Close your eyes at a Napavine game, and you’d still know when Cael Stanley is making plays.
The junior point guard is one of the Tigers’ vocal leaders on the court, setting up their press and directing teammates on defense. When he has the ball on offense, though, the only thing coming out of his mouth is a wordless “Whoop!” — always preceding an especially acrobatic no-look or crosscourt pass. The louder the whoop, the more likely the successive dish is to belong on the highlight reels.
“I have no idea, but I’ve been doing it forever, I don’t even know why,” he said with a laugh, after the Tigers’ 81-50 win over Willapa Valley on Dec. 27. “I have no clue, but in every picture, you can see my mouth open like that.”
That decisive win over the Vikings came on the back of a rough spot for the Tigers, when they went across the mountains and were dealt two double-digit losses to ranked teams. By way of response, Napavine burst out with a 28-0 first quarter to start against Valley, and ultimately went on to win by 31. James Grose broke the program record with a 45-point performance, and a whole lot of those buckets came from Stanley, who racked up 12 assists.
“He’s the most unselfish player out there,” Grose said afterward. “He’s looking for me always, he’s looking for everybody.”
The next day, the Tigers went to Castle Rock, and Stanley whooped his way up to 10 more dimes, facilitating a 41-point explosion in the second quarter of a 92-46 win.
Two days after that, it was six more assists for Stanley in a 93-64 blowout of Rochester.
Three straight wins, by an average of 35 points, with the Tigers scoring 266 themselves. Of those, Stanley scored a grand total of eight — two against the Vikings and Rockets, and three against the Warriors — and had over three times as many assists (28) as shots taken (9).
Not that he minds, at all.
“I just like to feed people shots,” he said. “I’d rather get James an open three, or somebody an open three, than score. I’ve always been like that. I’d rather have zero points and as many assists as I can get, just helping the team.”
That’s not to say Stanley doesn’t have fun with his distribution. Coming into his own at the top of the key, the no-looks, behind-the-backs, and acrobatics have become more and more commonplace in the Napavine offense.
In the second half of the game against Valley, he started to drive into the key, looking to flip the ball out to Grose in the corner. Instead, Grose curled around to the hoop himself; thinking on his feet, Stanley got to the block, stopped, and waited for him to get closer. Then he whooped and whipped the ball behind his back to Grose across the post for an easy layup.
“I try to have as much fun with them as I can,” he said.
One of the few true facilitating point guards in the area — a role that’s started to disappear in the modern game — Stanley will have the chance to rack up many more assists as the calendar turns over to January, with the bulk of Central 2B League play ahead, and the postseason after.
And if the Tigers want to make a run, they’ll need him to keep whooping it up and making the offense tick, even if nobody — including his father and coach — does know where that particular habit began.
“I don’t know where that comes from,” Rex Stanley said. “He just plays with a lot of passion, and everything he does is that way. That kind of energy tends to spread.”
