Kittitas basketball like Royal football in tennis shoes

The Kittitas High School basketball program has five freshmen boys the school has been waiting for since they were fourth-graders.

They have arrived, and they are having the impact Coyote fans were expecting. The team is 8-0.

“They have the best basketball player I’ve ever seen at the high school level,” Royal coach Pete Christensen said.

That was such an outrageous statement that I thought, surely Pete was kidding.

“No I’m not,” he said. “This is the best basketball player I’ve seen ever at this level.”

Pete wasn’t joking. Brock Ravet, a 6-foot freshman, looked like the real deal before the game even started. He oozed basketball skills and confidence in warmups. He was as smooth as silk.

Royal fell behind 2-0 while the clock was still at 8:00. One of the Knights incurred a technical foul for hanging from a rim during warmups. Ravet was given the task of shooting the two free throws, and he swished them dead center.

The game started and, faster than you could say Kittitas Coyotes, the score was 11-3. Royal battled hard all night, but no way were the Knights going to keep with this team.

The Kittitas Coyotes brought to the basketball floor a game with which Royal footballers are familiar. They came out fast, played hard and never let up. Besides shooting, they had speed, quickness, hand quickness and intent.

I watched the first half in the company of girls assistant coach Jamal Weems. I mentioned how smooth Ravet seemed on the two free throws.

“He was a free throw national champion in fourth grade or something like that,” Weems said.

I opined that head coach Tim Ravet, Brock’s father, liked the three-pointer or at the least wasn’t afraid of it.

Both, Weems said. The Coyotes have the green light any time they think they have a shot.

“You gotta shoot ‘em to make ‘em,” Weems said. Most of the Coyotes were reasonable, taking shots from maybe as far as 30 feet. Not Ravet. The six 3-pointers he made came from well beyond the 3-point line. A couple came from down town.

Ravet finished the night with 41 points. The only way he won’t have a 60-point night is if his dad sits him down with 59 points.

The freshman class accounted for 63 of Kittitas’s 80 points. Six-foot Caleb Harris scored 16, and 5-10 Bailey Gibson added six. Connor Brown, a 6-4 sophomore, had six points.

“Probably our best post player is that kid sitting at the end of the bench,” Weems said, speaking of 6-2, 225 freshman Christian Mata, who was not playing that night due to injury.

The next four years will be interesting for sports fans in the region in regards to Kittitas. They really should try to watch a Kittitas game this year to see Ravet and his companions play.

According to Weems, the Coyotes were 7-0 going into the Royal game, playing mostly A schools. One has to wonder how the B schools will do once the Coyotes turn to league play.