The 2024-25 Toledo boys basketball season was nothing short of a massive success. The Riverhawks won 22 games, their first district title since 2019, and they also earned their first trip to the state tournament in Spokane in six years.
The calendar has now flipped to the 2025-26 season, and the mindset entering this winter isn’t much different than it was last winter.
“The scoreboard is 0-0,” senior Cooper Fallon said. “You gotta work for it now, and you gotta put in time.”
The mindset entering this season is similar, but not entirely the same. Fallon leads a star-studded core that returns nearly everyone from last fall, including Adam Kruger, Eli Weeks, and Trevin Gale.
It’s a group that’s played together since kindergarten, and like the football team did just weeks ago, they’re hoping to go out with one final run.
“This is like what we’ve been dreaming of,” Fallon said. “Finally, we’re the seniors. … We wanna get back to Spokane Arena.”
Toledo will be without Tyve Vigre, who is now at Napavine, but it will be boosted by the return of Trevin Gale, who missed 18 games last season and wasn’t at 100 percent once he did return, according to coach Grady Fallon.
Coach Fallon is hopeful that a full season of Gale mixed in with the senior core can bring similar results to last year.
“When you have success the prior year, anything less than that seems like a letdown,” the elder Fallon said. “That’s the goal. We want to cut down some district championship nets (again) … I think these guys won’t be completely satisfied. We gotta get to Saturday in Spokane.”
Should the Riverhawks make it that far, an appearance on Saturday in Spokane would guarantee a top-six finish, something Toledo hasn’t done since that trip in 2019, when it finished fourth after losing in the quarterfinals.
Prior to that, their last placing was in 2014, when Cooper Fallon and the rest of this Toledo senior class was finishing up its kindergarten year.
“We’ve had this group our whole lives,” coach Fallon said, noting that he and a couple of other dads, including Brian Gale, have coached the group throughout their youth. “It’s like, realistically, this is the season you coach for your whole life.”
Grady Fallon would be the first to admit that if the Riverhawks want to accomplish their goal of a state trophy, it would take a much better performance than what Toledo had last winter.
After getting doubled up in the Regional Round, the Riverhawks gave up 87 points to Okanogan in the Round of 12, and they were eliminated from the state tournament by 11 a.m. on Wednesday of the tournament week.
In preparation for a potential tournament run this March, Toledo tested itself against several bigger schools at tournaments down south and in Ellensburg.
The only B team they played all summer was Adna, the other participant in the 2B District 4 title game a season ago and another team that made it to Spokane.
“I definitely like that competition,” Cooper Fallon said. “The mentality of the ball game. It gets faster sometimes, but also sometimes it’s slower. They can change the pace like this (snaps fingers), and it definitely helps us.”
The Riverhawks will also be tested later in December, when they head to Ketchikan, Alaska for a winter tournament with bigger schools. Anacortes is the only other Washington team that will be there, and Toledo’s first opponent, Dimond High School in Anchorage, has around 1,500 students.
“You go see competition that you’ve never played before,” Cooper Fallon said. “It’s gonna be an experience with all of these boys that we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.”
Nearly every game after that will be a league game, including a potential league-deciding final stretch of road games in Napavine and Adna to close the regular season on Jan. 31 and Feb. 4.
Last season, the Tigers finished atop the league and won the C2BL title, while the Pirates finished second. The Riverhawks finished third, but they went on to beat Napavine in the district semifinals and Adna in overtime in the district championship game.
“We’re going to have a target on our back,” Grady Fallon said. “I’m trying to use that as motivation that we have to really push each other to be better and not accept half effort … Hopefully, they can carry themselves with confidence.”
