LACEY — Three years ago, the River Ridge Hawks finished 0-20.
All but the first two games of that season were by a margin of 17 points or greater.
The 2016 run to the state tournament seemed far in the distant past for River Ridge at the time, and any future postseason activity seemed nothing but a dream.
Fast forward to Wednesday night, and the Hawks are Puget Sound League-Nisqually champions and will play for a league tournament title this weekend. It’s the first time the Hawks have finished atop their league standings since 2016, when they won the 2A South Puget Sound League and qualified for state.
River Ridge (12-8, 11-5 PSL) capped off its historic regular season Wednesday with a 77-53 rout of North Thurston in a game that was tight until the Hawks exploded in the fourth quarter, outscoring the Rams 26-6 in the final frame.
“Since I took this job three years ago, this has been the goal. We’ve improved every single year. Being able to finish with a lot of these seniors that I’ve been coaching since they were in eighth grade, it means the world to us,” River Ridge head coach Michael Crosby said of the league title. “It’s a good achievement, a good goal. But we’re not done yet.”
Ethan Thomas was one of those seniors who sat through the winless season three winters ago. The memories of the hopeless season have faded, and the standard at River Ridge has changed.
“We’ve been getting laughed at for three years, and now we’re the league champs. It means the world,” Thomas said. “I was out here when we were the joke in the city. We’ve worked our asses off, from the last day of last season to the first day this season. Competing and winning with these guys means the world. It’s my family.”
North Thurston held a lead over River Ridge for most of the first half, taking its first advantage with a Caleb Tenkley 3-pointer midway through the first quarter. Another triple by Matthias Tenkley helped put the Rams in front by two through one quarter.
Deshawn Cavalier and Caleb Tenkley each knocked down 3-pointers in the second quarter, and the Rams went blow for blow with the Hawks throughout the first half. North Thurston took a five-point lead with 90 seconds left in the half before Ani Hicks and Ryzen Nunez scored in the paint to cut the margin to one at halftime.
With his Hawks trailing at the half, Crosby kept his message in the locker room simple.
“The message was that we’ve worked really hard to get here. This is our opportunity, and we’ve got to take advantage of it,” Crosby said. “We knew [North Thurston] was going to come out here and play tough, but I think it was just our time. This is just the start of something great.”
River Ridge turned a 30-28 Rams lead early in the third quarter into a 43-30 Hawks advantage with more than half the period still to go. The 15-0 run was kickstarted by an and-one layup by Dominique Harper and featured a triple by Jorden Walker.
The Rams were able to respond with a 15-3 burst of their own to cut a 13-point deficit down to a single point late in the third, with Ryder Stephens scoring seven of the 15 in that spurt. Even though River Ridge maintained a 51-47 lead through three, North Thurston showed in the third quarter that it wouldn’t go down without a fight.
“These guys have believed in each other all year,” North Thurston head coach Mike Conner said. “Even though our record isn’t impressive to anybody looking from the outside, anybody that’s watched all of our games would agree that the growth these guys have shown and the competitive drive is an impressive thing.”
But the fourth quarter was all River Ridge. Before the Rams could score their first point of the period, the Hawks had built a 19-point advantage by scoring the first 15 points of the frame and 17 unanswered overall going back to the end of the third. Most of the Hawks’ damage came in the paint, highlighted by a Nunez one-handed slam.
Harper led all scorers with 19, Thomas added 14, and Walker scored 10. Nunez, in his return from an illness, tallied nine points, Alex Jones posted eight, and Joaquin Garcia logged seven.
Kole French paced North Thurston with 17 points, and Caleb Tenkley was the other double-digit scorer with 10. Mattias Tenkley posted eight points, Stephens put up seven, and Brady Hertzog added six.
North Thurston’s season ends at 4-16 and 2-14 in league action. Seven seniors — Brady Hertzog, Grady Wright, Kendric Degraffreed, Caleb Tenkley, Zack Allison, Adam Meyer and Kole French — move on from the program.
“To see the growth and the impact that they’ve had on the program from the daily work to the growth to the confidence and the never-quit mentality, they play hard,” Conner said of the senior group. “Whether they’re up against the best team in the league or the worst team in the league, it doesn’t matter. They bring that hard work day in and day out.”
River Ridge will now play Bellarmine (19-2, 16-0 PSL) in the PSL Tournament title game Saturday, Feb. 7 at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. The Lions blew out the Hawks 71-46 back in early December in their lone meeting this season. But two months later, River Ridge is a different beast and enters the rematch on a five-game winning streak and with voluminous energy.
“They’re a super hard team, very disciplined. They run a lot of the same stuff that we do,” Crosby said of Bellarmine. “When we faced them earlier in the season, I think we were still kind of going through some things. But I think this stretch that we’re on right now, we’re pretty hard to beat if we play together.”
