Basketball on the big stage: For players, coaches who helped elevate the game in Spokane, hosting NCAA Regional is the reward

Helen Higgs should know better.

A year ago, the former Whitworth women’s basketball coach put this week’s NCAA regionals on her personal calendar.

Yet somehow, she put off buying tickets.

“I guess I got a little cocky, thinking I could pick them up any time,” Higgs said last weekend. “Now I’ll have to buy some nosebleeds and work my way down from there.”

Good luck. Tickets for the four-day event, which begins Friday at the Arena, are scarce at any price. That’s no surprise, as it’s one of the biggest sports events in Spokane history.

Eight of the top teams in the country earned their way here through skill, hard work and a lot of sweat – the same ingredients that earned Spokane the right to host them in the first place.

Now they can share the reward. For the Spokane basketball community, it’s the fruition of decades of excellence on the court and in the stands.

Despite geographic isolation and a small venue, Spokane has earned its way to the big stage.

Given the lack of upsets in this year’s tournament, the real Cinderella story might just be Spokane itself.

“I believe we got this event because Spokane supports women’s sports better than almost anywhere else,” said Stacy Clinesmith, an assistant coach at Gonzaga and former star at Mead High School in the 1990s.

“It’s a culture that has been built on success,” Clinesmith said. “When I was growing up, there was incredible development and that helped create the success we have now.”

That success is decades in the making. For Clinesmith, it stretches back to her high school days in the 1990s, when fans packed the stands for games against rivals in the Greater Spokane League.

“Being from Spokane really pushed me to be the best I could be because Spokane really turns out for high school games,” said Clinesmith, who went on to play at UC Santa Barbara and the WNBA before returning to her hometown.

“It’s progressed to the point where Spokane is known worldwide,” Clinesmith said.

Little has changed. Another former Mead star, Jazmine Redmon, went on play at GU, where she’s now as assistant. Until last year, she coached at University High School, where she appreciated seeing “a lot of fans in the stands.”

“I’m not at all surprised,” Redmon said. “I was just expecting it because Spokane is a basketball town, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s high school or college or Hoopfest.”

Certainly, its reputation spans the country, and it goes back before Hoopfest and the rise of the men’s and women’s programs at Gonzaga.

The groundwork was laid by club coaches like Ron Adams and Steve Klees and developed at the high school level at several schools.

Since the 1980s, Central Valley has won six state titles, Mead and Lewis and Clark four each and Shadle Park and Gonzaga Prep two. And there have been nine runners-up, including two all-GSL title games.

By the time Kelly Graves took over the Gonzaga women’s program in 2000, the community was ready to embrace winning at a higher level. That took time, but Graves and his successor, Lisa Fortier, added another layer to a deepening culture of excellence

“Basketball is really important in that community,” Graves told The Spokesman-Review in 2021.

“I’ve seen coaches from all over, I’ve watched practices in every corner of the country, and there are as good of coaches in the Inland Northwest as there are anywhere in the United States,” Graves said.

Good fans, too.

“We’ve had a long history of hoops and great players, but also a lot of people who just love the game,” said Briann January, who played at Lewis and Clark before going on to Arizona State and the WNBA.

“We had some great games. I remember those days like it was yesterday,” said January, now as assistant coach with the Motor City Cruisers of the NBA G League. “But they also understand the game.

“There was always this pride of being a basketball player from Spokane. We were always kind of the underdog, but we always wanted represents against the teams from Seattle and the Oregon area.”

In the past five decades, almost 100 GSL alums have signed with Division I schools, about two dozen of them with Power Five programs.

The pipeline began with Angie Bjorklund, whose success at University High School compelled legend Pat Summitt to journey west to recruit her to Tennessee.

Decades later, in 2018, then-Stanford coach Tara Vanderveer recruited Lexie and Lacie Hull out of Central Valley.

“I coached at Idaho, so I knew there was great basketball in Eastern Washington,” said Vanderveer, who first signed a GSL player, Mead’s Regan Freuen, in the mid-1990s.

Others chose to stay at home. Lewis and Clark star Heather Bowman went on to a stellar career at Gonzaga, helping build a fan base that has only deepened the connection between the sport and the community.

“I think the success of the Gonzaga men and women, and the WSU women and just having good men’s programs around – that never hurts,” Higgs said.

It also helps that the Spokane Public Facilities District has a stellar record in organizing men’s and women’s NCAA events. That only adds to the connection.

But it goes even deeper than that for Clinesmith.

“I have so much gratitude for Spokane,” she said this week. “I didn’t think that as a 5-foot-5 kid, I could have done that in any other city.”