Eyeing Another Title Run

By Nichole Jackson
HoopGurlz Columnist
Posted Wed, 11/28/2007 - 12:00 Nichole Jackson of Auburn, Wash., resumes her column as a junior whose high-school team has some big goals.

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DIARY BY NICHOLE JACKSON; PHOTOS BY GLENN NELSON

Hey to all of our fans. This is my first official diary entry for our 2007-2008 season, during which we are the defending Washington State 3A champions. This year we have a special group of girls with five seniors who don’t want to come up short this year. Last Friday we were ranked 21st among the ESPN High School Elite 25. The ranking had a great impact on us and our preseason start. We have high expectations as players and for our team. We not only want to try to repeat as state champs, we also want to make a run at a national championship. It all starts with us, the player,s and our coaches who believe in us, and know we can achieve anything that we put our minds to.

So all this started on November 12th with two-a-days - what we all look forward to. We started early, at 9 a.m., at our favorite place ever, our own Riverside gym, where we nearly live. We have a great freshmen class entering our program this year, thanks to our feeder program. On our varsity team we have one new player who will be joining us and making a pretty big impact once she learns our system and how we do things around here. She’s very athletic, long and quick and pretty fundamentally sound for her size. That baller is Kathleen Cooper, but prefers to be called “Kat”. We can’t wait til she gets our system down because I believe she will be a big help.

Throughout our practices we always seem to get the attention of our coach, Adam Barrett, by not doing something right and he then gets our attention by saying what we believe are his favorite words eve, "On the line!" He also seems to think he’s pretty funny at practice and likes to make a lot of jokes and with those jokes come his wonderful face expressions. The whole team knows our coach is a big little kid, like when he went ice blocking and messed up his shoulder. LOL! He calls Katie Grad (Washington State signee) and Stephanie Egwuatu (Puget Sound signee) his "headaches." Of our sophomore guard, Mercedes Wetmore, he says, "She can never find a parking spot and stay in her stall to save her life," and her comeback is, "She has trouble pulling into a parking spot, can’t stay between the lines!" All he can do is laugh at our comebacks.

Our first week of practice it was pretty good and we are all working hard trying to reach the goals we’ve set. We have a big tournament in Arizona, the Nike Tournament of Champions, over winter break. We hope to make our first appearance a great one. We also have our first game Dec. 7 against White River High School at Riverside. Stay tuned for more on our road trip.

It’s Game Time, Baby!

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Nichole Jackson was the starting point guard for the 2007 Washington State 3A champion Auburn Riverside Ravens. Nichole made four three-pointers in both the semifinals and championship game, and led the Washington state 3A tournament in assists with 3.75 per game. She also was first-team, all-league and all-tournament at End of the Trail. A member of the National Honor Society, Nichole hopes to study communications in college and go into broadcasting.

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