Women’s basketball

Saint Martin’s vs. Pacific Lutheran – Marcus Pavilion – 7:00 PM
Preview from SMUSaints.com – Live stats and video

Girl’s basketball

Capital vs. Bremerton – Capital HS – 7:00 PM
Tumwater vs. Shelton – Tumwater HS – 7:30 PM
Listen live on the Eli Sports Network

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The Lynden Lions defeated the Tumwater T-Birds 41-7 in today’s 2A state football title game. The T-Birds finished second in the state behind the juggernaut Lions, who put on an offensive and defensive clinic and looked unstoppable. It was a really impressive performance from Josh Kraght, Zach Vis and the entire Lions team. Tumwater has nothing to hang their heads about, Lynden was just unbelievable good today.

College volleyball

Western Oregon 3, Saint Martin’s 0 (25-17, 25-17, 25-9)

RECAP FROM SMUSAINTS.COM:

MONMOUTH – The Saint Martin’s University volleyball team came up against a Western Oregon team that picked up its ninth win in its last 10 matches and SMU struggled to find a rhythm hitting as the Wolves won in three (25-17, 25-17, 25-9) on Thursday evening.

Set one looked promising for the Saints as they held a 6-1 lead behind the block of Kristyn Ross and Katy Ferguson. Tied at 11 it was back-to-back blocks by the Wolves that helped them take the lead. SMU would hang around and trailed just 20-17 but WOU scored five straight to finish off the set.

It the second and the third set the difference was in the hitting as Western Oregon hit .389 and .394 compared to the Saints at .118 and -.100. The Wolves finished the match with 42 kills and SMU had just 17 on the night. WOU also had a strong night blocking with nine team blocks.

Danielle Reese had a match-high 12 kills hitting .345 for WOU and added 12 digs. Krissi Kemper had nine kills hitting .300. Eight different players recorded at least two kills in the match for the Wolves.

Shea-Linn White recorded six kills for the Saints and added five digs. Teilissa Tua finished with four kills and seven digs. Carrie Starbuck added four kills and six digs. Halee Hernandez collected 12 digs and Cymbree Decosta amassed 16 assists.

The Saints will play their final match of the season on Saturday, Nov. 17th at 7:00 pm. It will be Senior Night at Marcus Pavilion as Tua and Ferguson will be recognized before the match.

One of my favorite sporting events of the year happens tonight: the annual Saint Martin’s/Evergreen crosstown basketball game, played this year at the CRC Gymnasium on the campus of The Evergreen State College. The fun gets underway at 6:00 PM with the women and continues at 8:00 PM with the men.

Though it isn’t a blood battle like it was in the first few years, no matter the situation, no matter if they are NAIA or NCAA, the talent on the floor, the records of the two teams, the men’s game is always fun to watch and hotly contested. The NAIA Division II Geoducks hold a 10-6 record against the NCAA Division II Saints since the Evergreen program was started in 1997. They won the first four meetings between the two teams and went 7-2 over their first nine meetings. But Saint Martin’s has won the last two games including an easy 75-61 victory last year and a 71-63 win in 2010 in one of the more intense games that I have witnessed between the two teams.

In their last meeting, it took Evergreen over ten minutes to score their first point allowing the Saints to build an 18-0 in the meantime. The Geoducks cut the lead to eleven a few times but never truly threatened to cut it any deeper or give the Saints any kind of trouble. Of players still on the roster, Roger O’Neill scored 16 points and Eric Taylor added 10 for the Saints while the only two remaining Geoducks from that game, Travis Wagner and Elzie Dickens, each scored six points.

The women’s game hasn’t produced as much of a rivalry over the years, mainly because one team has dominated the competition. The Saints are 15-1 all-time against the Geoducks, the lone Evergreen win coming in 2006. Last season, the Saints knocked off the Geoducks 54-38 behind ten points and 13 rebounds from Chelsea Haskey. Evergreen was led by Jessica Edge’s 14 points and Danielle Swain’s 11 points and 14 boards.

If you can’t make it to the CRC tonight, you can watch the games live on Evergreen athletics page or I will be tweeting plenty of updates throughout the game on the @OlySportsBlog Twitter page.

High school volleyball

4A state tournament
Olympia 3, Wenatchee 0 (25-13, 25-18, 25-17)
Olympia 3, Union 1 (25-18, 22-25, 25-21, 25-18)

The defending state champs looked really strong on day on and Olympia rolls into the semifinals behind a straight sets win over Wenatchee and a 3-1 win over Union. The Bears take on Mead tomorrow at 3:15 PM at Marcus Pavilion.

