HOOPTOWN
HALL OF FAME

They didn’t get the winning shot to go, or the whistle to blow. No spoiler alert is necessary to report, nearly three decades later, that the national championship eluded the Whitworth Pirates of 1996.

Anyway, it can be argued they did something grander.They got the school president to shut down the school. They launched a last-minute caravan -- six buses, countless cars -- that covered 400 miles to reach the title game. And mostly they revealed Spokane's nascent appetite for a basketball cause and diving cannonball-style into those delirious moments -- not that the players recognized it as it happening.

"I was just playing and feeding off the electricity," said Nate Dunham, a senior who had experience with a small school doing big things growing up in little Almira. "No way I thought people would still think of it as special in the story of Spokane basketball."

But the Pirates of '96 were special, as acknowledged by their induction into the Hooptown Hall of Fame.

The basketball madness of March is a different animal for the Whitworths of America, in a universe not ruled by the office bracket pool and "One Shining Moment." The Pirates were still members of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics in the mid-1990s, winning their way into the organization's raucous Division II tournament -- 32 teams, six days, one steamy fieldhouse in Nampa, Idaho.

Of course, before that crescendo were many mezzo moments, one dating back a decade.

Warren Friedrichs came to Whitworth in 1985 as the school's seventh head basketball coach in just 11 years, a steadying hand whose clerical demeanor -- he had once studied to be a minister -- masked a fierce competitiveness. He'd restored dignity to the basketball program and got the 1991 team to nationals, falling in the first round.

The heart of the next wave was Dunham, a State B champ at Almira/Coulee-Hartline who had won over Friedrichs' admitted bias toward recruiting from larger high schools by "making every right play." The other starter inside, Jeff Arkills, might take only four shots a game, but the coach retooled his offense the year before just to accommodate him in the lineup ("He'd take a charge in Hoopfest on concrete," Friedrichs marveled).

Consider merely these three points on her basketball vitae. First Spokane player in the WNBA. Still winning Hoopfest championships midway through her 40s -- a full 17 years after her first. And now coaching at the school where Spokane's basketball obsession plays out in front of 5,500 fans every game, among the top 10 in attendance in the nation.

Now consider this endorsement, from the most prominent pioneer of the women's game in the city's history -- culled from Clinesmith's high school past: "You could play five on two," the late Linda Sheridan once offered, "and if one of the two was Stacy Clinesmith, most of us would have a hard time winning." So perhaps it's best to skip trying to parse their relative worth and take them in tandem as Clinesmith's passport into the Hooptown Hall of Fame.

Maybe throw in the good fortune, too, that Stacy Clinesmith chose this sport in which to make her mark. Marvin and Nikki Clinesmith were more than dutiful when it came to carving out both support and opportunity for their daughters, so it could have been almost any game, really -- except softball ("I did baseball as a kid because softball was way too slow," she said). She was also a dominant soccer player who was twice MVP of the Greater Spokane League and scored 60 goals.

"A lot of people told me I should stick with soccer because I'm only 5-foot-5," Clinesmith said. "That's probably another reason I picked basketball -- people telling me I shouldn't." Now that's a window into her conviction. Fact is, 5-5 or not, Clinesmith was maybe even more fearsome on a basketball court, imposing her will on outcomes in outsized fashion. It's a gift her coach at Mead, Jeanne Helfer, recognized immediately -- though she remembers first having to deal with a slightly different willful side.

"She was a ninth grader at Northwood, but she'd come over to play soccer because freshmen were eligible," Helfer recalled. "I ran into her in the hallway and asked what she was doing here and she said, 'I got in trouble -- I jumped out a window.' And so I laid into her, but all the while I'm trying not to laugh. One thing about Stacy, she knows how to have fun."

Winning enhances the fun, of course, and at Mead she wound up in the middle of it. The Panthers were 78-9 in her three years, winning a state title over powerful Kamiakin her senior year after losing two head-to-heads earlier in the season. "The culture Jeanne built there, I think, was a little before its time," Clinesmith said. "You see it more now, but she ran those practices like college practices. She would push you really hard, but in a way that made you want to do your best not to disappoint her -- or yourself. She was just really fundamental in my career."

So in the summer of 1971, 108 boys gathered for a week at Riverview Bible Camp near Cusick for the first of what is now NBC Camps, Crowell's modest local notion turned global juggernaut. He recruited a few coaches to assist with the basketball instruction and took charge of the motivating, while his wife, Susie, commandeered the kitchen. Operations don’t get more mom-and-pop than that -- and if Susie was soon barbequing 1,500 pieces of chicken every summer Saturday, it never outgrew that spirit.

More than 50 years later, upwards of 450,000 kids have participated in some aspect of the NBC experience -- camps, clinics, touring teams, college prep sessions, varsity academies. It's nearly impossible to find a local player who reached the college level that didn't go through the Crowell funnel, to say nothing of the countless campers who embraced the life messages they received well into adulthood after they'd let go of basketball.

That remarkable reach -- and the testimonials that grew out of it -- makes Fred Crowell a perfect fit for the Hooptown Hall of Fame.

"He had a huge heart for seeing people succeed," said Crowell's daughter, Jennifer Ferch, now the chief operating officer of NBC Camps. "I think we know when people believe and care in us. It was obvious to kids that Dad cared."

That care endures even in the wake of his passing in 2021 at the age of 79.

An all-stater in high school in Anacortes, Crowell went on to play at the University of Idaho where NBA Hall of Famer Gus Johnson was a teammate (and occasionally borrowed Crowell's prized '54 yellow Buick to tool around town). The segue into coaching was immediate. He handled the Idaho freshman team as he worked on a master's degree and then, at the age of 23, was hired as head coach at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

But struggles with administration made his two years there and four at Samford University in Alabama a decade later less than rewarding, and four years as coach of Athletes in Action's barnstorming team kept him on the road too much.

