Family affair: Siblings Carl Crider, Heidi Perry lead Oakesdale boys, girls basketball teams to top seeds at district
Oakesdale High School athletics have always been a little bit different.
Oakesdale is one of the smallest schools in Washington to compete individually without a co-op school – the district has 166 students out of the town’s population total of 397.
That hasn’t stopped Oakesdale’s volleyball team from winning three consecutive state titles and 13 of 17 since the creation of the 1B classification.
The high school has 44 students this year, 23 of whom play on the boys and girls basketball teams.
The coaches knew this year would be different when summer practices started.
When the Oakesdale gymnasium was shut down over the summer for floor repair renovations, boys coach Carl Crider and girls coach Heidi Perry had to go to “Plan B” – training and practicing at the town’s only park.
“We’d meet at the park at 8:30 in the morning,” said Perry, in her fifth season with the Nighthawks girls. “The high school and the middle school would be there. Most days, we had like 17 to 20 kids on this concrete slab at the park.
“Everybody who comes here says, ‘Oakesdale is different.’ You don’t realize how different it is unless you’ve come from somewhere else. I think you feel that when you go into the little store downtown or when you come into the gym for games.”
That gym is the only one available for the residents of Oakesdale.
Crider and Perry, who are siblings, have become accustomed to working with whatever they have. Crider is in his 10th season as head coach of the boys team. He played on and coached the team during the 31 years the school co-oped with Tekoa.
“The first year we had after we split with Tekoa, I only had eight boys that year,” Crider said. “Our girls teams have been in that boat pretty recently. They had some games where they could only suit up five girls a couple of years ago.”
This year, both teams have exceeded the expectations of their coaches. With the girls and boys as the top seed in their respective District 9 1B tournaments, Oakesdale will host four consecutive playoff games for the first time in school history.
“We couldn’t be luckier to have the two coaches that we have in coach Crider and coach Perry,” Oakesdale School District Principal Jake Dingman said. “They were born and raised in Oakesdale, and they know what the community values and what’s important as far as developing young players into young men and women.”
The girls will face off against fourth-seeded DeSales at 6 p.m. Wednesday at 6 p.m. The boys take home court when they host fourth-seeded Yakama Nation Tribal at 6 p.m. Thursday.
Senior contributions
For coach Perry’s girls team, the most significant difference this year was the addition of two senior forwards, Payton Davis and Brieyn Henley.
Davis has been the leader for the Nighthawks , averaging 13 points and 8.5 rebounds per game. As one of the athletes on the dominant Oakesdale volleyball team, it was always Davis’ dream to play in college. After three straight state titles and committing to play volleyball at Central Washington University, Davis said it was time for her to give back to her community and school.
Perry’s three seniors – Davis, Henley, and Samantha Holling – had their volleyball threepeat together before Holling finally convinced Davis and Henley to join her on the basketball team.
“I had been working on them for the past three years to come play basketball with me,” Holling said. “And I am so thankful that they decided they wanted to join the team their senior year. We are like one big family.”
During her sophomore season, Holling sustained a knee injury that kept her on the sideline for four months while limiting the number of available players on the basketball roster to five.
“Then, this year, I reinjured the same knee during a nonleague game,” Holling said. “I’m determined to finish out my senior year on the court with my teammates.”
Choosing to ignore the pain for the sake of her team’s success, Perry said, is not unusual for Holling, whom she calls “one of the toughest players” she’s coached.
Holling averages nine points and eight rebounds this season while being a reliable defender at any position. Due to the number of girls who joined the team this year, giving Perry rotation opportunities, this year is much different for Holling.
Another difference in Oakesdale is how deep the family ties go. Not only are the head coaches of the basketball programs siblings, but there are four cousin relations and two sets of sisters on the team. Six of the 13 players on the roster had a parent who graduated from Oakesdale.
Freshman Karen Crider and eighth-grader Megan Crider are Perry’s nieces. Perry’s freshman daughter, guard Grace Perry, averages 10 points . Junior guard Lucy Hackett is first cousins with the Perry and Crider sisters. On top of that, Brieyn Henley has a sophomore sister, Bradyn, who’s played well for the team.
