Tall tales abound in the storied history of youth basketball on Bainbridge Island.
Paski Gym was jam-packed with 2,200 screaming fans for a boys Metro League game to decide league honors with perennial powerhouse O’Dea last week. Three hundred were turned away.
Between the band’s blare and an exuberant, painted, tattooed, yellow-and-blued, always-standing student body in the Spartan grandstand, my grandson saw his first grand game perched atop my shoulders.
“Now I can see better, Grandpa!”
I felt the presence of others in the Grand Bleacher that night upon whose shoulders everyone stood – or sat.
My mind’s eye saw pioneer game promoter Whitfield “Whit” Routh; the towering Antoncich brothers; “Ashcan” Loverich; “Gentleman” Tom, and mercurial teams of flashy-uniformed sons and bloomered daughters of families of farmers, seamen, loggers, mill workers, fishermen, shipyard workers, dairy hands and busy folk from the eras of World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression and World War II.
I felt generations of Spartan teams; progeny of baby boomers; brothers and sisters, parents and children playing one-on-one and H-O-R-S-E before dinners growing cold, an enormous community of past and present whose lives were transcended for a short time each winter by a game – an improbable improvisational group dance upon an illuminated varnished floor, choreographed between elevated baskets to the frequently unpredictable bounce of an inflated ball.
No sooner had Canadian Dr. James Naismith invented the game of “basket ball” – two words – in 1891, then folks were nailing bottomless baskets and containers of all kinds onto island trees, barns, warehouses and community halls – and chicken wire over their windows!
The game quickly became the rage with both women’s and men’s teams. Having a vertical goal rather than a horizontal one, and allegedly prohibiting roughness, enabled it to be played indoors.
It spread like a winter flu. By 1901, the Kitsap County Herald reported the craze with an illustration and rules almost like today’s game.
By the time the YMCA spread its game rules throughout the United States and abroad, most of the kinks were worked out.
No longer were games played by up to 40 on a team because folks thought “the more players, the more fun!” A jump ball replaced having both teams line up at opposite ends of the court and stampede into one another to get the ball at the start of games.
And what about that out-of-bounds rule that said whoever retrieved the ball got to bring it back into play?
It caused more action off the court than on, highlighted by fights in stairwells and gymnastic teamwork to get the ball whenever it went in the balcony.
They got rid of that rule faster than the net cages that used to hang around the courts to protect spectators from the melee of “cagers.”
The earliest local hoop promoter didn’t need a cage. Most Bainbridge Island gyms then were too small for spectators. In a 35×50-foot court, walls often served as out-of-bounds lines.
Before BHS was built in 1928, the Winslow High School Lions roared over teams from Manzanita’s Olympic High School, Rolling Bay’s Moran School, Poulsbo, Silverdale, Port Orchard, Bremerton and occasionally Vashon – the Kitsap League.
Bloomer-uniformed WHS girls teams were active in the 1920s, long before 1972 Federal Title IX laws mandated them in a new wave of women’s liberation. The 1925 WHS girls team tied with Bremerton for the Kitsap County title and its game over Silverdale may have set a scoring record.
They won a squeaker, 3 to 1.
