Talk about a road trip. I don’t know if the boys and girls Tenison Woods high school basketball teams from Mount Gambier, South Australia, have a nickname or a mascot, but I have one for them. You’ve heard of the Dayton Flyers? The PF Flyers? We’ll call Tenison Woods the Frequent Flyers. They’re in the midst of a two-week tour that took them first to Washington state, then down I-5 to Phoenix. They’re playing in the Pirates’ three-day tournament that ends Saturday.
The Aussie teams do this every other year, says Pirates boys coach Glenn Johannes. They raised $45,000 for the West Coast trip that will wind its way to Los Angeles, before taking a detour to Hawaii and heading back Down Under.
The teams play 10 games in 14 days and are equivalent to solid Class 3A teams in Oregon, said Johannes, whose unbeaten Pirates beat the, uh, FFs, 58-41, Friday.
“They play the European style of offense and move the ball around quickly,” says Johannes, who is in his first year. “They’re a good team.”
The trip here was arranged by former Phoenix boys coach Brian Miller, now the athletic director at Rogue River. The traveling party of 32 is being housed by the families of players and others in the community.
In their final games of the round-robin tournament Saturday, the boys play Cascade Christian at 1 and the girls face Eagle Point at 3.
