Lady Griz Orientation :: Avery Waddington

Here is a visual to get this story started. A freshman in high school, six-feet and thin, like hide-behind-a-telephone-pole thin, spotted up on the 3-point line at a summer team camp, hitting shots from all over for Lake City High, skinny but also long and athletic, good enough for that age and with enough bubbling-over potential for a Division I coach to think to himself, I'm intrigued. I'm very intrigued.

Here is another visual, something that's been happening at Montana's practices this month, after the work is done, when the mood goes from serious to jovial and a girl can cut loose, the same one who was on the same court as a high school freshman, then slight and a stationary shooter, now taking passes from her Lady Griz teammates and trying to finish off alley-oop dunks, a 6-foot-3 athlete in full glory.

Call it the evolution of Avery Waddington, and if those two visuals aren't the beginning and the end, if we're only at some midpoint of her ongoing improvement, from perimeter shooter to slasher-and-finisher to back-to-the-basket post scorer, all while retaining each of those skills during the journey, how fun are the next four years going to be? And how good could Waddington become?

"She's going to be good. She's going to be a contributor for us," says Montana coach Brian Holsinger, but that's what a college coach has to say, trained as he is to speak the common language of his profession. Tone it down, keep it generic.

We need to find someone who is willing to match our all-out enthusiasm, maybe another coach, say, one who has been with her the last four years, through that evolution from then to now, one who can still get Waddington locked in with a simple text message of three words, all capitalized, the electronic version of what Nars Martinez has been (ahem) gently telling Waddington for years: SCORE THE BALL.

"When you consider her length, her speed, her jumping ability and her all-around work ethic, her upside is to be an all-conference player, if not a multiple-time all-conference player. I think she is going to be very successful," says Martinez, director of FBC Northwest Alliance, the club team in Seattle for which Waddington, who lives outside Coeur d'Alene, played from her freshman year onward.

That's the player college coaches were packing the bleachers to see in May of Waddington's junior year, at an event in Phoenix, when she made the jump from intriguing prospect to OMG WE HAVE TO HAVE HER sensation almost overnight.

There was a time when she had one solitary offer, from nearby Eastern Washington, and that was nice, comfortable, easy. Then another came her way, later another, a slow trickle that was easy to manage, mostly stress-free. Waddington figures she had maybe five offers before that tournament in Phoenix, the one when she balled out, going from off the radar to focal point.

"The coaches sit at the baseline at those tournaments. I don't know that there was an empty seat at many of her games that week," says her dad, Mark. "I don't want to assume that they were all there to see her, but there were more coaches than there had been in the past."

Her time was no longer her own, open periods at school, lunch breaks, evenings, all of them filled with phone calls from college programs. She was uncommitted, a free agent, someone to be pursued, so behind a closed bedroom door she would go, out to the garage to sit in her car, to take another call from another coach at another program somewhere.

"Avery is very independent," says her mom, Amy, who admits she and Mark would sneak into the bathroom from time to time and put their ears up against the wall in an attempt to hear who the latest call happened to be from. "She is very humble, so she did not make it a big deal."

Martinez did it for her, reporting through social media the latest offer to come Waddington's way. Five became 10 became 15 became more, 19 offers when all was said and done, and it would have been more had she not committed when she did in early July before her senior year, before the final AAU tournaments of the summer. "It was overwhelming," Amy says.

The thing is, she wanted Montana from way back, just like her brother did, Alden going to Griz football camps with regularity growing up, playing football inside Washington-Grizzly Stadium the only thing that would have convinced him to go to college instead of following Mark into the firefighting profession, which Alden did when football didn't come through.

It's been quite a journey, for all of them, the two boys, Avery, Amy, Mark, who was born in England and only made it to the U.S. when his dad, a salesman for a precious-minerals drilling company, was sent to Minneapolis, then to Spokane, and how Mark's life changed the day a golf course opened nearby when he was in seventh grade, hooked so much that he'd skip out on baseball practice to get in a round.

He was good enough that he won the 1994 Washington state championship as a senior at University High, put his goal of playing professionally back in England on hold to play for the Beavers, enrolling at Oregon State for a year before heading south to Arizona to play on the mini tours and earn a living as a club professional, meeting Amy, product of the desert, on a blind date arranged by a golfing friend.

It was bound to happen, Mark 6-foot-2, Amy 6-foot-nothing, that the two boys surged past both of them in stature, then came the girl, who grew. And grew. And grew. Until the day Amy saw daughter pass by father in the living room and said, wait, wait, I think she's taller than you are. Mark wasn't having it, got out a pencil and ruler, went up against the wall to prove that … yep, Avery, as well, had surpassed him.

"He still denies it," says Amy. He accepts it these days but throws in, "I attribute that to the kids wearing me down. I was like seven-foot until we had kids," he says, the two of them cracking up together, sharing the same phone interview. And you think anything but a great teammate is going to come out of that household, where husband and wife have modeled it from Day One?

"Every team Avery has been on with us, she just gets along with people so easily. Her teammates love her. She is so coachable and wants to see others succeed as well," says Martinez. "Mark and Amy did such a great job raising her."

