, and the coaching change (from June Daugherty to Tia Jackson) pushed me away.”

While Kingma always wanted the best for Corral, she couldn’t help but to wonder about what could have been.

“I thought about that all the time,” said Kingma, who still maintains contact with Corral through texts and phone conversations. “Not necessarily U-Dub, because I know she loves USC. But if she would’ve gone to Jackson, maybe we would’ve gotten a state championship.”

Corral has been a key figure for the Trojans (17-11 overall, 9-8) since her freshman season. Kingma has earned plenty of playing time at UW, but she hadn’t emerged as a go-to scorer before this season. The 5-foot-10 wing ranks fourth in the conference in scoring (15.8 points per game) and recently set the school record for 3-pointers in a season, with 73.

But one thing Kingma has yet to do is beat her former Wolfpack teammate. Her Huskies (11-15, 6-11) have a chance today, when USC hosts UW in the Pac-10 regular-season finale.

“We have grown apart, just because she’s moved away and we don’t see each other as much,” Kingma said. “But, yeah, I love playing against her.”

Corral is looking forward to the reunion as well.

“It’s fun being able to play against her, and I want her to do well, but I’d definitely rather win than lose,” she said. “… We know we’ve got to shut Kristi down. She’s a phenomenal player and a big-time scorer. We just have to come out and get a win. We really need it.”