Shoot, they yelled.
Why? she wondered.
The victory was locked up. Only 14 seconds remained in the game. She already had broken the school’s single-game scoring record.
Yet everyone in the gym – except the opponents – was exhorting her to let fly. Even her coach was shouting for her to put it up.
Too late. By the time her teammates got her the ball, the final seconds had elapsed and she couldn’t get a shot off.
Too bad. Tiffany Speer had fallen two points short of 50.
“It would have been awesome,” she said a couple days later. “But it didn’t really matter how many points I scored.”
They all say that. They all say it doesn’t matter.
People close to Tiffany Speer know that she meant it.
Only one thing mattered to her: the victory.
“She’s a tenacious competitor,” said Fred Crowell. “She hates to lose.”
Crowell had coached her in his Northwest Basketball Camps, then after she went to work as an instructor for him, he watched her in pickup games against male instructors on summer nights. She more than held her own.
That’s what having two older brothers will do for you, whether you’re a girl or a boy. It’ll toughen you up, physically and mentally.
“I’ve always loved being challenged,” said Speer, a junior at Whitworth College in Spokane who did her prep time at Snohomish High School. “I’ve always seen my brothers and how hard they worked. I love the drive they had. I always wanted that.”
She has it. In abundance.
Her coach at Whitworth, Helen Higgs, describes Speer as a “nice young lady off the court.” And on the court? “She’s really competitive. She’s not a jerk or mean, but she’s that kind of competitor.”
The kind that, because she’s so relentlessly energetic, can frustrate a friend or a foe.
“She’d dive for any loose ball,” said Mark Albertine, who coached her for two years in high school. “She’d play so physical that sometimes the kids on the other team would get a little upset.”
That’s the only way she knew how to play, said Keith Gilbertson Sr., a longtime coach at the high school. “I’ve never seen a kid play with more energy on a court night after night.”
Even on one-on-one drills, Speer wouldn’t let up. “That was kind of the joke my freshman year in high school,” she said. “I’d get so into it and everyone else would say, ‘It’s just a game.’ “
It might have become a little more than that when, as a 12-year-old playing only her second year of basketball, she was cut from a team in the Snohomish Basketball Association. The same thing happened to Michael Jordan early in his high school career. You saw what it did for him. It did the same thing for Speer.
“I was upset but I knew I had a lot of things to work on,” she said. “It definitely did (make her more determined) because I knew I could play with those girls.”
“That really stirred Tiffany,” said her father, Dick, a pastor living in Olympia. “She knew she was as athletic as the other girls. She was determined in her heart that basketball was going to be her sport.”
All she needed was a challenge. Now she had one.
“She always rises to the occasion,” her mother, Sue, said. “You give her a tough job and she’ll get it done.”
If only the gifted athletes made the teams, most coaches would be out of work. It’s the kids with the intangibles – the strong work ethic, the passion for the game, the hunger to excel, the willingness to accept coaching, the grittiness to get up after they’ve been knocked down – who form the bedrock of most teams, whatever the sport.
Tiffany Speer had all of these intangibles, plus she was raised in an athletic family, and she could look at her two older brothers and say, “I want to be like them.”
Nate, 27, played baseball at the University of Portland, and Josh, 24, was a wrestler at Pacific Lutheran. Sometimes she would quiz them about what it was like to be put in certain situations and how they reacted.
“She’d ask Nate, ‘What are you thinking when this guy’s throwing 95 mile-per-hour fastballs at you?” their father said. “Or she’d say to Josh, ‘What in the world do you think when you’re out there in the middle of the wrestling ring?’ ” And he would respond, “I tell myself, ‘You (his opponent) have not worked hard enough, you do not deserve to be in the ring with me,’ ” Dick said. “That got built into her heart really early.”
And a big heart it was. A heart that yearned to be great. A heart that said “some may have more skills than I but they will not outwork me.”
“She relied on heart and preparation,” her father said. “You would not pick her out of a crowd for her skills; she would be middle of the pack.”
