Garfield boys back where they belong

Dan Finkley grew up about four blocks from Garfield High School and remembers the excitement around the great Bulldogs boys basketball teams of the 1970s and 1980s.

Heroic performances, packed houses, state championships.

So when Finkley took over a struggling Garfield program in May 2005, he understood firsthand the significance behind the community's No. 1 question to him:

When are you going to get back on top?

Garfield took a big step this season, returning to the state tournament for the first time since 2002. The Bulldogs, who started slow but secured a state berth with a nice run at district, play in the first round at 10:30 a.m. today at the Tacoma Dome, versus Prairie of suburban Vancouver.

It's the only first-round matchup between two teams with double-digit losses. Garfield is 12-10, and Prairie is 12-11.

"I think the tables will start turning," predicted Finkley, 42, who was an assistant coach at Garfield in the 1990s. "I don't want to put a time on it, but people were giving me about four years to get to state. Who's to say what's going to happen next year?

"We're just going to accept the challenge and basically try to get it done."

Garfield is the most storied name in Seattle high-school basketball, with 11 state titles, the first in 1955 and at least two in every decade since. The last title was in 1998.

Reminders of Garfield's glory days are everywhere. Al Hairston, who coached five of those championship teams, is the athletic director of Seattle Public Schools. His son, Marques, is a Garfield assistant.

Brandon Roy, part of the 2001-02 Garfield squad that went 23-4, plays for the Portland Trail Blazers in the NBA. Will Conroy, a 2001 graduate who won four straight KingCo titles at Garfield, is also in the NBA.

"That's one of the main reasons I wanted to go to Garfield," said senior guard Duntae Jones. "Because of their tradition, because of their attitude, that they're going to win no matter what it takes."

But Jones and the Garfield program have suffered through inconsistency: a 15-9 record in 2005-06, Finkley's first year; 12-11 in 2004-05; 10-12 in 2003-04; and 16-7 in 2002-03.

Good enough perhaps at other schools, but not necessarily at 23rd and Cherry, not with Garfield's history, not with cross-town rivals like Franklin and Rainier Beach sending kids to big colleges and winning state titles.

Garfield has lost 13 straight to Franklin dating to 2001, and the Quakers are going for their third state title in the past five years.

"The community is really not going to accept us being at the top until we beat our opponents down the street," Finkley says. "We can beat everybody else, but when we start beating Franklin, that's when we'll start getting our notoriety and our respect."

This year's state berth didn't come easy. There was a 3-6 start, followed by a rough two-game stretch this month when Garfield gave up 109 points to Franklin and 101 to Inglemoor in blowout losses.

"After that, we had a long talk," Finkley said. His message: "Hey, we're a lot better than how we're playing."

Garfield won six in a row before losing to Franklin in the KingCo championship game. Said sophomore wing Aaron Dotson, who leads Garfield with an 18.3-point average, "We were just tired of getting beat."

Finkley credits the leadership of Jones, who is averaging 13 points despite not being fully recovered from a broken foot suffered in December, and the improvement of Jade Collier, a 6-foot-9 senior who started the season on the bench after missing practice to work on his grades.

During the winning streak, Collier averaged 12.2 points and played tough defense.

Two talented sophomores — Dotson and point guard De'Andre Taylor — have helped greatly.

Jones believes the team started coming together during summer ball. Finkley saw signs too, as he reined in the run-and-gun approach and began to communicate his "play hard, play smart, play together" system, the same coaching foundation emphasized by Hairston.

"Over these last four years, it's been hard," Jones said. "We haven't found a group of guys that just fit all together, but we stuck through it. This team, everybody was together. This year, we were all dedicated."

So is Garfield back?

The future looks bright. Bigger things will be expected from Dotson and Taylor, who averages almost 12 points. And eighth-grader Tony Wroten Jr., hyped as one of the best middle-school players in the country, is expected to enroll at Garfield next fall.

The 6-3 Wroten is the son of the former University of Washington tight end of the same name and the former Shirley Walker, a standout track athlete at Washington and sister of Joyce Walker, the ex-Harlem Globetrotter and current Garfield girls basketball coach.

"I think this year is just a stepping stone for what's going to come for Garfield," Jones said. "We're just in a building process right now. We're just going to keep it going."

Michael Ko: 206-515-5653 or mko@seattletimes.com