Katie Storey solid for the Knights

There are a ton of sports clichés to explain Katie Storey.

There’s the one about it not being about the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. There’s another about big things coming in small packages.

The problem with clichés is that they’re, well, cliché.

And there’s nothing cliché about the East Valley girls basketball standout.

She may be slight, she may look like she would get scrambled if she set a pick for any player above the size of a point guard, she may look like she’d be blown around the court in a drafty gym, but Katie Storey is the rock on which the Knights build.

“In the last year, Katie has really matured a lot,” East Valley coach Freddie Rehkow said. “She’s a fine leader and she steps up every day. She’s showing me the things I knew she was capable of doing two years ago when we made her a starter as a freshman.

“She may be a tiny, wiry young lady, but is she ever feisty! She’s just ornery.”

At 5-foot-6, and slight, Storey comes from a basketball family. Two older brothers played basketball at East Valley and her father played in both high school and college.

“I learned to shoot from my dad,” Storey said. “I got my love of the game from him.”

And she got the hard-nosed attitude from them all.

While she’s a young woman of few words off the court, her game speaks volumes.

“Katie will get after her teammates,” Rehkow said. “She’s not afraid to tell them if she thinks they aren’t working hard. And she’s not afraid to get after me, either.

“She’s grown so much. She’s matured so much. Now she realizes she can’t take a day off from practice. She needs to be there and to go hard every day because her teammates need that from her.”

Beginning with her freshman season, Storey was thrust into the position of being the team’s scorer, the team’s floor leader – a position that was not necessarily a natural fit.

“She was put in a situation early in her career where everyone expected her to shoot, everybody relied on her to dribble the ball,” the coach said. “Now, this year, she’s got a supporting cast that will take a lot of that pressure off of her, and I think she’s more relaxed out there. She can lead by example and, hopefully, it will be the right example for everybody to follow.

“More so this year than in the past. Even last year, she didn’t care if she was the leading scorer. All she cared about was the bottom line – whether or not the team won.”

And, Storey said, the pressure to shoot isn’t so great this season.

“I think a lot of other people on the team are starting to step up, and that makes it a lot easier this year,” she said. “I think our whole team realizes what’s expected of us, and we just want to get out there and get it done.”

Storey got off to a fast start this season, but was in a slump recently – connecting on 3 of 27 shots from the field.

“That happens,” she said. “But coach Rehkow just kept telling me to shoot, so I kept shooting. The shots are going to fall.”

Last year East Valley reached the Greater Spokane League playoffs at 10-10.

This year, the team wants more.

“I think last year we were pretty happy with where we finished at 10-10,” Storey said. “This year, we think we can go farther, especially with dropping down to Class 3A.

“I think we realized what we could accomplish with what happened to the soccer team and how far we got in the state playoffs.”

Storey said she can see the improvement the team has made each year – and the team learned more during playing summer league basketball.

“I think we learned we could be successful over the summer,” she said. “We learned we can compete with anyone, and we learned how to play together. That helps each year.”

Even with a break to play soccer, those summer lessons stuck.

“You lose a little bit when you take a break, but we’re a lot farther ahead because of all those games we played in summer ball,” she said. “We played something like 40 games or so. You learn about your teammates. You learn what you can expect from one another.

“It makes things come together that much faster when you get back together at the start of practice.”

One of the most important things the Knights will rely on the rest of the way is her desire.

“It’s one of things about Katie. If it’s something she wants really bad, then you’re going to have to deal with her,” Rehkow said. “This is her senior year, and I think she really wants to end things with a bang.”