So in 1971, the Crowells relocated to Spokane, where he and a partner launched Northwest Counseling Services. And in what would be known today as a side hustle, he also planted the seeds for Northwest Basketball Camp with that first gathering on the Pend Oreille River.

The camp culture was still in its infant stages. The famed Conifer camp had been going at Snoqualmie Pass for a decade, and Marv Harshman had started the Cougar Cage Camp at Washington State that would later mushroom under George Raveling.

Crowell's vision wasn't necessarily grander, but it was rooted in something more than just basketball, going back to when -- following his wife's lead -- he committed his life to Christ.

It's how we know him. Through the 1990s and into this century, the participant numbers of Spokane's downtown 3-on-3-palooza soared toward 28,000, and yet there was pretty much just one face: Shann Ferch -- a circumstance made all the more curious by the fact that he never appeared on the event's poster.

People -- even the players -- came out to watch Shann Ferch.

It's why he's this year's Hoopfest wing honoree to the Hooptown Hall of Fame.

That and the jump shot: that ridiculously well-honed stroke, delivered from both an impossible apogee and impossible distance.

"He was the Stephen Curry of Spokane," marveled Nate Williams, a noted long-distance shooter himself who played both with and against Ferch in Hoopfest and countless pickup runs. "Even when you knew it was coming, it was so pure and he'd get such elevation. Plus, he had just a little fadeaway. I'd jump with everything I had in me and couldn't block it."

Ferch's teams never won back-to-back Hoopfests, but he did something maybe more difficult: he won three times across nine years with nine different teammates. The first group -- Mark Crowell, Ken Sugarman and Dave Wilson -- took the elite men's division in 1994. Three years later he teamed with Drake Charles, Todd Doolittle and Jose Hernandez. Two runner-up finishes followed before Ferch threw in with Williams and his fellow Whitworth alums Jeff Arkills and Nate Dunham to win again in 2002.

That group had actually played together in 2001, reaching the semis, when Ferch put on another exhibition -- winning both a Toyota RAV-4 in the half-court shooting contest and the 3-point contest. To some astonishment, his qualifying half-courter was a pure jump shot, delivered as if he'd been toed-up on the arc.

So where was this shot crafted?

In the gyms on Northern Cheyenne and Crow reservations in Montana, where his father Tom -- a shooter of renown himself on the masters circuit even into his 80s -- coached high school players who grew up making fearless art with their passing and shooting. On the East Side playground in Livingston in the shadow of the Absaroka Mountains, where he'd practice and play up to 10 hours a day in preparation for high school seasons that twice ended in state championships, one with his brother, Kral. At NBC Camps at Silver Lake, where he would meet his wife, Jennifer, and find another guiding light in her father Fred Crowell, the founder. At Montana State and Pepperdine, and later in Germany's Bundesliga, where he shot 52 percent from the international 3-point line.

But it's those Native American players -- Jonathan Takes Enemy, Elias Pretty Horse, Jarvis Yellow Robe -- and teams from his boyhood that especially resonate with Ferch, who remains in touch with many.

"I just remember thinking, 'They can really shoot it,' " he said. "It's amazing how well they shoot from deep, and then they really pass it and play very fast. I found it kind of magical."

A distinguished writer in addition to his work as a professor at Gonzaga now, Ferch cops to looking at such things "through a poetic lens," but also came to know through his father and brother there was work to be done to make the magic. Hence the plyometric training that in time developed a 42-inch vertical jump.

But in truth, so much of what January has achieved in a life in basketball has been predicated on leaving nothing to regret. In her preparation, practice and play -- especially in a 14-year WNBA career -- the Lewis and Clark High School graduate set an exacting standard for herself and the teammates she prized.

That example and her accomplishments go hand in hand in mandating her entrée into the Hooptown Hall of Fame.

Consider what may be a career-defining play from her days with the Indiana Fever, on their way to the 2012 WNBA championship. Down 0-1 in a best-of-3 East final against top-seeded Connecticut, January missed a breakaway layup in the closing seconds of a tie game. But rather than give up on the loose ball heading out of bounds, she dashed to cut off the Sun's Allison Hightower, dove toward the Connecticut bench and, just inches off the floor, saved the ball to teammate Shavonte Zellous, whose jumper beat the buzzer and sent the series to a deciding third game the Fever won on the road.

"The neat thing is," January later told ESPN, "I've had a ton of emails from coaches who say, 'I showed this to my team, because you exemplify hustle . . . and never giving up.' That was cool to hear, because that's how I love to play."

And it goes back to when her third-grade soccer buddies talked her into playing on their YMCA team, the Royals.

Barry and Sally January's middle daughter was never going to be a one-sport wonder -- not with dad a karate instructor and the house full of black belts. Later, January would win a state high jump title for LC. But when Jim Redmon, LC's girls coach at the time, enlisted her in the eighth grade to play on a short-handed summer team, he saw immediately that basketball would be her calling.

"We hadn't seen that level of speed and quickness," he recalled. "But she also played with purpose. Not a lot of players that age do."

The purpose was defense. It's not that January was unable to score, but simply drew more gratification out of distribution and defense, something that never left her. She would twice be Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year at Arizona State, and was picked to the WNBA's All-Defensive Team seven times.

"It's just the competitive nature in me," she said. "Making my opponent uncomfortable, making things as hard as possible -- that was fun for me. Getting a turnover, leading the break and getting an easy two points hyped me up. It ignited our teams."