Paired with the other half of the talented athletes on the team, Davis, Holling, junior Grace DeMeerleer, and eighth-graders Autumn Roper, Evelyn Goyke and Maddie Schunegar, the small-town family atmosphere makes the experience more valuable.
“Despite the close bonds, I’ve felt nothing less than welcomed and loved by this team,” said Davis, who moved to Oakesdale from Pullman before her eighth-grade year. “Playing on the Nighthawk basketball team is no ordinary experience. I’m grateful to look into the stands and know the names of almost all the community members there. Oakesdale will always be my second family.”
It’s those connections, Perry said, that make the team so strong. At the end of each practice, Perry gathers the girls gather in a circle and takes turns sharing one positive thing about the day. As they conclude, Perry said she selects one player to choose a word for the team to say as they break the huddle.
“One of the most common things the girls choose is family,” Perry said.
Sticking to that theme has paid dividends for the Nighthawks over the course of this season. From the times when the whole team couldn’t get together in the summer to watching seniors and eighth-graders gel, Perry’s team has always stuck together.
As coach of the middle and high school programs for Oakesdale, Perry says she would gather as many students to the park as she could during the summer. In years when the high school roster numbers were low, Perry would occasionally call up a few eighth-grade students. This season, Perry has five eighth graders who practice with the team.
Davis, who balances playing club volleyball and basketball, decided her main goal coming into a sport she hadn’t played in years was to have fun and make the most of the time at Oakesdale.
According to Perry, Davis and fellow seniors Henley and Holling did much more for the program than they know.
“With the seniors coming in like that – that particular group had never played together before,” Perry said. “Just to see the chemistry and the way everybody got along from just practicing in the park was pretty incredible. And it was really apparent from the very first day that there was something kind of special about this group.”
“We wouldn’t be able to play on the court the way we do now without the relationships we have for each other off the court,” Brieyn Henley said. “This team is truly a family, and that is how we got to where we are now, hosting playoff games.”
Hunger for winning
Crider ended last season unsure of what his team would look like this year. The Nighthawks graduated four seniors from that team, one returning player was dealing with an ACL injury, and the core group could not get together throughout the summer.
On top of that, he also led practices at the Oakesdale outdoor park amidst gym floor repairs.
“I had a lot of uncertainty,” Crider said.
A fix to some of those problems was the addition of players who chose basketball as a secondary sport. Learning team ball and how to play together on both ends of the floor came over time, but Crider said the bond between the boys being established so quickly made this season possible.
Led by freshman guard Ryker Reed’s 14.6 points per game, the Nighthawks cruised through the final four regular-season games to end with a 14-6 record overall and 11-1 in league play. Even though they tied with Pomeroy as league champions, they get a No. 1 seed heading into the 1B tournament.
The Nighthawks have four seniors on the roster – guard Logan Brown, guard Will Lanius, wing Jaxon Eads and wing Daxton Chapell.
Staying with the Oakesdale family theme, Brown’s dad played basketball at Oakesdale during Crider’s first season as an assistant coach in the late 1990s. Brown and Lanius are also first cousins.
Eads, whose dad works for Oakesdale’s fertilizer/chemical company, has been a reliable, hard-working player for Crider’s team. Chapell, who tore his ACL during fall 2022, has played a vital role off the bench this season.
“It kind of feels like a family now,” Logan said after reflecting on previous seasons. “We’re actually playing as a team. We share the ball really well and we score pretty well, too.”
Each of Oakesdale’s six losses this season came against teams ranked in the top eight of the state’s RPI system – Moses Lake Christian Academy (No. 2), Wellpinit (No. 4), Cusick twice (No. 5), DeSales (No. 6) and Pomeroy (No. 8).
“We had a really challenging nonleague schedule against quality opponents,” Crider said. “I’d say about half to two-thirds of the way through the regular season, we finally kind of started buying into that concept of playing team ball.”
The difference between this year and previous years for Crider is the hunger he sees in his team.
In the 2019-20 season, the last time Oakesdale made the state tournament, the seniors from this year’s team were in eighth grade. Crider said a couple of them got to suit up on that team and warm up.
“There’s a hunger there when you don’t do it in a previous season,” Crider said. “It just leaves you wanting something more, so it’s definitely a driving factor for these guys.”