With preseason practices well underway, a trio of new coaches are busy preparing their basketball teams for the upcoming 2024-2025 prep season. And while team practices this time of year can all look fairly similar from school to school, the pathways these three new coaches traveled to get to where they are now — their first high school head coaching posts — certainly couldn’t be any more different.

Coach Tyler Geving, Edmonds-Woodway boys’ basketball

Tyler Geving is a familiar face around Edmonds-Woodway High School, serving both as an educator and as the school’s athletic director. But this season will be his first as the head coach of the Warrior boys’ basketball team.

While never having served as a high school coach before, Geving does have plenty of experience coaching at the college level.

Geving led the Portland State University Vikings men’s basketball program from 2009 to 2017 after serving in various assistant coaching roles at HIghline and Edmonds Community Colleges, Central Washington University, Seattle University and Seattle Pacific University.

After leaving Portland State (and a subsequent short stint as an assistant at University of Portland), Geving returned to the Puget Sound region to teach in the Edmonds School District and was eventually assigned to oversee the athletic department at E-W.

Now Geving finds himself back coaching basketball and he’s leaning heavily on what he honed during his many years coaching collegiate hoops.

“(After) coaching at that level, coming here I already kind of have a philosophy — I kind of know what I want to do,” Geving said.

Although Geving is calling upon his college coaching experiences to now lead a high school hoops program, he’s finding big differences between the two basketball levels.

“The one thing I’m finding out right away is in college you have 30 practices before your first game,” Geving explained. “Plus you get about three weeks of two hours a week with your team. So at the end of the day you’ve about 40 practices. So you can really take your time putting stuff in.”

Gevings is trying to pack three to four weeks of what would have been college-level preparation into about two and a half weeks of preseason high school practices using drills, whiteboard teaching and video. “I’m trying to throw a lot at the kids,” he said.

Geving also noted another big difference between coaching at the college level versus the high school level: the pressure to succeed and the consequences if you don’t. Scrutiny from the media, alumni and school administrators is much more intense when leading a collegiate program than a high school one, he said.

“My mortgage isn’t on the line anymore; it’s kind of nice,” Geving said with a smile.

The Warriors’ first game of the 2024-2025 season is a home tilt against the Ferndale Golden Eagles on Thursday, Dec. 5.

Coach Benson Sims, Meadowdale girls’ basketball

After two successful seasons coaching the Meadowdale Mavericks girls’ basketball team, Kevin Thompson has moved on to become an assistant at Northwest University in Kirkland. To take his place, Meadowdale has hired self-proclaimed “gym rat” Benson Sims.

While a three-sport athlete (football, track and basketball) at Lindbergh High School in Renton, Sims admitted that basketball was the toughest for him to grasp. “It’s funny; basketball was the sport that I kind of had a lot more struggles with,” Sims said. “I was very athletic but I didn’t understand the game.”

But basketball became the sport Sims would continue to pursue after his high school graduation, jumping between working at AAU basketball camps, coaching youth basketball, playing a year of collegiate basketball at, ironically, Northwest University and playing semi-pro basketball around the region.

“I had this really wild sense of belief that I could do something in this game,” Sims said.

Sims showed his ability on the court as part of the 2018 Vancouver Dragons semi-pro basketball team that won a league championship.

But not all of his past basketball experiences turned out positive, Sims explained.

While a student at Bellevue College, Sims tried out for the mens’ basketball team there but didn’t make the squad. Following that setback, Sims used the rejection to fuel a desire to understand the sport better.

“If it wasn’t for the adversity of not getting picked, I don’t know that I would have become a student of the game,” Sims said.

Now after years of playing, studying and helping to train others, Sims said he is ready to take on the role of high school girls basketball coach at Meadowdale. And he feels as though he has a head start in leading this season’s Mavericks squad.

“I was at nearly every Meadowdale home game watching this team play last year,” Sims said.

Now as head coach, Sims will have the best seat in the gym to watch the Mavs, starting with their opening game of the season on Tuesday, Dec. 3 versus the Cascade Bruins at Cascade High School in Everett.

Coach Johnny Phillips, Mountlake Terrace boys’ basketball

After 28 years as an assistant coach at Mountlake Terrace, Johnny Phillips has moved up to become the head coach of the Hawk boys’ basketball program this season following the retirement last spring of longtime coach Nalin Sood.

With all that experience in the program — plus four years of playing for the Hawks in the late 1980s — Phillips is excited and confident that the storied history of Terrace basketball can continue under his leadership.

“Never anxious; always excited,” Phillips said, summarizing his feelings going into this season and his new role in Terrace boys basketball. “I always tell these guys that pressure comes to those who are unprepared. We’ve been preparing for this — this is what I’ve been doing (for years).”

While serving as an assistant for first Coach Roger Ottmar and then Sood, Phillips saw the time, methods and attention to detail required for those two coaches to lead a program to multiple league and district championships — in addition to the many team appearances at state championship tournaments. Now Phillips said he’s ready to take on that new role for himself and push his teams to similar successes.

“For me, it just gives me a different kind of responsibility to reach that standard that we always talk about,” Phillips said, “but then to make that standard as far as coaching goes too.”

Phillips said he is well aware of the 60-year history of Terrace basketball and the on-court success it has had. “You look on the wall everytime you walk in the gym and it’s there for you,” he said, pointing to the dozens of plancards noting league, district and state championships that Terrace boys basketball has won over the years.

“The history speaks for itself (and) the expectations never change,” Phillips said.

While the nearly three decades of experience under successful Hawk coaches Ottmar and Sood have served as a type of apprenticeship for Phillips, the 1989 graduate of Mountlake Terrace didn’t necessarily think the time spent in the program as an assistant would lead to him landing the head coaching position.

“I never wanted to be the head coach but this is the way it worked out,” Phillips said. “So I accept the challenge. I’m going to meet it head on just like our guys are going to meet (challenges) head on.”

Phillips inherits a young Terrace team for the 2024-2025 season that has as many freshmen (four) on the varsity squad as seniors. That young Hawks’ group begins their schedule with a pair of road contests — Tuesday, Dec. 3 at Everett and Saturday, Dec. 7 at Lynnwood.

You can learn more about new Terrace coach Johnny Phillips in our previous story here.

— Story and photos by Doug Petrowski