TUMWATER — Tyler Venable was prepared to take over the 2A Evergreen Conference when she was in middle school.
While a Tumwater Middle School student at the dawn of the decade, Venable studied the league intensely. She was an EvCo encyclopedia; she knew the name of just about every player on every team. She attended high school varsity games alongside her father Todd with the intent of scouting players she would potentially share the court with at Black Hills High School, taking a mental note of her future opponents’ strengths and weaknesses.
“I already had scouting reports. I knew how to guard them,” Venable said. “I knew who could go with their left hand. I knew who could shoot. It gave me such an edge. I knew who my biggest competition was going to be.”
Her homework paid off.
As soon as Venable hit the court for the senior-laden Black Hills Wolves as a freshman in the 2023-24 season, she was immediately one of the top players in the league she studied so closely, earning First Team All-EvCo honors as a ninth grader. She helped Black Hills win 18 games and finish second in the league standings, only to fall one win shy of the state tournament.
Venable followed up her debut season with improved statistics en route to a second straight First Team All-EvCo nod as a sophomore. But, the Wolves once again finished a victory short of a trip to Yakima.
Now a junior at Black Hills, Venable is beginning to envision greatness for herself and for her team. She’s created a bucket list of items she hopes to accomplish before her time at Black Hills is done, and she crossed one of them out in just her second game of the season when she broke the school’s single-game scoring record with 39 points on Nov. 28 against R.A. Long.
“It was definitely surreal, but I couldn’t do it without my teammates giving me the ball and believing in me,” Venable said. “They were coming up to me after every point like, ‘Ty, you got it. You gotta get it.’ Once I got it, everyone was cheering for me. I have the best teammates ever.”
Venable also wants to surpass 1,000 career points this season. After averaging 23 points through her first seven games, she’s only about 140 points away, give or take a couple points. At this pace, she would creep closer to another goal of becoming the program’s all-time points leader. According to the banner outside the gymnasium doors, the current career leader is Valerie Gustafson, who totaled 1,308 points in her career.
Above all else, however, Venable wants to bring Black Hills back to the state tournament after falling gut-wrenchingly close each of the past two seasons. She is confident that this group can strike that goal off the bucket list this year after returning all but one player from last season’s squad. The challenge is daunting, as only three teams from the district earn bids to state, down from four last year.
“I think we’re coming back a lot stronger. Our offseason this year was huge. We’re a big friend group, and we get in the gym a lot,” Venable said. “We were doing a lot of summer league stuff, open gyms, getting runs in and working out in the weight room. The girls we have know what it feels like to be so close but still come up short. This year, we have a different drive. The mental game is so much different.”
Venable was seemingly destined to be a Black Hills Wolf. She grew up watching players like Megan River, Mia Flores and Jordyn Bender, and she was even the team’s water girl as a fifth grader. Her father also was the head baseball coach at Black Hills.
Herb Guscott, Venable’s head coach, recalled seeing her attend games over a decade ago and watching her shoot hoops during halftime. Venable started playing organized basketball at the age of 9 to follow in her older brother Hank’s footsteps and found immediate success, winning back-to-back league titles in third and fourth grade.
Growing up, Tyler played baseball and even rode horses and competed in rodeos, including bull riding at the age of 7 during the Oakville Junior Rodeo.
“Sports inside on a court is where I belong,” Venable said with a laugh.
While she also competes in volleyball, fastpitch and flag football for Black Hills, basketball is her true love. She hopes to compete at the Division I level and even the professional level down the road. Venable has been in communication with schools like Boise State University and the University of Portland, among others, and has met with coaches at AAU tournaments while traveling with HoopStars Family.
Guscott believes the sky is the limit for his star guard in her basketball career. In the first weeks of Venable’s junior season, he has already witnessed growth from her in a multitude of ways, not just in the scoring column.
“I think people are just starting to figure out how good she is,” Guscott said. “Now they’re gonna start trying to take her away, so she’s got to realize that she’s got to move without the ball and do things differently. She’s taken more of a leadership role. We’ve all known since she was little how good she was going to be. I’m just really proud of her.”
Those daddy-daughter dates turned into scouting sessions back in middle school and the hours spent around the team as a water girl have proven to be fruitful for Venable. When her career is said and done, it’s certainly possible that her accolades will rewrite the records plaque bolted to the wall outside the Black Hills gymnasium.
“I know what I need to do to make our team successful and to help us,” Venable said.
