Lady Griz Orientation :: Hayden Kaut

What stood out about the play, other than it winning the school its first-ever girls' basketball state championship, is how casual she made it look, nonchalant but with confidence, a whole Jimmy Chitwood I'll make it vibe while everyone else inside Spokane Arena was frantic, including the fans.

Just a minute earlier, Napavine, a state tournament regular but never before able to stand atop the mountain, found itself trailing Okanogan 40-36 in the Washington Class 2B title game. It was March 2, 2024. There was a minute and change left on the clock.

In other words, it was Hayden Kaut's time. "In the clutch, it doesn't faze her," says her dad, Chris, 6-foot-8 and benefactor of his daughter's current 6-foot-2 frame, her even longer wingspan. "If there are a couple seconds on the clock, she isn't concerned about it."

Kaut, then a sophomore, scored at the rim with a minute left to make it a 40-38 game. What followed was by design and years in the making, the Tigers using their man-to-man defense, in one of the biggest moments in program history, to force a shot-clock violation and regain possession.

It was the moment Shane Schutz had dreamed about since he was young, of coaching in that situation, of having his team looking at him, to him, and the coach pulling all the right levers at all the right times, his players able to raise a trophy overhead after the final buzzer because of it.

He was, fittingly, born in Spokane, where he was now, on the verge of a championship, raised 45 minutes away in Tekoa, the son of a coach, a teacher, as if there is any difference, the emotion and pageantry of Washington's state tournaments giving him his carrot, no stick needed.

"Coaching is in our family blood. That's all I was around," he says. "I knew growing up I wanted to be a coach. When I was young and going to state and seeing teams playing for championships, I just had that burning desire that that's what I wanted to do. I couldn't wait to get an opportunity."

He would play at Centralia College, then Saint Martin's before setting out on a journey that led him to the sideline in the 2024 Class 2B state championship game, the place he'd always dreamed of being.

He started at small-town Tenino, arrived with his box of Coach K instructional videos and began installing Duke's offense. "I started doing what I thought I was supposed to do," he says. "I thought I knew it all."

His dad had always taught him, especially when he was in the presence of more veteran coaches, to listen, to ask questions, which Schutz did in the summer, coaching club basketball alongside mentors like Al Aldridge, who would lead Prairie High to six state titles in his prep coaching career.

"Getting to hang out with those guys for a summer, I changed what I was doing because of them," he says. "I got to be around some of the best coaches in Washington and Oregon and used that opportunity to develop my own style to get to that championship level.

"I'm still trying to improve, still trying to find innovative ways to score."

With Napavine down two in the championship game, with 30 seconds on the clock and with his team circled around him, he tried a lever he hadn't pulled all season. UConn, they called the play, an elevator screen at the free throw line to free up a shooter going from one wing to the other.

The players would have had no trouble remembering it. He used a whiteboard and dry-erase marker but wouldn't have needed to. This whole thing, after all, was by design, years of imprint ready to be revealed, ready to be implemented.

After coaching at Tenino for a year, he caught the eye of someone at Napavine and, outside of two years when he went a dozen miles up the road to coach at Centralia College, he's been there ever since, nearly three decades.

Call it The System, something else. He terms it vertical alignment, that thing unique to small towns, when a longtime coach stays in place and builds something from the ground up, players getting into basketball, their heroes playing on winter nights for the high school team.

The middle school coaches played for him, teach the same things, use the same terminology. He welcomes volunteer parent coaches into the feeder system at the elementary level, thanks them, then gets them onboard, makes them feel like they are a part of something larger, the buy-in growing.

That defensive stop in the final minute of the state championship game? Man-to-man, the only way in Napavine, top to bottom. "I emphasize we're going to play man-to-man only," he says. "Some youth teams want to play zone because kids can't shoot it that far yet, but that's missing the point.

"We're trying to teach kids a little about work ethic, how to defend, how to guard somebody, how to work together."

Because of his time at the school, his time coaching at different levels, he has a big-picture view of what happened that evening in Spokane, the girl he drew up the elevator screen for the same one he'd coached when she was first getting started, the coach's kids the same age range as Kaut.

Years ago, he took the then second graders to an event in Morton and even then, even on eight-foot rims, Kaut was hitting shots from 3-point distance. "I thought, oh, she knows what she's doing. She's got a sweet little shot for a second grader," Schutz says. "She just has a natural gift for shooting."

Lady Griz fans who have been around long enough will remember her mom, who played at Eastern Washington as Kathleen Nygaard, a three-time All-Big Sky Conference selection who led the league in scoring as a senior and totaled 1,466 career points, a 2015 inductee to the EWU Athletics Hall of Fame.

"(Hayden) is the perfect example of putting the time in," says her dad, Chris. "She'd take out the garbage and wouldn't come back in for an hour and a half because she was out there shooting a basketball. She's self-driven and a quick learner. She worked hard to get where she's at."

Now she was in the Napavine pipeline, a handful of wide-eyed, big-dream girls per grade getting coached up in the Ways of the Tiger, going to little tournaments around west-central Washington, the sport becoming part of their identity, starting to become their passion.

"From the ground up. You could see in that process that those collective groups of kids were going to be pretty good," said Schutz, who is today the girls' basketball coach and school superintendent. "Hayden was at the forefront of that.

