Heat-fest victors travel long, hot road

Word on the street was that Wade Joseph’s nickname after this weekend should be “the human Band-Aid.”

One spectator swore he saw Joseph go for a ball in a Saturday morning Hoopfest game and nearly take out the front row of the east bench at Nike Center Court.

The bandaged shiner on his left eye offered support to the theory, but Joseph insisted it didn’t bother him.

“It doesn’t hurt,” said Joseph, whose Green Mountain Construction team from Nampa, Idaho, won the Men’s Elite Over 6-feet title in Riverfront Park on Sunday.

Joseph and teammates Ryan McCarthy, Jordan Mayer and Chris Allen – a North Central High School graduate – may be hurting today though.

Their 20-16 championship victory over Team Numerica (Bryan Depew, Derek Taylor, Gunner Olsen and Chase Williams) was Green Mountain Construction’s ninth game of the day.

“We took the longest possible route to get here,” Joseph said. “I’m not tired yet – I’m kind of riding an emotional high right now – but I’m sure I will be shortly.”

“We lost our first game (on Saturday) and had to win every game after that just to get here.”

Joseph’s successful drive past Olsen to the hoop tied the game at 16-16 and McCarthy gave Green Mountain Construction its final lead with a two-pointer shortly after.

McCarthy, who was playing in Hoopfest for the first time, made a lay-in and sank a free throw for the victory.

“It feels great,” said McCarthy, referring to the victory, not the 97-degree heat. “Everybody talks about Hoopfest being this big deal, and I was kind of skeptical, but then I got here and all of downtown was closed off and it was just bigger then I could imagine.”

Messenger team delivers

Spencer Bishop hopes his team is the next dynasty in the Men’s Elite Under 6-feet division.

Bishop, a Shadle Park graduate, and Associated Messenger teammates Matty McIntyre (Gonzaga Prep), Michael Johnson (Gonzaga Prep) and Dallas Leslie defeated team MyThankYou.com (Joseph Hodges, Joel Ryman, David Kielian and Justin Shamion) 20-15 in the title game at Center Court.

It was Associated Messenger’s second straight championship victory over MyThankYou.com.

“We remembered playing them and we knew it was going to be a challenge,” Bishop said.

MyThankYou.com led until Leslie’s lay-in tied the game at 11-11.

Leslie gave Associated Messenger their first lead with a free throw to go up 14-13 and they led the rest of they way.

Bishop drained two free throws and Leslie added another for the final three points of the win.

Prior to Associated Messenger’s first title at last year’s Hoopfest, team Hoop Hearted (Darell Walker, Winston Brooks, Eric Avery and Ryan Hansen) had won the division four straight times.

Associated Messenger hopes they are poised for the same kind of streak.

“We’re having a great run together,” Bishop said. “We definitely want to keep playing together. It’s great competition down here.”

Tomato Street back for more

Raeanna Jewell lives in the Phoenix area now, where temperatures have averaged 110 degrees in recent weeks.

But that didn’t prepare her for the playing the Spokane heat during this year’s Hoopfest.

“I don’t play in this kind of heat, and I’m only halfway in shape,” the former Gonzaga and Central Valley High School standout joked.

Jewell, former WNBA veteran Stacy Clinesmith (Mead), Lindsay Herbert (Lake City) and Ashley Anderson (Gonzaga) won their second straight Women’s Elite title together as team Tomato Street.

They beat Cricket (Megan Kane, Ashly Jamison, Tiffany Schmidt and Abby Johnson) 20-18 in the championship game.

Tomato Street took an 8-0 lead to start the game, but Cricket was able to climb back in and tie things up at 10-10.

Cricket took its first lead at 18-17, but Clinesmith netted a reverse lay-in and Herbert scored before Anderson sank a free throw to win the game.

Hoopfest goes international

Erik Heinz and Seth Yates had just finished doing the play-by-play for one of the games at Youth Center Court on Spokane Falls Boulevard when Laura Walter approached their broadcast table.

Heinz and Yates, part of the small Seattle-based company YourSports that streamed video of youth games online this weekend, had been speculating as to what Walter’s daughter Danielle’s team name “BBG” stood for.

“We guessed that it was BasketBall Girls,” Heinz said.

They were wrong.

Walter politely informed them it was Blessed by God, and that her husband, Stephen, had been able to watch his daughter’s game online all the way from Soyo, Angola, in Africa.

“We also had family that watched in Texas and my mother-in-law watched from Oklahoma; it’s pretty neat they did that,” Laura Walter said. “My mother-in-law called – she’s pretty into church. She wanted me to let them know what the team name was.”

And Heinz and Yates didn’t mind.

“We thought it was pretty cool,” Yates said. “Now we can tell people YourSports is international.”

Danielle Walter (Pasco), Jazmine Redmon (Mead), Kellie McCann-Smith (Clarkston) and Daisy Burke (Lewis and Clark) teamed up to win the Elite High School Girls title for a second straight year.

The four also play on the same club team, the Northwest Blazers.