Auburn’s basketball players hear the doubters. They’re determined to prove them wrong
The players of the Auburn High School boys basketball team feel disrespected. They’re on Twitter. They see what’s being said; they hear the talk.
For instance, a June 1 tweet from former O’Dea star and McDonald’s All-American Paolo Banchero, who will be a freshman at Duke in the fall.
“They would be the 6th best team in metro,” he wrote, referring to Auburn.
“That’s crazy,” said Auburn junior guard Maleek Arington, who holds a Pac-12 offer from WSU. “We’re down here. They never come watch us. They see we’re winning games like 100 to 40, so they just like saying we’re playing trash teams.”
The Trojans burst onto the scene during the 2019-20 season, led by a group of talented, up-and-coming sophomores. Arington, who was a Tacoma News Tribune All-Area first-team selection as a sophomore, put the Trojans on the map, alongside 4A NPSL first-team selection Trevon Blassingame, and second-team selections Amar Rivers and Dae’kwon Watson. Rivers is a senior this year, while Arington, Blassingame and Watson are all juniors. Sharp-shooting Kaden Hansen gives the Trojans another weapon as well.
Auburn rode the talents of its young corps to a 23-7 record last season, advancing to the Class 4A state tournament at the Tacoma Dome, where the Trojans lost to a Jackson Grant-led Olympia squad in the first round.
“Last year, we felt like we got a sniff of the Dome,” said Ryan Hansen, who has coached at Auburn for 19 years. “We’re disappointed that we didn’t get the opportunity to go this year. We thought we could make a little bit of a run this year.”
The coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellations of state tournaments across all high school sports this year. While there won’t be a postseason, Auburn, which is now in 3A, is currently 11-0 in the regular season. The Trojans are outscoring opponents by an average of 41 points per game, burying opponents with a balanced attack.
In a 64-49 win against Kent Meridian on Tuesday, Auburn was without one of its top players in Blassingame, who had a sprained ankle. The Trojans still won comfortably.
“It makes us very tough to defend,” Arington said. “People look at rankings and all that, and they’ll try to key on me and (Blassingame). But guys like Kaden — he’s our leading scorer. So like, they’ve got to start guarding him, he’s hitting threes. Then when they go out on him … we have a bunch of people who score the ball. It’s hard to guard just one of us. You have to guard all of us.”
The physical maturity leap the team’s corps took from sophomore to junior year has been obvious to Hansen.
“These kids have been putting in a lot of time between last year and this year, even during this pandemic,” he said. “They were working out, getting stronger, spending time trying to get more athletic. I think it’s showing this year. Last year as a team, we had two dunks in 28 games or however many we played. This year, we’re over 40 dunks in 11 games.”
This Auburn group has been together for a long time. Kaden Hansen and Dae’Kwon Watson have been playing together since the first grade. Arington and Blassingame came up through the high school’s feeder program, too. Hansen knew there was something different about this wave of players, even from a young age.
“We’ve been able to watch them since they were little,” he said. “They were special then, too. We kind of saw it coming a little bit. We knew it was going to be a special group. To see it come to fruition this year is pretty special.”
While transfers are rampant in high school basketball in Washington, this group wanted to stay together and represent Auburn. The temptation to leave for a Metro League team in Seattle, or somewhere else, hasn’t proven enticing enough to a group that desperately wants to win a state championship at Auburn.
“I love Auburn,” Arington said. “(Hansen’s) a great coach. He lets me dish, control the team being a point guard. I feel like I like the system here. There’s teams that have a lot of talent, but they don’t run plays. We run a lot of sets. That’s a great thing. Teams can’t guard our sets.”
The Trojans know that respect needs to be earned. Auburn has never won a state championship. Meanwhile, the past nine Class 3A state titles have been won by Metro League teams (seven of them by either Garfield or Rainier Beach). Of the 12 teams in the 3A state tournament at the Tacoma Dome last year, half were from the Metro. By the tournament semifinals, only Metro teams remained. Want to win a state championship in 3A? You have to go through the Metro.
“There’s no question that those guys deserve (the recognition),” Hansen said. “That league has spoken for itself for a long time. Our kids know all those kids, they played AAU with them and grew up with them, so we’d love the opportunity to go to the next stage. I think we can put a team out there that could compete with those guys.”
Auburn’s players hear the doubters. They’re determined to prove them wrong next winter.
“I think we can go in and show them something they’ve never seen before,” said Kaden Hansen. “They’re going to think we’re a little 3A team from down here. I think we have the tools. I think we can go put a show on, put on a game.”
And as they’ve been doing all season, by steamrolling through the 3A NPSL, they know that ultimately, they’ll have to prove it on the floor.
“When people talk online, we just let our game do the talking,” Arington said. “Next season in state, we’ll see about that talking.”