"We have a system in place, (kindergarten) through 12, and we train that system. In middle school, they run a handful of the out-of-bounds plays we do. They run the same offense, teach the same fundamentals, then when they get to high school, it's reactionary instead of teaching so much."

So, that moment in Spokane was years in the making, the second grader with the sweet stroke now a sophomore, and who else would the coach design the potential winning shot for?

Kaut started the play on the left wing, while the ball was brought up the right side, then passed to the top of the key off a pin-down screen.

The play design called for Kaut to go from wing to wing, through an elevator screen, though only one of the doors of the screen closed, the other player more interested in watching what she knew was coming.

"They were pumped to run it because we hadn't run it all year," said Schutz. "They forgot to close the doors on the elevator screen. She told me, I know but I had to watch Hayden hit the shot."

Kaut's defender went under the elevator screen and had to close out hard on Kaut, who now had the ball at the 3-point line on the right wing, facing the basket. All it took was a shot fake to get the oncoming defender off her feet and two dribbles to her right, ala Jimmy Chitwood, and Kaut let it fly.

It gently grazed the rim before falling through the net. In Napavine's 17th appearance in the start tournament, the Tigers were champions for the first time. Kaut ripped Okanogan's heart out by scoring the game's final five points. Final: Napavine 41, Okanogan 40.

Her story veers from the expected when you learn she played soccer (outside mid) and softball (first base) all throughout her high school career, all-region in each of them, never sacrificing that time with the girls she'd grown up with at the altar of high-level travel basketball and all its demands.

She had Portland 80 miles to the south, Seattle 95 miles to the north, but neither offered what she had right in Napavine. "Her peers were the biggest influence on her," Schutz says. "She wanted to play college basketball but that wasn't going to come at the cost of her friendships at home."

Her talent stood out in Napavine but she wasn't a unicorn. Schutz's program sent a player to Portland State a number of years back and his Tigers are frequently filling the rosters of NAIA and Division II programs across the Northwest.

But Hayden Kaut will probably go down as the best of them all. "I knew from her freshman year she was going to be a Division I kid somewhere," says Schutz. "She had the skill set to do it. She just had to find the right fit. Montana had the same family atmosphere we had here. That made it easy."

She did dip her toe into high-level club basketball, with Tree of Hope in Seattle, just long enough to know it wasn't the right feel. She opted instead for South Sound Roots Academy in Tumwater, founded by Josh Wilson, who graduated as the all-time assists leader at Northern Arizona.

"He's probably one of the better shooters I've ever met, and he coached her all through," says Chris.

She wasn't crisscrossing the country, but Roots was getting her out there enough to be seen. "I knew I wanted to play college basketball, so it meant a lot to go those viewing periods to be in front of all of those coaches who were there to watch," Kaut says.

"It definitely made me nervous. It probably would have been better if I hadn't known they were there."

It was former Lady Griz assistant coach Emma List who first identified Kaut. "She had skills that translate across levels," says Lady Griz head coach Nate Harris.

"Rebounding translates. If you can rebound in middle school, you can rebound in high school. If you can rebound in high school, you can probably rebound in college. She had a versatile offensive game, then she's 6-2 with long arms. That looks like a basketball player to me.

"She is skilled, she is tough, she is competitive. She played for a great high school coach and basketball is important to her. She checked all the boxes as you go through the process."

Kaut did the same thing as she was going through her three finalists for college landing spot. San Jose State? Silicon Valley. Too many people. No chance. Eastern Washington? Legacy player? Nope. She wanted to make her own way, write her own story, create her own history.

"She asked me questions and I answered them but I left it 100 percent up to her," says her dad. "I got her through high school. She's at the point where she has to make those decisions, not me."

In the end, there was only one. "This feels like home. I'm not a huge city person. It's gorgeous here and everyone feels like family. I like it," Kaut says.

June arrived. Her first workout with the Lady Griz. It was both overwhelming and pretty much the greatest thing ever.

"I don't think anything can prepare you for that first practice," she said. "It's a whole different level going from high school and select to Division I, with the physicality and the intensity of all the other girls. I like it."

She went from the Napavine pipeline to the fast track with the Lady Griz, this three-sport athlete now putting her all into one, which is speeding up her development. "She is an exciting kid when you think about her future," said Harris. "She is further along than we planned. She is incredibly talented.

"With her length and her ability to shoot it and her unique set of skills, she can have any future she chooses."

The team's male practice players would probably agree, the ones who get to the rim and think they have an easy finish, just like they always have. Not. So. Fast. "This has got to be the first time we've had somebody who's blocked more than a handful of their shots," says Harris.

None of this is unexpected but it's still goose-bump stuff for Schutz, because he's in it for the feels, the relationships. Wins and trophies are a nice reward but they are not the goal.

He gave college coaching a try, at Centralia, a two-year community college. He prefers his coach-player relationships to extend more than that, the longer, the stronger. So, he found his way back to Napavine and high school basketball.

It's why, after Kaut hit that game-winning 3-pointer in 2024, it wasn't the trophy that meant the most to him. It was the endless string of text messages, from former players who have gone on to bigger and better things but will carry the heart of a Tiger with them for life.

Now, Kaut is out of that den and into a new one, Tiger to Grizzly. "She loved to win and hates to lose," he says. "She's just a winner. It makes me feel good to hear she's doing so well. That's our job, to prepare them for what comes next."

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