Carson Grove, seen here last season, rained down 11 points in a wild one Thursday night. (Parker Hammons photo)
You don’t see that every day.
Playing in prime-time Thursday, the Coupeville High School JV boys’ basketball team hooked up with visiting Forks in a raucous rumble which featured … deep breath …
A full-scale, punches-thrown fight which crashed into the scorer’s table and revived memories of the rough-and-tumble world of 1990’s high school hoops.
One team accidentally scoring for the other.
A ref spending more time getting sassy, lecturing assistant coaches on both benches, than he did in stopping said fight, coming to a skidding stop and staying well out of range of the fisticuffs.
The Wolves rallying from 15 down.
The game coming down to the final millisecond, ending with a 37-36 win for Forks and a dismissive hand wave from the conflict-averse official as he fled the gym, likely ankling for a warm cup of tea to calm his frazzled nerves.
So, basically, as one coach said, “The most JV of all JV games.”
The second units went second for once, with the varsity playing first, in case Forks had to leave early to catch a ferry and return to their far-away land of rain and gloom.
They did not, which was just as well, since the JV game delivered more than its share of plot twists, eyebrow raisers, and WTF moments.
In the beginning, it was all Forks, all the time, as the Spartans built a 10-2 lead after one quarter, then stretched the advantage out to 19-4 midway through the second after banking in a three-ball that was shot from somewhere down around the ferry dock.
The Wolves were struggling but finally got the spark they seemed to need thanks to a Forks player losing his mind.
It started simple and ended complex.
A Coupeville player lobbed a pass over the soon-to-go-nuclear Spartan in the far corner, then headed back up court. There was the briefest of ticky-tacky collisions.
However, moments later, the Forks player charged down half the length of the floor and, arms swinging, launched an attack, with the Wolf defending himself and winning on the scorecard.
Personally, it reminded me of a game in 1993 when an Oak Harbor girl slugged a particularly obnoxious Everett rival, and the night ended with local police escorting a bus out of town.
It was a different time, certainly, highlighted by the refs back then actually jumping into the fray.
Thursday there were three officials on the floor, yet only one attempted to physically stop the fight, as the other two went into a full retreat, leaving coaches to bring things to an end.
For a moment, it seemed like the game might be called on the spot, but then, other than the two players being ejected, everyone basically looked the other way and pretended none of it just happened.
Things continued to be a bit rough-and-tumble from there, but the focus quickly shifted from cheap shots to made shots.
Coupeville closed the first half on an 8-0 … well, we can’t exactly call it a run when six of those points came via free throws … but it changed the tone of things.
Back within 19-12 at the half, the Wolves got the deficit down to five in the third, watched it creep back up to nine, then put together a charge to take control for a bit.
Three-balls from Carson Grove, Trent Thule, and Liam Lawson fired up the scoreboard operator, while Khanor Jump and Josh Stockdale rampaged on defense.
And then in the middle of a particularly frantic scramble, Forks forgot which basket it was trying to score on, with a Spartan knocking down a pretty, pretty layup … on the basket he was supposed to be defending.
The gift bucket gave Coupeville its first lead of the game, and the Wolves went to the bench at the end of the third up 32-30.
But after combining for 31 points in the third quarter, the two teams rattled the rims for just 11 more in the fourth.
Grove rolled past his defender and popped a short jumper to knot things up at 35-35, before Jump nailed a free throw to cap the scoring, but Forks made off with one last bucket in the paint in between those two events to set the final score.
Coupeville had a chance to steal the game at the end, but the clock ran out on them, evening its early season record at 1-1.
Grove had the hot hand, popping for a team-high 11 points, while Stockdale (9), Lawson (5), Jump (3), Thule (3), Ayden Warren (2), and Brian Thompson (1) also scored, with Jayden McManus, Chris Zenz, and Nathan Coxsey seeing floor time for the Wolves.
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