Stanwood has class and talent

  • Larry Henry / Sports Columnist
  • Tuesday, January 22, 2002 9:00pm
  • Sports

It was a class act by a classy coach.

We’re referring to Nate DuChesne, the Stanwood High School boys basketball coach.

He brought his team to KeyArena to play Mark Morris in the King Holiday Hoopfest Monday afternoon.

It was a celebration to honor Martin Luther King Jr., with eight standout teams playing in four games during the course of the day.

Stanwood would end up losing the game by a point in the final seconds, but that didn’t seem to matter much.

What did matter was that DuChesne recognized what a big deal it was for his kids to play in the SuperSonics’ home arena on this special day and he got every player in the game in the first half, and the Spartans still managed a nine-point lead.

That says volumes about the kind of coach DuChesne is. Sure, he would like to have won the game, but he was more interested in rewarding his kids for the work they put in at practice every day.

Who knows, the experience may pay off sometime down the road. If the Spartans make it to the Class 4A state tournament and DuChesne has to go to his deep reserves, the kids will already have played before a big crowd.

And even if some of these kids don’t play that much the remainder of the season, they’ll have a memory that’ll last a lifetime because they have a coach who remembered what it was like being a kid himself.

* * *

Want to see a fun basketball player?

Catch Ryan Appleby’s act.

He’s the junior point guard for Stanwood.

If every college coach in the country doesn’t know about this kid by now, they’ve been sleeping on the job.

Appleby could probably step in and help some teams right now. He might get knocked around a bit, though, because he’s very slight. He needs to put on some weight.

But how the youngster can play. He’s especially adept as a passer, but he’s also a deadly outside shooter.

He made some passes against Mark Morris that you don’t often see by a high school player. He’s so skilled with the no-look pass that he sometimes caught teammates offguard, and they either fumbled it or missed the shot.

Once he drifted across the free throw circle, left to right, and whipped a pass to Marcus Steele on the left side of the basket for an easy two-pointer.

Another time he drove the left baseline and delivered a behind-the-back pass to an unsuspecting teammate, who missed the shot.

Still another time he had the ball on the right wing with his back to the basket, whirled and fired a left-handed pass to another teammate for another … missed shot.

“He works on his left hand a lot,” DuChesne said.

The coach said he gets so used to seeing Appleby make great passes in practice that hardly anything he does in a game surprises him.

He’s got a sweet jump shot and canned all four of his 3-point attempts.

“We’d like to see him shoot more,” DuChesne said, “but he’d rather get his teammates involved.”

Appleby did have one embarrassing moment, however. As he started to launch a shot, the ball slipped off his fingers and went straight up in the air.

He was able to laugh about it.

He’ll laugh even more when he gets a scholarship to play Division I ball. And he will.

He’s that good.

* * *

We’ve all heard someone make a remark that is so incredibly outrageous that we shriek, “He didn’t really say that, did he?”

Yes, he did. I heard one last week.

Some radio person asked Bret Boone how much stress he felt while waiting to see which team he would be playing for this season.

Boone was going to make a ton of money wherever he played, and he ended up with a Mariners contract that could pay him $30 million.

If that’s stress, send us all a bag of it.

Stress, Mr. Radio Person, is not knowing in the first hours after it happened if your husband or wife or son or daughter got out alive in the World Trade Center disaster on Sept.11.

Stress is getting laid off from your job a few days before Christmas.

Stress is being diagnosed with a brain tumor and not knowing yet whether it is benign or malignant.

Stress is being a single mother and trying to raise three kids on $30,000 a year because her deadbeat ex-husband won’t pay child support.

Stress is being evicted from your apartment because you lost your job and can’t make payments.

Stress is an Army Reservist being called to active duty overseas and leaving a wife and three small kids behind.

Stress is being a police officer and walking into a domestic dispute.

Stress is not fretting over where you’ll get your millions.

* * *

When Jeff Cirillo came to the M’s, he recalled playing on the same team with Boone at USC.

He remembered Boone being somewhat of a hotdog. “I shouldn’t call him that,” Cirillo said, then added, “Yeah, he was a hotdog.”

Cirillo was a pitcher in college, and he said one time when he was on the mound, Boone was playing shortstop and made an errant throw that hit him between the eyes.

Asked about that incident last week when he was in Seattle, Boone feigned ignorance. “Yeah, I read about that somewhere, but I don’t know what he’s talking about,” he said with a slight grin. “We’ll have to get that straightened out when we get to spring training.”

Wink. Wink.

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