Look out, 1A state tourney teams: Life Christian is coming, after capping undefeated league season with win over Annie Wright
For the fourth straight year, the Life Christian High School boys basketball team has won its league title. This year, it came with an undefeated mark in league play, with the Eagles posting a 16-0 record in the Class 1A Nisqually League to go along with a 17-1 overall record.
Suffice it to say, this was the clear expectation.
“It’s nothing new to us,” said 6-foot-8 senior center Chae Haynes, who scored 21 points in the win. “This is our fourth year winning league. It’s just another day in the office for us. This group is special because we’ve been together since sixth grade and this is our last year, so we’re trying to make every game count and just enjoy every game one by one.”
It’s the fourth season for coach Charles Simmons, who has brought his up-tempo style to Life Christian, leading to plenty of success as of late.
“I’ve been with the core of this group since they were in fourth grade,” Simmons said. “So we kind of grew together and we wanted to make sure tonight, we closed it out the right way because we’ve won every year since I’ve been here. It’s the fourth year and it’s the fourth league championship. We wanted to make sure we went out the right way.”
Life Christian, as it does every game, played at a frenetic pace on Thursday night in front of a sold out Annie Wright gym, pushing the tempo at every possible opportunity: on turnovers, loose balls, missed shots. Whenever the ball came the Eagles’ way, it was off to the races, culminating in an 82-55 win.
“When you’re constantly applying pressure, it don’t give the defense time to settle,” said senior guard Bradley Swillie, who scored a game-high 29 points in the win. “We feel like we can push it down the court, get in transition, get Chae on the block where nobody in the state can stop him. We just know where our strengths are.”
It’s a relentless style that Life Christian prides itself on.
“That’s how we play,” Haynes said. “We push the ball. A lot of teams just relax. We’re just, step on you the whole game until you don’t got nothing left in you.”
The style is intentional, Simmons says. When he watches film of some of the top 1A teams across the state, he’s struck by how slow most of the systems are.
“I don’t think teams are used to playing that way at the 1A level,” he said. “Every team we watched, they walk it up, walk it up. Even last year at the (unofficial) state tournament, we just watch teams walk it up. It’s kind of hard to scout because it’s like, ‘We’re not going to play that way,’ the way teams are playing against them. We also prepare for it. We do a lot of running in practice, our conditioning is real serious at the beginning of the season and we prepare ourselves.
“Every game, we win a lot of games big in our league, but our goal is to develop positive habits. I tell the kids all the time, winning is habit. We work on it all year long so by the time we get to this point in the season, we’re used to playing that speed.”
Senior Dai’Shaun Nichols added 18 points for the Eagles and Mykel Valrie scored seven. Annie Wright, which doesn’t list a single senior on its roster, looks primed to be a contender in the years to come. Sophomore guard Hunter Carter led the Gators with 18 points sophomore guard TJ Marshall scored 15 in the loss.
About that unofficial state tournament last spring: The WIAA cancelled all of its state tournaments during the 2020-21 school year because of the pandemic. That led Cedar Park Christian to hold an unofficial state tournament in Bothell, inviting the best 1A teams in the state to duke it out for the top prize. Life Christian won the tournament, but the win doesn’t go down in the WIAA record books.
That stung for Life Christian, which felt it was the best team in the state last winter and proved it by winning the tournament.
“I feel like we got robbed of winning an official state tournament,” Haynes said. “To us, we’re trying to win this one. We’re still counting the other one is a win. I feel like that’s how it would have been. To try to repeat, it’s going to be harder but we can definitely do it. A lot of teams haven’t been there but we’ve been there, so we know what to do.”
