Wilkens, Ehlo part of Rise Above

PLUMMER — It’s not every day a Basketball Hall of Famer, three times over no less in Lenny Wilkens, and a 14-year NBA veteran like Craig Ehlo with local ties come to visit the Coeur d’Alene Tribe through a program among Native Americans called “Rise Above.”

But Monday at the Benewah Medical and Wellness Center, 140 children from first grade through high school from the areas of Coeur d’Alene, Spokane, St. Maries, Plummer, Worley and elsewhere got to hear speeches from those people.

Wilkens, who brought Seattle its first championship as the head coach of the Seattle SuperSonics in 1979, before the NFL’s Seahawks won the Super Bowl in 2014, came to look around the medical center as part of a brief tour. Then he gave a 30-minute speech to a crowd of more than 40 in the basketball gym at the wellness center. Ehlo’s NBA career spanned 14 seasons, including his last season with the Sonics in the 1996-97 season, a team that lost in the Western Conference semifinals to the Houston Rockets in seven games. Ehlo played with Washington State in the 1982-83 seasons, and played a key role helping the Houston Rockets, Cleveland Cavaliers and Atlanta Hawks — the last two Wilkens coached for 10 seasons.

Wilkens, 78, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989 as a player, in 1998 as a head coach and in 2010 as an assistant coach on the 1992 U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team, otherwise known as “The Dream Team”. He is the coach with the second-most wins in NBA history, with a win-loss record of 1,332-1,155 over 32 seasons. He played for the SuperSonics for four seasons, leading the NBA in assists in 1970. He also coached the Sonics from the 1977-78 season to 1984-85 and was its player-coach from 1969 to 1972.

“We went from a team that started out 5-17 (in 1977-78) to back-to-back appearances in the NBA Finals,” Wilkens said before his speech. “When I drafted (starting center) Jack Sikma (in 1977), the papers said, ‘Jack Who?’ I saw him average a double-double in the NCAA tournament, I thought he could help us win. Gus Williams was another one, Golden State did not want to pay him, so we got him. Winning the championship, it was a love-in. Our fans supported us and helped us win a championship. My coaching philosophy was to compete, it was to utilize your personnel as best you could. I wanted my players to utilize their roles.”

Seattle has no NBA team since the Sonics were sold by Howard Schultz to Clay Bennett, who moved the team to Oklahoma City and it became the Thunder, starting in the 2008-09 season. The team was sold to Oklahoma City 2006, marking this the 10-year anniversary of the Sonics being sold. He said he came to Plummer because Rise Above co-founder Brad Meyers got ahold of the person who helps run the Lenny Wilkens Foundation. Wilkens said if an NBA team returns to Seattle, he’d like to be involved in helping bring it back.

“I wasn’t very happy with that,” Wilkens said. “Two years before the sale, I think people knew about it (moving eventually). Fans deserved a lot more. Seattle’s a Tier One city, so I hope we get over that hurdle.”

Shedaezha Hodge, youth programs manager at the wellness center, said social media played a part in helping the Coeur d’Alene Tribe find out about the program. Rise Above is a program that attempts to reach children through suicide prevention and how to avoid drugs and alcohol, to ‘rise above’ or go around certain bad situations.

“We were able to fund this through suicide prevention through a grant,” Hodge said. “We saw it on Facebook. We saw the program that (program co-founder and director) Jaci McCormack started in August of 2015 in Caldwell. We saw it at the Kalispell (Mont.) Tribe’s clinic. We wanted to bring it here.”

Originally, former Sonics point guard and Basketball Hall of Famer Gary Payton was going to arrive and speak. But due to unforseen circumstances, he could not make it to Plummer.

During the speech, Wilkens just gave some general life lessons, growing up in a family of five children with a single mother.

“My dad died when I was five years old,” Wilkens said. “My mom drilled in our heads we had to be accountable, honest and integrity were important. Growing up in Brooklyn, we were out on the streets playing with anything with a ball. We had one rule, don’t let the street lights catch you, be inside your home before then. I looked up to Jackie Robinson and I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. Seeing him accomplish things made me want to do things. I want you to dream dreams, then broaden those dreams. Surround yourself with strength and with people who care about you. When I was drafted by the St. Louis Hawks, they weren’t the best in terms of civil rights. I couldn’t eat at a restaurant or live in certain areas.”

Before Wilkens arrived, Ehlo, who was a Sonics television analyst from 2003 to 2006 and a Gonzaga TV analyst from 2006 to 2012, told the children after a basketball clinic that he was addicted to prescription drugs, shortly after he underwent back surgery. In the 2011-13 seasons, Ehlo was an assistant coach with Eastern Washington University. He also stressed a small percentage of high school basketball players make it to play college and even fewer reach professional basketball, either in the NBA, where there are roughly 400 players, or overseas. He is a 6-foot-8 former guard-forward and averaged nine points per game.

“The physical and mental need brought me down hard,” Ehlo said to the children. “You’ve gotta have courage and admit you need help. I was afraid to ask, addiction is not your friend. You’ve got to listen and you’ve got to have respect.”

Ehlo knows the struggles Washington State is going through, but he sees some hope.

“They got the right guy in (coach) Ernie Kent,” Ehlo said. “Recruiting city kids to come to Pullman is tough. He brings stability, I don’t see WSU as a stepping stone, but against Gonzaga, they competed.”