The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

Basketball, football and baseball fans in the Touchet Valley may be wondering what happened to former Cardinals head basketball coach T.J. Scott.

Scott, who stepped down from his part-time coaching and teaching positions in the area last summer, reports he is alive and well in a remote part of southeast Alaska where he just took a team of Tsimshian Indian high school basketball players to the state title game.

The Annette Island Chiefs, who hail from a commu­nity 15 miles by floatplane or ferry from Ketchikan, lost the championship game last week to place second in the state. But that doesn’t take away from the storybook turnaround for the players, whom Scott shepherded through the edge-of-your- seat playoffs.

“It was a disappointing way to finish,” Scott said in a telephone interview from his home in Metlakatla this weekend. “But one kid on the bus home told me that if I had predicted at the beginning of the year that we’d come in second, he’d have laughed at me.”

That was the low-tide point at which Scott found the team, which had seen four coaches come and go in as many years. They hadn’t gone to the playoffs in nearly a decade and hadn’t won the state title in nearly three decades.

Before Scott arrived, their style was old-school: lots of one-on-one, with fast action up and down the court and quick shots with neither plan­ning nor strategy. It’s pretty much the way most teams up there play, Scott said. At least it was until the new head coach from Waitsburg – who also coaches middle school sports, teaches PE and math, and leads the district as ath­letic director – introduced his own style.

It took a while for the Chiefs to get it. They weren’t used to controlling the ball so intensively, causing a high percentage of turnovers and frustrating the other teams by slowing things way down, he said. After eight games they were 2-6.

Then they played the mighty Ketchikan Kings, a team from a district ten times their size, and came within a half dozen points of beating them. Suddenly, the Chiefs saw the possibilities.

“From that moment, the kids bought into that sys­tem,” said Scott, who used the same approach to get the Cardinals to state two years in a row. “They saw the light and we were on a roll.”

Together with Scott’s new style that drove opponents crazy, the team’s efforts in practices and talent on the court sent them on a 17-game winning streak. They also sent them all the way to the ti­Scott tle game, in which they were up by 10 points in the first quarter only to be thrown off their game by the team from Cooper Bay, which had a 6’2” guard the Chiefs just couldn’t slow down.

But the new Annette head coach has the prospect of three all-league juniors re­turning next winter and pick­ing up where he left off last week in a corner of the 49th state where he’s beginning to feel at home.

“It’s a great community,” Scott said about Metlakatla and its passion for basket­ball. The town, which is on reservation land like the rest of the island (population 1,600), “is crazy about the sport. It’s a big deal.”

Scott, 32, left Waitsburg in August for his adventure north and arrived on Annette after several days of fishing with his dad Jerry Scott and his uncle Mitch Matthew. It wasn’t the first time he’d set foot in the big state. But the last time, when he spent a summer working for a commercial fishing outfit in Bristol Bay, was thirteen years ago.

He had expected it to be colder and whiter.

“We only had one week of snow all year,” said Scott. He was surprised by the amount of rain in southeast Alaska, but he said it isn’t nonstop. “Every day, we get rain and some period of sunshine.”

Scott, who said he misses home “like anybody would,” is looking forward to run­ning spring basketball camps on Annette, hunting and fish­ing seasons, and a trip down to the lower 48 sometime this summer.