3A state tournament
Southridge 3, Timberline 1 (25-18, 25-12, 17-25, 25-20)
Mt Si 3, Timberline 0 (25-23, 25-21, 25-17) – Timberline eliminated

North Thurston 3, Shorewood 1 (25-21, 20-25, 26-24, 25-18)
North Thurston 3, Columbia River 2 (28-26, 23-25, 25-22, 25-27, 15-9)

North Thurston stayed alive by first beating Shoreword 3-1 in the first round and then finding a way to win in an epic second round game against Columbia River. The Rams move on to the seminfinals tomorrow. They will take on Southridge at Marcus Pavilion beginning at 1:30 PM.

2A state tournament
West Valley (Yakima) 3, Capital 1 (25-18, 17-25, 25-13, 25-23)
Capital 3, Sumner 0

Capital dropped their opening match to a strong West Valley squad but stayed alive in the consolation bracket with a straight sets win. The Cougars play at 8:30 AM against Sehome at Pierce College.

Tumwater 3, East Valley (Yakima) 0
Tumwater 3, Anacortes 2

Tumwater easily swept through East Valley in the first round but had to come back from a match point in the fifth set to eventually beat Anacortes and move into the semifinals. The T-Birds will face Colville tomorrow at 12:30 PM at Pierce College.

High school football

2A state tournament
Tumwater 45, Steilacoom 22

Christian Cummings scored four rushing touchdowns and Andrew Brown added another and Tumwater extended their winning streak to ten and moved onto the quarterfinals of the 2A state tournament with a 45-22 win over Steilacoom. The T-Birds built a 45-6 lead before Steilacoom rattled off 16 points in fourth quarter garbage time.

The T-Birds move to 10-1 on the season and will move on to face Archbishop Murphy, 45-21 winners over Bremerton, next week.

Men’s basketball

Chaminade 89, Saint Martin’s 82 – Recap from GoSwords.com
Great Falls 64, Evergreen 61 – Recap from Evergreen athletics

Eric Taylor scored 28 points on 10-of-14 shooting and three other Saint Martin’s players scored in double-digits, but it wasn’t enough as Chaminade knocked off the Saints 89-82 at the GNAC/PacWest Challenge in Monmouth, Oregon. Rei Jensen scored 13 points and Evan Coulter and Roger O’Neill each scored 12 for the Saints in the loss.

TJ Harris put Great Falls up by three with just six seconds left to play but Cody Peters’ three pointer at the buzzer missed the mark for Evergreen and the Argos held on to a 64-61 point win in the Cascade/Frontier Challenge in Spokane. KJ Hong led the Geoducks with 17 points while Peters added 15.

The three point loss is the closest the Geoducks have come to a win since a 79-72 win over PLU on November 26th, 2011 and only the second time that they have lost by less than double-digits over that span of games.

Women’s basketball

Cal Baptist 63, Saint Martin’s 50 – Recap from SMUSaints.com

Brooke Paulson scored 13 points and Chelsea Haskey added 12 more in Saint Martin’s 63-50 loss to Cal Baptist at the GNAC/PacWest Challenge in Monmouth, Oregon. The Saints trailed by just a point, 31-30, at the half but a 19-0 run by the Lancers led them to their first win of the season.

Seattle U’s shellacking of Evergreen tonight reminded me of this article I wrote for the great website The Mid-Majority about the game the two teams played last season at the ShoWare Center. The Redhawks 83 point win further illustrates the growing divide between the once equal teams…

Monday night’s game between the Seattle University Redhawks and NAIA Division II The Evergreen State College Geoducks was an unremarkable, dull basketball game that went pretty much how you would expect it to go. In front of a very small crowd played 20 miles away from campus at the ShoWare Center in Kent because Key Arena wasn’t available, the Redhawks dominated every aspect of the ShoWare College Showcase and the game wasn’t nearly as close as the 77-54 final score indicates. The most remarkable things about the game were Evergreen’s first half shooting woes (14.3% field goal percentage including 0-15 from behind the arc), the pregame meal at Chipotle that didn’t feature any horchata, my daughter’s love of the funhouse style mirrors outside the ShoWare Center and the horrific looking fall that a Redhawks cheerleader took (thankfully she was OK).

But this game between these two programs illustrates the dramatic changes to the Seattle U program in a very short time period. Fourteen years ago when Evergreen – a small college in Olympia, Washington that might very well be the most liberal school in the country – added basketball to their small athletic department, Seattle U was also an NAIA member and were still nicknamed the Chieftains. In their first meeting at a tournament in Tacoma, the program that was once put on the map by Elgin Baylor was knocked off by a team named after an ugly bivalve that was supposed to be the anti-mascot for a school that didn’t believe in competitive athletics.