But it can't be just about height, right? And being a fun, supportive teammate. And another girl who loves sports, both soccer and basketball equally until that day she has to choose one over the other. There has to be something more there, a differentiator, that when you see a bunch of kids playing soccer in third grade, even a parent has to do a double-take and say, okay, that one is special.

"She'd get the ball at midfield and go all the way down and score a goal. You could see she was going to be an athlete but she was different," says Amy. "When she was on the field, she'd get her game face on and get focused. I can't even explain it."

And if Mark and Amy had remained in Arizona, who knows how this story would have twisted and turned and where it would have ended up, but soccer in north Idaho means playing in the rain and the cold and even the snow, and what girl wants to continue doing that, waiting for another field to be cleared, when a warm, inviting gym is right there, so tempting. And basketball won out.

And what a time to be a player in Coeur d'Alene, from kindergarten on, all these girls going through the grades together, elementary, middle school, eventually becoming seniors last year at the city's two high schools, Coeur d'Alene and Lake City, the two teams that brushed aside all the other large-classification schools from down south and played in the state championship game.

It's how a girl becomes pretty much lifelong teammates with a player like Sophia Zufelt, now a freshman at Texas-Rio Grande Valley, her dad, Terry, taking on Avery like another daughter, pairing the two of them like they were twins, despite Sophia never growing taller than her current 5-feet 8-inches, meaning the tallest player on the local rec team was … being trained as a guard? A shooting guard?

"When I grew up, tall girls always got put in the post, so I was a post player," says Amy. But Terry had seen Avery running up and down the soccer field and knew this was not a player he was going to pigeon-hole and say, you're the tallest, so you play down there and rebound and such. Maybe we'll even pass it to you from time to time.

"He had her bringing the ball up and playing shooting guard. That's when it hit me. I thought Avery would be a post player. When I saw she was going to be brought up as a 6-foot guard, I thought, that could be pretty special. I couldn't bring the ball up the court. I'd get it stolen within two seconds. I never had any ball-handling skills at all. I was told to get down to the block and stay there."

And now her daughter has her new team's third-highest 3-point shooting percentage since summer workouts and is trying to flush alley-oops after practice.

Martinez saw what was happening over in Coeur d'Alene and wanted Waddington's future in his hands, wanted to give her the benefit of challenging herself against players who were better than she was, to speed her development, to maximize it, wanted to get her on a team that played a national schedule, against the top players and teams in the country.

But those ties were strong, dating back years, these girls that had been playing together for Zufelt. How could someone come along and take one part of it and leave the rest behind? Amy made a deal with Martinez. You have to take the entire group. All the girls who were willing to make the commitment needed a spot on FBC Northwest Alliance. Take it or leave it. Martinez took it.

But after a year, the interest in continuing with that level of long-distance commitment began to waver among some of the players. Martinez didn't want to lose Waddington, called Amy, left a voice message she still has. You have a decision to make. Your daughter is special. She needs to be pushed and needs to play with girls better than she is. Prayers, thoughts, conversations. They decided to go for it.

That wasn't the end of the CDA gang but that also took some work to keep together, the Waddingtons living in Rathdrum, a little northwest of Coeur d'Alene, a few minutes from Lakeland High. The three other girls she'd played with since third grade were going to Lake City, the school's gym Waddington's second home before her freshman year, hoping against hope that some miracle would come through.

Wasn't going to happen. She was registered at Lakeland, she could read her class schedule if she could see it through the tears, her parents having to keep telling her again and again, no, we're not taking you 20 minutes to school when there is one right here. Eventually they gave in. An inch. And their daughter took it a mile. If she could convince the Lake City principal, she could make the change.

The letter arrived at the principal's desk, a 14-year-old introducing herself before going on to convince this stranger why her high school would be better off with Waddington as one of its students. Amy got the call not long after the letter had been opened and read. "The principal called me and said, the letter touched her heart and was so special and that they'd love to have Avery at their school."

It was that Lake City team that arrived in Missoula the following summer, at team camp, when Holsinger saw this six-foot shooter and became intrigued for the first time. It was that player who arrived in Seattle and played under Martinez for the first time, this shooter with the athleticism to do so much more, and so began a give and take, a back and forth, coach pulling potential out of player.

"She was six-foot at the time and was definitely a stand-still 3-point shooter who was not looking for contact, to say the least," says Martinez. "She just wanted to stand out there and shoot threes, and she was effective with it."

But he knew there was more, so much more. He got to work expanding her game, using the 3-point shot as both a threat and a just one option she had to score, ball to rim being the next component she added to her game.

"Moving into sophomore year, she made a really big jump," says Martinez. "She started shot-faking on the 3-point line and attacking the hoop a little bit more. By her junior and senior year with us, she was able to attack the basket with authority and draw fouls and get to the free throw line. We told her, you're so athletic, just run and jump. Get the ball to the hoop and give it a chance to go in."

Those three little words became a trigger. Don't settle. Use your gifts and your athleticism. SCORE THE BALL.

