With just one loss, Jaguars poised for 4A state tournament run. “We’re putting Emerald Ridge on the map.”

Before they played their first minute of basketball this season, the Emerald Ridge girls had an inkling they would be pretty good.

The talent returned. The chemistry developed.

“Our starting five is as tight-knit as is possible,” Emerald Ridge coach Arvin Mosley said. “This is a team that’s growing.”

What the Jaguars didn’t know was the winding road they would have to take to arrive at this point, where all the pieces for a long run through the playoffs seemingly are in place – including Mosley, who is the third coach to patrol the sidelines for Emerald Ridge this season.

Circumstances early on forced second-year coach Katie Akeson to leave the program after leading virtually this same group to an 11-3 mark during the Covid-delay and truncated 2021 spring season. While quickly finding an interim coach, Jaguars athletic director Jesse Kase stepped in for three games.

“I was a place-holder until we sorted things out,” Kase said.

That sorting-out process included a call to Mosley, who has remained very active with girls basketball in Washington and around the nation with skills camps through the company Elite is Earned.

“I was not getting back into coaching,” Mosley said. “I’ve been fired twice. That was not for me. But during the conversation, they asked ‘Would you be interested?’”

Mosley started to think about it.

He knew the kind of team Emerald Ridge (12-1 overall, 7-0 SPSL 4A) had, and that it wasn’t a matter of needing a rebuild. After all, many of the Jaguars on the current roster had attended Elite camps over the years – Monique Carter, along with the twins Marecia and Maya Barnett.

And he’d previously met another of the starting five, even if Mosley didn’t immediately remember it.

“My first day on campus, (Kali Haizlip) approached me and told me we’d met when she was a seventh grader,” Mosley said. “It was at a tournament, and I mentioned to her dad that his daughter was a good player.”

Fast-forward five years.

“He just didn’t recognize me, until I said something,” Haizlip said. “I met him at a tournament in Auburn while I was playing for Cloud 9 in Bellingham. He said that to my dad, which was a great compliment. I wasn’t really that good at the time.”

That encounter further solidified what became apparent to Mosley.

“It made it even more that this was meant to be,” Mosley said.

These days, Haizlip has joined with Carter, the Barnetts and Alina Sapilak to create the explosive starting five for the Jaguars, who’ve lost only once all season – to Sumner (one of the three games Kase was on the sidelines in December).

Even her presences with this group proved a fortuitous turn of events. Her parents are college professors, Haizlip said, and their work has taken the family all over the world.

Haizlip’s cell phone prefix remains the 804 area code, from their time in Virginia. But the Emerald Ridge senior has lived in Dubai, Georgia and Bellingham before landing in Puyallup two years ago.

The timing worked to be a positive. With the pandemic raging, and remote learning going on, interpersonal interactions were limited.

Haizlip integrated quickly into the Jaguars basketball core, joining and becoming a valuable member of a group that had played together for much of their lives.

“My mom is always saying that things happen for a reason,” Haizlip said. “Whenever we’ve moved, I’ve always been upset. It’s tough for me.”

She played at Squalicum High in Bellingham before the move south.

“I asked if I could graduate there,” Haizlip said. “But when I came to Emerald Ridge, it’s just pretty incredible how it all worked out.”

Haizlip found she already knew some of her teammates. For instance, she and Carter had met at an AAU team tryout a few years ago.

The team simply has gelled.

“This team was going to be good, no matter what,” Mosley said. “We just may be helping to conver some of that, being in the right place at the right time. To coach these girls, it’s been easy. They are not fighting us at all. The girls have been all-in.”

In part, that buy-in stems from this group’s goals – things they want to accomplish no matter what obstacles circumstance throws in front of them.

“We’ve faced adversity,” Haizlip said. “We have workhorses on our team. We fight through all of that – ineligibilities, Covid, coaching. But we have a goal. We want to get a state championship. And we’re putting Emerald Ridge on the map.”

This story was originally published January 27, 2022 at 5:00 AM.