BELLINGHAM – Everyone knows that to earn a college basketball scholarship, you need to start dribbling a ball while still in diapers.
Shoot hoops in the backyard with your old man a few days after your first steps.
Join an elite AAU team when you’re 6 and travel the United States playing 60 games a summer, that is, when you’re not at basketball camp or with your sports psychologist or personal trainer.
Move in with your uncle who lives across the alley so you can attend the high school that goes to state and produces a half-dozen Division-I players every year.
OK, maybe we exaggerate. But only slightly.
Tyler MacMullen didn’t do any of this. He skipped high school ball altogether and look what it got him.
A job as the starting center with the Western Washington University Vikings.
He tried to do it the traditional way. Went out for the team at Kamiak High School his freshman year. Got cut.
Tried again his sophomore year. Got cut again.
Didn’t try his junior year.
“I just lost interest,” he said. “You work so hard at it.”
And then the coach tells you you’re not good enough.
“It crushes you.”
Fast forward a few years.
MacMullen is a freshman at Edmonds Community College, taking a course in basketball, three “easy” credits.
Halfway through the quarter, the instructor, Keith Kingsbury, the veteran EdCC basketball coach, pulls MacMullen aside and asks him if he ever played high school ball.
That he had no prep experience made no difference to Kingsbury, an excellent teacher and talent evaluator who has sent droves of players on to four-year schools.
“I’d watched him, liked his competitiveness,” Kingsbury said. “He ran the floor hard and worked hard.”
Besides that, MacMullen was tall, 6-foot-9.
The Tritons’ season had just ended but the players were meeting for Sunday workouts and Kingsbury invited MacMullen to join them.
“I don’t think I want to play basketball,” MacMullen said.
“I don’t care what you think,” MacMullen recalled Kingsbury saying. “It’s what I think that matters.”
“I don’t remember it quite that way,” the candid Kingsbury said. “Whatever.”
Sunday came. MacMullen showed up, after a little pep talk from his mother. “You’re as good as anybody else,” she said.
Oh? “I’m out there with all these high school legends,” MacMullen remembered thinking. “I hadn’t played since middle school.”
Didn’t matter. Kingsbury knows talent. Thought this kid could help him.
He did.
MacMullen became a full-time starter as a sophomore and led the Tritons, who went 21-9, in scoring (15 points per game) and rebounding (10.2).
“He’s a helluva rebounder,” Kingsbury said. “He has great instincts for the ball, and he’s tireless. He just keeps going.”
By the time his JC career was over, MacMullen was attracting interest from about 40 schools, he estimated, but he went with Western, which began recruiting him early.
“It seemed like the best fit,” he said. “Close to home, good school, good program, good coaches.”
Now, he’s a starter on an NCAA Division II team that’s anticipating big things with three of its top four scorers returning.
“Maybe if I’d played in high school,” MacMullen mused the other night, “I wouldn’t be as good as I am.”
It was a half hour or so after the Vikings opened the season with an 84-65 victory over Northwest University at Sam Carver Gymnasium.
And MacMullen was thinking he hadn’t been very good that night.
“It gets frustrating when you don’t play up to your expectations,” he said.
His line wasn’t all that bad – nine points and six rebounds – considering he sat out most of the first half with early foul trouble.
But it didn’t please his most severe critic: himself.
Now he had a “deep down disappointment” that would take a day or two to get over.
It wouldn’t do any good to remind him that he was playing against guys who were “high school legends.”
“He’s kind of like me,” Kingsbury said. “He’s kind of a perfectionist. He becomes frustrated because he wants it so bad.”
He occasionally let his emotions get to him on the court when he played for EdCC, and that would bring a rebuke from his coach. “What he didn’t understand well enough was that he was part of a group,” Kingsbury said.
Though he sometimes crossed swords with his coach, MacMullen realizes he might still be playing pickup basketball were it not for Kingsbury.
After all, Kingsbury was the one who told him “if you work hard at it, someone will pay for your education.”
Western paid by giving him a full ride.
“He had one of the biggest impacts on my life,” MacMullen said. “He believes in people.”
MacMullen is still learning, about basketball and about life. Out of high school, he enrolled at Washington State, but lasted only a year.
Too much partying, he admitted. “Got myself in a lot of trouble. A rough time in life. I learned a lot.”
Many of us do.
Then we go on.
Tyler MacMullen – a.k.a. “Gym Class Tyler,” the nickname Kingsbury gave him – is going on with the WWU Vikings.
“He’s one of the best guys I’ve ever had from a rebounding standpoint,” Western coach Brad Jackson said. “He makes an effort on every play. He’s eager to learn and please.”
Dave Harshman, coach of Pacific Lutheran University, was on hand the other night to scout the Vikings for an upcoming game, and he described MacMullen as a “stairstepper.”
“Every year he gets better,” Harshman, a tough critic of players, said. “By the time he’s a senior, he’s going to be really good.”
Good enough perhaps, Kingsbury said, to play pro ball in Europe.
Which would be the niftiest cut of all – to those who cut him in the first place.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
