Palmer grad returns to play college ball against former rival

ANCHORAGE — Although the common snowbird flies south this time of year, the Hawai'i Pacific University Sea Warriors are headed north to take on the Seawolves in a historic game of basketball.

With the Sea Warriors comes former Palmer High School point guard Taylor Blake, home for the holidays (sort of) and excited to play her longtime rival and friend, former Wasilla High School point guard Alysha Devine.

Blake said she heard Devine was injured recently but should be playing this weekend.

“I do hope she gets to play ‘cause she’s a really great girl and I loved playing against her in high school,” Blake said by phone Wednesday.

Though the girls competed at the same level in high school and traveled together on a summer league team, Blake’s transition to playing college ball took a different path than Devine’s.

A few days before the official start of the season at HPU last fall, Blake’s coach suggested she should redshirt her freshman year — meaning no game time, no traveling out of state.

They had seven seniors, five of whom were point guards, plus the three other recruits that season, also point guards. Blake knew that going in, but the realization that she wasn’t going to play a single game her freshman year hit hard.

“It was pretty rough at first,” Blake said. “I went from playing every single minute in high school to being told I’m not gonna see any minutes in any game.”

As one of the top scorers in Palmer’s history — she finished her high school career with 1,346 points, averaging 20 points per game her senior year — she hadn’t expected to be such a little fish in a big pond.

After numerous phone calls with her dad, however, she decided her coach was right — she should take the year “off” to just practice and hone her skills.

But that didn’t mean she didn’t watch every away game she could or view the play-by-plays online with her three fellow freshmen, wishing she was there.

And just like everyone else on her team, she got up at 6 a.m. every morning to run up and down the beach for two hours for fitness training.

“It was a long season,” she said, but it paid off. “I really used that year to develop a lot more and become a better basketball player.”

So far this season, Blake has seen 75 minutes of playing time and scored 22 points for the Sea Warriors, who currently have an 8-1 record. Wednesday alone, she scored 9 points in her 15 minutes on the court in the game against Chaminade University.

While the team had a good amount of success last season, winning 18 of their total 28 games and making it to the semi-finals in the PacWest Conference Tournament, Blake said it seems like everything is coming together this year.

“This year we really flow together, we really click,” she said. “Everything just seem like it’s there.”

Part of the reason for that, she says, has to do with their team captains, two of them transfer students from Eastern Washington University.

“They’re really, really awesome in helping everyone get along,” Blake said.

But hanging out, going to the mall and going to the beach together on their mopeds every week is not the only evidence of the team’s good chemistry.

“Those three have been just doing tremendous for us,” Blake said of teammate Morganne Comstock and captains Kylie Huerta and Chenise Peone, all seniors from EWU. “They each play almost all 40 minutes of every game, averaging 18 to 20 points.”

Looking back on that first year, Blake said she knows the time she put in at her team’s numerous practice venues — at least five different locations in a given season — was worth it.

“During the time it seemed like longest year ever,” she said, but “it was just one more year I got to learn and be a better player.”

And most of all, she said she has her coach to thank for it.

“I have a great relationship with my coach, he’s really awesome,” she said. “(He’s) really excited for when I become an even better basketball player.”

Given the way she’s playing the game this season, that doesn’t sound like it will be a problem.

Though she had to forgo her plans to pursue a career in medicine due to the time commitment of Division II athletics at HPU, she’s found a new interest in business that may be useful in the future. Blake’s uncle runs Copper River Seafoods out of Anchorage, and after spending her summers commercial fishing in Prince William Sound, she said she could see herself working in or around that industry.

After all, there’s no place like Alaska.

“I love Hawaii but I don’t think I could live here and raise a family here,” Blake said.

That’s saying something, as her boyfriend, Connor Looney, also a former Palmer basketball star, is at Hawai’i Pacific with her playing as a point guard.

They say they both plan on coming back at the end of their college careers, but right now, life is pretty good.

“I think I get the best of both worlds, beautiful Hawaii during the year and in the summer I get Alaska, which is just perfect,” she said. “It’s pretty neat that we got to live our dream in Hawaii playing basketball.”

Blake and her teammates arrived in Anchorage late last night and will practice at her alma mater in the afternoon. Over the weekend they will travel back to Anchorage and prepare to play the Seawolves at 5 p.m., Sunday in UAA’s Alaska Airline Center.

“I’m really looking forward to this game,” Blake said. “Our style of play is just like theirs. We run the floor and shoot threes all day, we live off of those three-pointers.”

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.