The first thing Seattle Pacific University women’s basketball coach Julie van Beek did after her Falcons won the West Region championship last week was to thank her seniors for their leap of blind faith.
Daesha Henderson and Megan Hoisington didn’t know a whole lot about van Beek when they signed with SPU five years ago, and yet they trusted the Falcons’ new head coach with their basketball futures.
The seniors haven’t once looked back on their school commitment, and now their future is a matter of days — if not hours.
Henderson and Hoisington — part of a senior class that has since added Eastern Washington University transfer and former Snohomish High star Sydney Benson, who is out with a knee injury — will try to cap off their SPU careers with an NCAA Division II national title this week. The Falcons (27-3) play Fort Lewis of Colorado (33-3) in the national quarterfinals in St. Joseph, Mo., at 10 a.m. Pacific time today.
“It’s like icing on the cake,” said Henderson, who played with Benson at Snohomish High. “It’s been a tremendous experience with everything here (at SPU). It shows all that hard work paid off.”
Like her classmates, Henderson didn’t know all that much about van Beek when the former coach at Trevecca Nazarene College walked into her house in Sept. 2005 as the new face of the SPU program. The recruitment process of the 21st Century has become kind of like Internet dating, and so Henderson had been in contact with van Beek but had yet to meet her face-to-face.
“I had talked to her on the phone a million times before,” Henderson said, “so I wasn’t really nervous as much as I was excited (to meet her).”
When van Beek and assistant coach Michelle Skyles visited the Snohomish home of Henderson’s mother, the connection was pretty immediate.
“They were awesome,” said Henderson, who made her final decision after visiting the SPU campus and meeting the team shortly thereafter. “Easy to talk to, very up-front. They laid out everything very nicely so it was clear what I was getting myself into.”
Van Beek, a native of Idaho who was coming from an NAIA program in Nashville, had first discovered Henderson shortly after the Falcons hired her in July 2005. While still living in Nashville, she made the 200-mile drive to Memphis for an AAU tournament, walked into the building and watched a team from Washington called the Columbia Cascade.
“A godsend,” van Beek would call the chance encounter.
That would be the only time van Beek would watch Henderson play basketball, although she did take in a few Snohomish High volleyball games before the SHS senior signed with SPU — over Division I schools like UNLV and Weber State — in Nov. 2005.
“It was huge,” van Beek said of being able to sign Henderson, the first of three Snohomish players to join SPU since that winter of ’05. “Coming into a situation where SPU was coming off five losses in a three-year span, we needed to sign kids. And besides Daesha being a great player and a great person and a great student, she came from a winning program. At Snohomish, they know how to do things and know how to win; that was important.”
Hoisington had a similar recruiting experience to that of Henderson during her senior year at Central Kitsap High School. Hoisington had been in contact with the former SPU coaching staff as a high school junior, and she was persistent when the new coach signed on.
Van Beek and Hoisington eventually met for lunch after the new SPU coach took a ferry to Bremerton, at which time the Central Kitsap star knew the school was right for her.
Five years later, having been a part of 100 wins and just 19 losses, Hoisington knows she made the right decision.
“I don’t have any regrets coming here,” she said. “It’s the best decision I could’ve made. Every (SPU) team I’ve been a part of has been unique and special in its own way.”
Hoisington also wanted to make it clear that her current team isn’t quite finished.
“We accomplished our goals” by making it to the Elite Eight, the 5-foot-11 senior said, “but we’re not settling. We want to come out of this with a national championship, and we know we’re good enough to do it.”
Henderson was also adament that the Falcons’ season-long quest to make it to St. Joseph, Mo., was not the end-all-be-all objective.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “Obviously, this was one of our huge goals. But now that we’re here, we want to win the whole thing. Like all the teams that have made it this far, we know now that we’re very, very good, that we’re one of the best.”
The woman who brought them to SPU is hoping to send her seniors out in style.
“It gives me great satisfaction and a great sense of happiness (to be at the Elite Eight) because these kids really bought into what we believe and gave their heart and soul to the team,” van Beek said of her senior class. “It’s fitting. It’s a great ending _ and it will be an even greater ending if we can win three more this week.”
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