CALVIN DENNIS GOES HIGH
By Terry Mosher
Editor, Sportspaper
There have been few true tall (and good) big men in the local high school ranks in the nearly 50 years this reporter has written about sports in West Sound.
So when a kid like North Kitsap’s 6-10 senior Calvin Dennis comes along he immediately becomes a standout figure because we are not accustomed to seeing a high school basketball player so tall and do so well.
This season Dennis helped the NK Vikings go 17-7, grab a share of the Olympic League 2A title and come within a game of earning a state regional berth. Dennis, whose court vision is exceptional, was a pass first, score second big man that averaged a remarkable double-double (14.52 points and 14.78 rebounds). He also had 99 blocks (4.3 per game) and 3.0 assists a game.
Big men like Dennis don’t come along very often around here. One former local big man who quickly comes to mind is Chris Welp, a 7-foot German exchange student who helped lead Olympic High School to the 1983 state 2A championship. He was the best of the few. Welp later played at Washington and briefly in the NBA.
There was also John Coker, another 7-footer who played for Olympic and then at Boise State (1991-95). Coker had a few 10-day contracts with NBA teams and was more of a finesse big man who could shoot it well from outside.
It’s difficult to think of 6-9 Marvin Williams as a big man because while he was playing at Bremerton he often brought the ball up the court like a point-guard. Williams, a 2004 Bremerton graduate, played one year at North Carolina helping the Tar Heels to a NCAA national championship and is currently playing for the Charlotte Hornets where he averages 25 minutes, seven points and five rebounds.
When I got in West Sound in 1970 the first local big man seen was South Kitsap’s 6-8 Gordy Brockman, who played at Seattle Pacific and one year in France (His son Jon Brockman was a star at Washington, played in the NBA and is now playing in Germany).
About the same time as Brockman, Brant Gibler, a 6-9 center, helped lead East Bremerton High School to second place in the 1972 2A state tournament. Gibler later became the MPV of the NCAA D-2 National Tournament, leading the University of Puget Sound to the national championship in 1976.
In 1994-05, Jim Harney, coach at NK, had the tallest big man – 7-2 Jay Stride. Stride would later play at Portland and Alaska-Anchorage.
Not counted among local big men is former prep and college All-American Rick Walker, who at 6-5 played the post for East when it finished second in state in 1972 and the following two years won consecutive state titles.
It hasn’t been all roses for Dennis. He missed his freshman basketball season due to academic issues and he said he was told to not bother to turn out for the team his sophomore year by the previous coach.
Dan Rosenberg took over as head coach his junior year and Dennis was back on the NK high school court. The first time Rosenberg said he saw Dennis in the gym he knew there were some issues, but he could see the basketball potential in the big man.
“He’s an interesting character,” says Rosenberg. “He’s a very funny kid and he’s surprisingly smart. He’s had academic problems (in the past), but he has grown a ton as a player and just as a person. He’s matured and has become more respectful and responsible.”
“He kind of wears his temper on his sleeve little bit,” says Tarence Mosley, who coached Dennis two summers with West Side Hoops. “I told him you are the biggest guy in the gym, you are going to get picked on and you can’t let referees dictate how you play.”
“He’s a kid who has grown up with a temper,” says Harney, who acts as a consultant for the team and sat on the bench during games. “He keeps getting better and better able to contain himself all the time. He’s really a talent, but this is a process. He’s very much a child, but he is making progress.”
Rosenberg could clearly see the progress Dennis has made, both in the classroom and in the gym, and now he looks at him and sees a really good big man.
Harney says Dennis, “is one of the most talented big men in the history of the area” he’s seen since he has been here, and that dates to 1973.
“He’s got a lot of game,” says Harney. He’s one hellevua of a player in my eyes. e’s one “He can do a lot of things for a kid who is six-foot-10. He can handle the ball, he can pass – he might have been the best passer on the team – he can run, he can jump and he can block the ball.”
Rosenberg says because Dennis can do so many things it’s very possible that he will wind up playing the three position (wing player) in college. That shouldn’t surprise those who have witnessed Dennis around town because he is always carrying a basketball.
“I dribble the ball and do spin moves on the (telephone) poles and stop signs,” says Dennis of his habit of walking with a basketball. Then, of course, there is all the time playing pick-up games at the Suquamish Tribal Center gym or at Poulsbo Middle School or at NK High.
Amazingly, he didn’t really start playing organized basketball until the seventh grade. He was into baseball and football. But those sports petered out as he discovered the joy of playing hoops.
Harney was his first organized coach at Poulsbo Middle School and his deep passion for the sport kind of rubbed off on Dennis. That seventh-grade year is the first time Dennis dunked the basketball.
Dennis then started playing with West Side Hoops and was trained by Jeremy Landis and Mosley, who is assistant coach for Olympic High. Then last summer Dennis was in Craig Murray’s Total Package program.
“Calvin is a good player, man, when his head is in it,” says Mosley. “When his head is in it, he’s a really, really good player. He’s lights out around the basket. When he’s fully engaged he can be a monster.”
To get the most out of Dennis it will take a coach willing to smooth out the rough edges and allow him time to grow from being a man-child to a man.
Right now, the most interest is coming from community colleges, especially Highline and Bellevue. Evergreen State is also interested. It seems more likely that Dennis will take the CC route, and he said he would make that decision sometime in March after participating in open gyms at Bellevue and Highline.
College may suit him better than high school because his overall skills don’t need a lot of refining. Rosenberg talks about how good a passer he is to the point he often passed the ball rather than take it to the hole.
“His court vision is uncanny,” says Rosenberg. “Sometimes he has made passes that high school kids were not ready to receive. Some of his passes were those of a point guard. He has got a lot of guard built into his 6-foot-10 body.”
Jeremy Eggers, basketball coach at Bellevue, would love to have Dennis in his program. He didn’t get a chance to see him play in high school, but saw him on the AAU circuit with Murray’s Total Package team and was impressed.
“I like him,” Eggers said. “I like the way he moves, his athleticism and he’s a very respectable kid, and coachable. He’s a great kid and I think his upside is huge.”
Eggers said he and Dennis were texting each other back and forth a week ago (Wednesday, Feb. 18) and then about two hours later he ran into him at the school. Dennis, it turns out, was accompanying his girlfriend, Briar Perez, who was working out with the Bellevue volleyball team. The Bellevue volleyball coach is recruiting Perez, who was the Kitsap Sun’s Volleyball Player of the Year this past season.
The Bellevue basketball team was about to hit the road for a game, but Eggers said he and Dennis had a good conversation.
Wherever Dennis winds up, the work-in-progress part of him could someday enable him to compete on a major college court with a D-1 school. That would make the cycle complete and put Dennis in the good company of the few other big men like Welp and Coker and Gibler and Brockman who went on to success on the hardwood.