In fact, in the first five years of Evergreen basketball’s existence, the Geoducks beat Seattle U four out of five times including a 71-59 victory over the newly minted Redhawks in their first season and only season in the NCAA’s Division III. In 2002 the Redhawks moved to Division II and ran off four straight wins over the Geoducks before a very good Evergreen team led by a talented yet undersized guard named Nate Menafee evened the series at five a piece by upsetting a Seattle U team in their first season transitioning to Division I in 2008.

So Evergreen has seen the changes in Seattle U firsthand and was still competitive as recently as three seasons ago. But the game on Monday exposed the differences between a waning NAIA Division II program and an NCAA Division I mid majority program on the rise. Despite their shared competitive history, Monday showed that things will never be the same between these two schools and once Seattle U’s Aaron Broussard – the only player or coach left on either team involved in the 2008 game – graduates after this season, the ties to the recent past will completely be broken.

For Seattle U, the ties to their small time college basketball past can’t be broken quickly enough. In 2009, in advance of their first DI home game, the school named the top 29 players in their DI history and in the process totally discounted the contributions of all their basketball players over the past 28 years. Look at any history of the Seattle U athletic department and you see a gaping hole from 1980 to 2001. The NAIA years are embarrassing to Seattle U, a dark time in the school’s history, and every time they thrash one of their former NAIA equals, another nail is put into that time period’s coffin.

Seattle U welcomes Stanford to Key Arena on Thursday night creating a two game series that perfectly illustrates where they have been and where they aspire to be. Meanwhile, Evergreen heads to Kirkland, Washington on Saturday to open Cascade Conference play against Northwest University. What a difference fourteen years makes.

Men’s basketball

Seattle U 117, Evergreen 34 – Recap from GoSeattleU.com

Lucky Lagerberg hit a bucket three minutes into the contest and another at the 4:50 mark and those were the only two field goals that Evergreen hit in the first half. Seattle U used a 39-1 run between the two field goals to bury the Geoducks, 61-6 in the first half and took home the victory 117-34 in an exhibition game at Key Arena.

The Geoducks shot just 6.2% in the first half and 16.2% for the game, hitting just 10 field goals over 40 minutes. Meanwhile, Seattle U shot 64% in the first half and 60% in the game. Cody Peters led the Geoducks with nine points.

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Evergreen 4, Warner Pacific 1 – Recap from Evergreen athletics

Freshman Willie Spurr scored two goals and senior Kevin Flavin scored the eventual game-winner in Evergreen’s 4-1 win in their first playoff game since 2005 and first home playoff game in program history.

Spurr started the scoring in the 24th minute scoring on a header off a Flavin cross. Warner Pacific evened the score in the 3oth minute when Jameson Jones scored on an open goal after Evergreen keeper Mauricio Sanchez misplayed a ball on the other side of the box. It was Sanchez’s only mistake of the night, making five saves over the course of 90 minutes. The two teams went into halftime tied at 1-1.

Warner Pacific came out of the half as the aggressors but couldn’t put home a goal. In the 60th minute, Flavin received a long pass and dribbled around Knights’ keeper Drew Bonifacio to score the eventual game winner. Willie Spurr duplicated Flavin’s effort for the insurance goal in the 67th minute and Kyle Wiese added another insurance goal in the 80th minute to give the Geoducks the 4-1 victory.

Evergreen moves on to the Cascade Collegiate Conference championship game on Saturday and will face the #1 seed Concordia in Portland at 6:00 PM.

Girl’s soccer

Archbishop Murphy 6, Tumwater 1

Tumwater’s state tournament came to a premature end on Tuesday night with a 6-1 loss to Archbishop Murphy. Despite the higher seed, the T-Birds were big underdogs. The Wildcats won their 20th game of the season with their only loss coming in the district seminfinals, dropping them into a #3 seed and a road matchup with Tumwater. Selesha Harrah scored the T-Birds lone goal in the 76th minute.

Men’s basketball

Washington State 62, Saint Martin’s 50 – Recap from SMUSaints.com
Northwest 96, Evergreen 50 – Recap from Evergreen athletics

Saint Martin’s trailed by two points at halftime and were down by just five points with 5:41 left in the second half, but a 7-0 run put the Washington State up by 12 points and the Cougars held on to knock off the Saints 62-50 in an exhibition game in Pullman. Roger O’Neill scored 13 points for the Saints and Matt Dodson added 11 in the loss. Brock Motum led the Cougs with 21.

Northwest University scored the first 14 points of the game and shot 62% from the floor in their 96-50 victory over Evergreen in a non-conference game in Kirkland on Tuesday night. KJ Hong led the Geoducks with nine points while Travis Wagner added eight. The Eagles Michael Greene scored 22 points and former Saint Martin’s Saint Michael Russo added 19.