Caleb Valko did a bit of everything — setting up plays, shutting down the league’s top scorer and, later, running over a fat-ass ref with a bad attitude. (Shelli Trumbull photos.)
“Oh, I applaud you, Mr. Valko!!,” screamed the fans after the ref was run over.
There is incompetence, and then there is lippy incompetence.
The second was on full display Tuesday night in Coupeville, as one ref from a three-man crew decided to showcase a mixture of baffling calls and arrogance in one less-than-sweet package during a boys’ basketball bout between the Wolves and visiting Sultan.
By the time he was done throwing off the rhythm of the Wolves with two odd third quarter technical fouls — one for a questionable score-book snafu, the other for not being able to get his own portly butt out of the way fast enough to not be run over by a player scrambling to stop a breakaway — he had thoroughly thrown off whatever rhythm Coupeville had.
Then he turned to Wolf coach Anthony Smith and got snippy, whining “You didn’t have any rhythm anyway, coach!”
Which was not true.
With Caleb Valko channeling Gary “The Glove” Payton and effectively shutting down the Cascade Conference’s leading scorer, Brock VandenEkart (he finished with a season-low seven points), Coupeville had fought the Turks virtually to a standstill in a defensive-minded first half.
Then came the calls, the insults and a general breakdown all around and Sultan took advantage, turning a series of quick buckets into a 52-16 win in a game that had been a brawl for nearly two and a half quarters.
Coupeville had come out strongly, with Valko bumping and grinding football style with the heralded VandenEkart, keeping him out of the paint and denying him any easy looks at the bucket.
VandenEkart’s biggest impact in the first quarter came when he landed heavily on Drew Chan‘s head in a scramble for a ball, drawing blood from the Wolf guard’s mouth. Other than that, he was AWOL as the Wolves jumped to a 6-2 lead behind buckets from Nick Streubel (on a nice pass from Carson Risner) and Aaron Trumbull and free-throws from Valko.
With both teams playing hard-nosed defense, the score stayed low — and close — until the final seconds of the first half. Trailing just 18-10 with under 40 seconds until halftime, Coupeville fought through an entire 35-second shot clock, defenders flying to the ball, only to have Sultan hit a lucky three-point bomb right at the shot clock buzzer.
Then came the technical fouls, the antics of Howdy Doody and things kind of went to pieces.
Scrambling on defense, Valko inadvertently plastered the ref, who first said the technical was for running him down. Then he changed his mind and said it was for yelling at him to get out of the way.
Then he got all defensive and huffy, not a surprise since he had done virtually the same thing in the JV game, when he loudly lectured Wolf Anthony Bergeron for accidentally hitting a Turk player in the head with the ball as he lobbed it to the ref.
By the time the final buzzer had sounded, Trumbull and Streubel had scored six apiece for the Wolves and Valko had chipped in with four.
The ref? He was priceless, if you were a Sultan fan.
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