Former colleague Don Hunt recently wrote me recently to point out that in 2003, a South Medford eighth grade AAU basketball team had four players who recently completed the season playing at the NCAA Division I level, and three of them were in the postseason: Kyle Singler (Duke), Michael Harthun (Washington State), Garrett Fiddler (Yale) and Clint Chapman (Texas). Fiddler’s Yale team finished below .500 and didn’t get past the regular season, and Chapman was with the AAU team for a bit but didn’t play in games. Harthun was a grade lower but played up to take advantage of better competition.
Don tells me the three bigger kids, excluding Harthun, were all at least 6-foot-5 and, “needless to say, they kicked butt.”
Here’s what Jack Decoste, who works for Harry and David and coached the youth team, recalls via an e-mail to me:
“Everything that Don said is correct except we never really had Clinton. He practiced with us a few times but I never took him on a tournament. He really improved after 8th grade. His family moved to Canby after 9th grade so he was on the South freshman team. His brother Alex is a year older, is 6’9″ and has played for Nebraska, but I don’t know his current status. He was on the South JV team.
“Michael and Garrett along with my son Johnny (playing for Northwest Christian in Eugene) were on my 6th- and 7th-grade teams and we were pretty good. We went undefeated in 6th grade but mainly played locally. My son was the smallest guy on the team but ended up being 6’5″.
“Kyle first joined us in the summer after 7th grade for the State Games of Oregon tournament in Portland. We beat three Portland teams to get to the championship, where we ran into the United Salad, an all-star team that had Kevin Love hitting threes from the corner or tossing alley-oop dunks to a 6’5″ guy from Seattle who didn’t look like he was getting ready to go into 8th grade. That was Portland’s first exposure to Kyle and right after the game they were inviting him to join their team for upcoming tournaments.
Also joining us from that point on was Jon Grimes, a future starter for the state championship team.
“Our 8th grade team went 27-2. We still played locally but we probably shouldn’t have.
“I don’t have a hard time remembering the two losses …
“Another Portland all-star team that had split off from United Salad, called Pro-Am, came down to the Comet Classic looking for us and they beat us in the championship game. We regrouped and the following week met them in the championship game of a tournament in Salem and beat them in a great game.
“The United Salad coach invited us to the President’s Day Invitational in Portland where 8th grade teams were flying in from all over. We were the only school-area based team in the tournament. Our only other loss of the season came in the first game of that tournament, where we were matched up with Taylor King’s South Coast All-Stars, a team from all over Los Angeles. I don’t think King (a Duke recruit with Singler) has grown since the 8th grade. He was running the floor and power dunking. They jumped on us and we couldn’t recover. But we went on to win the rest of our games in the tournament, including beating a pretty good Sacramento team and the Portland Pro-Am for the second time. We placed highest among the Oregon teams.”