But this middle-of-the-packer became a good high school player that Albertine viewed as an “emerging star.”
“She was a singleminded, tenacious competitor,” he said, “who just kept getting better and better.” And, after a “tenfold improvement” between her sophomore and junior year, she started on the varsity her final two years.
When she got to Whitworth, she was slated for a backup role on the varsity her freshman year. Then the player in front of her, a senior, got hurt in a preseason practice.
That player now knows how Wally Pipp felt. Because like Pipp, who was replaced by Lou Gehrig, she never got back in the starting lineup. Well, she did, but for only one game – Senior Night.
Two-and-a-half years later, Tiffany Speer has yet to be dislodged, having started 69 of 70 games, including 17 this season for the Pirates. The star that was emerging in high school has blossomed into a full-fledged standout, one of the top players in Division III. “She’s become a really good player,” Higgs said, “a very good, all-around player.”
Just as she kept getting better and better in high school, so has she kept improving in college. Taking the starting opportunity presented to her and making the most of it, she averaged 11.2 points and hustled down 6.5 rebounds per game as a freshman, earning Honorable Mention All-Northwest Conference.
She was just getting tuned up. Her sophomore year, she averaged a league-leading 15.7 points and almost seven rebounds and was selected the Northwest Conference Player of the Year.
No longer middle of the pack, she now led it. And she was about to break away from it.
This season, the young lady who once got cut from a team is cutting opponents apart with an array of scoring that has her well on the road to the Whitworth career record with still a lot of games to be played over the next year or so. On a team that is 13-4 after a win over George Fox on Friday night, Speer is averaging 22.7 points and 6.5 rebounds. She currently has 1,077 points, ninth on the all-time Whitworth scoring list. The school record is 2,040 points.
Speer has been the Northwest Conference Player of the Week five times this season. She has scored 25 points or more seven times, equaling the school single-game record with 39 on Dec.6.
Then, eight days ago, in a 65-54 win over Linfield, she broke the record. No, she destroyed it, pumping in 48 points. And how’s this for symmetry? In each half, she scored 24 points and made 8 of 12 shots.
As dominant as Jordan was in the NBA, did he ever score 28 consecutive points in a game? Tiffany Speer did, getting the last 12 of the first half and the first 16 of the second.
“I’ve been in a lot of gyms, but I’ve never seen anything like that,” Higgs said. “Everyone on our team understood the kind of game she was having and got her the ball.”
Higgs expected Speer to get better this year because that’s just the way she is. But she also knew that every team they played was going to throw a defensive blanket over her. So Speer did what Michael would have done: She expanded her game, honing her mid-range and 3-point shots to become an inside-outside threat.
When she got her 40th point against Linfield, she heard the PA announcer recognize her school record. Then she quickly got her mind back on the game, oblivious of her point totals, which kept rising. When they hit 48 and she missed two free throws, the crowd groaned and she couldn’t figure out why.
Her coach was also unaware that she was only two points from the magic 50. But when the assistant coach informed her, Higgs started screaming Speer’s name and ordering her to “post up hard.” Speer recalled thinking, “We’re ahead by 10 with 14 seconds to go and she wants me to score again?”
She didn’t but she was still the top story on the local sportscast that night.
“The announcer came on and said, ‘Ray Allen of the Sonics had a good game, but not as good as Tiffany Speer’s,’ ” her proud father recalled.
Someday she’ll leave all this behind, the shooting, the scoring, the crowd roaring, the media attention. She is working toward a degree in health and fitness, and after she graduates might go back to school and get another degree in nursing.
“Nursing has been my true passion,” she said. “My dad was involved in church mission trips to Mexico, and to see little kids not get the treatment they needed makes me want to go back to Mexico and serve.”
“That experience,” her mother said, “touched her deeply.”
Now you get an idea of why Crowell lauds her human qualities.
“She’s a phenomenal person, an outstanding student,” he said. “She’s the kind of person you want as a model for your children.”
A nice young lady off the hardwood. A fierce competitor on it.
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