Saturday, 10 January 2004
12:42 PM
My colleague Roger went to Seattle Public Schools in his day and still takes an interest in what's going on with high school sports around the area. Last year he suggested that we go to a basketball game at Garfield High, my kids' school, so we did and it was a blast. So much so, in fact, that we went to a game again last night.
Garfield is an inner-city school in Seattle's Central District. Because of some history of public school integration and busing that I'll have to explain another time, Garfield has a very diverse student body. As alluded to in this blog, GHS has a phenomenal music program, especially jazz and orchestra; the test scores earned by the student body include both some of the highest and lowest in the city; it has a nationally competitive Latin team; and Garfield is strong in some sports, notably volleyball and basketball, especially girls' basketball.
Tonight's game was a doubleheader, first girls then boys, against Redmond High School. Redmond is a well-to-do suburb on the Eastside; it is in fact the very city where Microsoft is located. Thus a match between Garfield and Redmond is practically a caricature of inner city versus the suburbs.
We watched both games, which isn't as long as it sounds because high school basketball uses an eight-minute quarter. The games were both very exciting; the Garfield girls lost by 1 point in a heartbreaker, and the boys' game was neck and neck until the end of the fourth quarter, when Redmond ran away with it. In both games the kids hustled constantly -- never once was there a leisurely dribble down the court, it was all flat out. There were standout players on both teams (boys and girls), usually the point guards, who were fast and had incredible ball-handling skills. In the boys' game, the Redmond team played a very good team game and had great, consistent shooting. We saw some awesome acrobatics from some of the Garfield players as they attempted shots, but unfortunately, a few too many of them fell short.
But we also had to laugh at the kind of culture clash that we were seeing. All but one of the Redmond players were white; only one of the Garfield players was. We were also amused by the differences between the two cheerleading squads. Redmond's cheerleaders yelled and jumped up and down and waved their pom-poms. There were about 12 of them, all white. Garfield fielded about 24 cheerleaders, three white, two Asian, the rest black. They, too, yelled and waved their pom-poms, but they swayed and swung while they did so. The cheer we heard that amused us most was the one encouraging the team to score: "Put it in! Put it in! UNH!" We did not hear a similar cheer from the Redmond squad.
The differences between the two schools, we thought, were perhaps most neatly encapsulated by having a glance at the team rosters. Here's a selection of first names of the girls on both the Garfield and Redmond teams. Guess which team is which.
| Briana | Cathy | | Sissy | Aislinn | | Takiya | Carissa | | Tamarah | Emma | | Nasra | Rachel | | Shavon | Nicole | | Chanieka | Morgan | | Jasmine | Kendall | | Kaneshia | Brooke | | Aneshia | Hannah | | Milia | Mardie |
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