All of a sudden, 10-point scoring games became 20, the three 3-pointers still there but now there were strong takes to the basket that resulted in easy finishes or trips to the free throw line. Or both, playing through contact for another and-one. Her game was growing by the day.

"If she adds a strong mid-range to her game in college, she has a real chance to be a true three-level scorer when it's all said and done," says Martinez. "There is no doubt in my mind that she will."

She didn't play varsity at Lake City as a freshman, a team that was led by 6-foot-4 Brooklyn Rewers, who would go on to play at Michigan State and now Hawaii. But she became a starter as a sophomore, the season ending with a third-place finish, bumped from the winning side of the bracket by Boise High and Avery Howell, the two-time Gatorade Idaho Player of the Year who is now at USC.

Her junior season ended short of the state tournament, the championship won by – nails on chalkboard x 10 – Coeur d'Alene High, 65-27 over Rocky Mountain.

Last year's Fight for the Fish, the twice-played rivalry game between CDA high schools, complete with all the spirit you could imagine and played in front of thousands, both times went Lake City High's way, part of a memorable regular season that had Waddington match the school record of 34 points, the one held by Sydney Butler since 2008.

It's not just the 34 points Waddington remembers now but the run-out layup she missed in the closing seconds that would have given her 36 points and the record.

She remembers the state championship game but would just as soon forget it, a 57-49 loss to CDA High.

And she remembers the time last spring when the school's golf coach, also the boys' basketball assistant coach, convinced the girl who had played a bit of junior golf growing up to help him fill out his minimum roster size and play at the 5A Region 1 tournament at Lewiston Country Club.

She dusted off her clubs and got in one practice session before boarding the bus at 6 a.m. to make the trip to Lewiston. She hadn't played in years but had her team's third-best score. "It made me wish I had played throughout high school. Too late," she says.

But those were the care-free days of a high school senior who has her college plans all locked in. We need to get back to those stressful days, when Waddington took her handful of offers to Phoenix as a junior and returned home with everyone knowing both her name and her phone number.

"It was stressful and annoying and just a lot. Any free time I had, I tried to get a call in," she says. "There were places I knew I didn't want to go, but I wasted my time talking to them anyway."

And where was Montana? Hello? Is an offer coming her way? "I knew I loved it here. I was still talking to them a lot, just never got the offer." Then Phoenix happened and Holsinger thought, uh-oh. This diamond in the rough was no longer. This was a gem and she was out in the open, totally available for any newcomer to come along and grab her. She was uncommitted but probably wouldn't be for long.

Montana's was another call in another long day of them, Waddington taking Holsinger and associate head coach Nate Harris's in her car in the parking lot of Café Rio while on school lunch break. They finally said it, those magic words, the ones she'd been waiting to hear: we want to offer you. "I got that feeling right away, like, let's go!" says Waddington, who … then didn't commit.

She needed to make a visit to Missoula, then needed just a bit more time. "I just wanted a couple days. I knew my emotions were high and needed to settle down and make sure. Two days later I committed."

There were layers to it, Waddington not realizing how excited she was to be going so close to home, giving Mark and Amy easy travel to games in Missoula, until after she committed, plus the Lady Griz fan base that none of her other suitors could match.

And deeper and deeper the connection went. "I picked here because I knew I was going to grow as a person outside of basketball," she says. "Also on religious reasons. Brian and I share that. I wanted to be encouraged and lifted in a positive way. That was a big thing I didn't get with any other coaches through my recruiting process."

And let's not forget Mark and Amy, because it's not only a weight on the shoulders of the player making the decision. It's a collective heaviness that everyone has to bear.

"It was such a relief," says Amy. "I remember the night she committed, being emotional when I went to bed, thanking God not only for the opportunity but for her to be at a spot just over the mountain where we can be at all of her games and support her. We really loved Brian's leadership, the way he is with the girls and his faith. That was a big part of where we wanted Avery to land, that the coach had faith.

"We didn't put any pressure on Avery. We told her we'd give her our blessing wherever she decided to go. Mark and I were walking on eggshells for a few days wondering what she was going to do. When she committed, we all slept better. The recruitment stopped and we got our daughter back, we got family dinners back, we got her home in the evenings."

For all the stress she brought to their lives, and it's a stress they would take 100 times out of 100, given what it meant and what it led to, the 4.0 student and future nurse made that side of things easy. Unlike the boys. "She just got stuff done. A good self-manager. The boys, I was always checking online, checking their grades, checking with their teachers. Never once did I have to check on Avery," says Amy.

"I wish we could take credit but she managed her schooling and sports herself. She's an all-around solid kid. We're the lucky ones."

And now Mark and Amy turn her over to Holsinger, to his staff, to her teammates, to Lady Griz fans everywhere, the lucky ones expanding exponentially. "Some kids just fit what you do, and she really fits us," Holsinger said. "She's so easy to like. Amazing teammate, great kid, as coachable as it gets. Everybody loves her."

And, finally, Holsinger cracks a bit. He can't hold back anymore. Forget the coach speak. He's going all in. "She is a steal. A bigger steal than I thought."

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