The father played recreational basketball when his sons were young and they would always tag along with him and “do their thing.”
“Both,” he remembered, “had a nice feel for the game.”
As if they were born to play the game. Because years later, they’re still playing it, still doing their thing.
One is doing it in cloudy, rainy Seattle. After a recent storm, he woke up to three inches of water in his basement apartment.
He didn’t panic. “I’m all wet,” Rob Diederichs said resignedly, “but I’m all right.”
He was, however, a bit perplexed about what to do with all that water.
His younger brother Tim didn’t have that problem. He woke up to sunshine in Los Angeles.
Both boys have their father glowing.
“I really feel blessed,” Paul Diederichs said.
Rob, a 6-foot-8 sophomore out of Shorewood High School, is the second-leading scorer for Seattle Pacific University, an NCAA Division II school that is 4-1 and came within nine points of the University of Washington in a preseason exhibition.
Tim, a 6-9 pure freshman who played his past two years of high school ball at Snohomish, has started all 10 games for Division I Loyola Marymount and is the team leader in shooting percentage.
The only thing that would make their dad happier is if both boys were playing for the UW Huskies, not that he isn’t pleased where they are. He is. Very.
You have to understand, though, that all three — Paul, Rob and Tim — are staunch Husky fans. “I’m a Husky, I’m a Dawg,” Rob crowed. “I go to pretty much every Husky (home) football game that I can. Growing up, I quit soccer so I could go to Husky football games.”
The UW didn’t recruit him, but he considered walking on there. However, SPU offered an opportunity he just couldn’t pass up.
“Free education, good education, good (basketball) program,” he said. “Here was the best thing for me.”
Rob said he felt a “little snubbed” by the UW and it’s apparent he didn’t get over the slight. When he found out that the Falcons would be playing the Huskies in an exhibition this season, he circled the date — Nov. 5 — on his calendar.
“I was unbelievably excited for that game,” he said. “It was a dream come true for me to play in that arena and I took full advantage of it. I don’t think I’ll ever have a game where I was so pumped up for it. I knew that if I had a good game, it would be on the biggest stage probably of my college career. In Seattle, at the UW, where I used to be ball boy.”
Though the Falcons lost the game, 86-77, Rob might have had Husky coaches wondering if perhaps they hadn’t made a mistake in not recruiting him. He scored 36 points — 18 in each half — and made 15 of 23 shots from the floor.
“It was kind of redemption for me,” he said. “I kind of showed everybody that, ‘OK, maybe I’m not playing in the Pac-10, but if I come into a Pac-10 school and do what I did, I can hang with you.’”
He almost hung the Huskies.
In their younger years, the Brothers Diederichs hung out a little with the Huskies of coach Bob Bender’s teams as ball boys.
How that came about is a cute story. It seems one night the Huskies were hosting UCLA in what was a “huge game,” as Tim remembered it, and Paul and the boys and one other guy went down to Hec Edmundson Pavilion. The problem was, they had just two tickets and the game was a sellout.
Paul thought maybe a friend of his who worked in the equipment room could provide some tickets, but the friend wasn’t around. One of the guy’s colleagues, however, said that two of the ball boys hadn’t shown up, and told Paul, “I can put your kids to work.”
“It was crazy,” Paul said.
Crazy wonderful for his sons. The Huskies won the game, and Rob and Tim went on to serve as ball boys for the next three seasons.
Only Rob came away from that experience certain he wanted to wear purple and gold someday.
“I knew I just wanted to play college ball,” Tim said. “Not necessarily for the Huskies.”
His choice of Loyola Marymount has turned out so far to be a good one. Though the Lions as a team have struggled, losing seven of their first 10 games, Tim has performed well, averaging 7.5 points and four rebounds per game. As one of two freshmen starters, he has logged more time on the court than anyone else, averaging 27 minutes a game. He’s shooting 58 percent from the field. If only he could get more shots. “We have a problem of getting him the ball,” coach Rodney Tention said.
Indeed, Tim is averaging just five shots a game and during one stretch of three games, he didn’t shoot but four times. In the next game, he put up 10 shots, hit six, scored 14 points and the Lions won.
He has a quality that basketball coaches cherish: He doesn’t force shots. “He looks for the open guy, which is kind of rare for a young player,” Tention said. “He’s a very unselfish player.”
That selflessness was apparent at his last stop, Snohomish High School, which he helped lead to a fifth-place finish in the Class 4A state tournament last season, averaging 14 points, nine rebounds and five assists per game.
“He has a really good understanding of where his teammates are on the court,” Panthers coach Len Bone said.
It’s part of that “feel” for the game Paul Diederichs talked about. Another term for it, offered by SPU coach Jeff Hironaka, is “court sense.”
That court sense allows the oldest Diederichs brother, the 21-year-old Rob, to know where the ball is going to come down once someone launches a shot. “If he was physically stronger, he could probably be a double-double player easy because he’s got a nose for the ball,” Hironaka said, “but sometimes he just physically gets rooted out of the play.”
He does get his shots, though, as his scoring average — 18 points a game — affirms. “If you get him the ball, he’ll know what to do with it,” Hironaka said. “He just needs to take good shots when they come to him rather than take forced shots.”
Both players, their coaches believe, have the ability to become all-conference players, which would obviously tickle their dad to no end.
“Neither one of my kids is going to be on highlight reels,” Paul said. “They’re not flashy. Mostly they’re fundamentally sound. And they like playing.”
Maybe they were born to play the game.
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