MOSCOW -- The wooing of Leilani Mitchell began five years ago, when she was an eighth-grader, scarcely 5 feet tall, whipping passes around a Kennewick middle-school gym with her signature dark ponytail bobbing behind her.
It wasn't UCLA or Connecticut attending these games, though perhaps it should have been.
It was the members of the Kennewick High School team, who had been told by their coach that one of Mitchell's five brothers had transferred to a rival school, Pasco, and that Mitchell was thinking about doing the same. They showed up, cheered her on, and reminded her subtly that Kennewick kids don't play for Pasco.
This high-school team included Emily Faurholt and Heather Thoelke. Its coach was Debbie Roueche. They knew they had a talented club and they sensed this petite, exotic-looking point guard could be their catalyst.
They were right. Not once but twice.
First, Kennewick High won 56 straight games and a Washington state 4A title as soon as Mitchell came aboard.
Now, four years later, Mitchell, Faurholt and Thoelke are starting for a University of Idaho team whose coaching staff includes Roueche, and they have jolted a long-mediocre program to its best start in 18 years.
Faurholt leads the country with a 25-point average, while she and Mitchell rank 1-2 in the Big West Conference in scoring and 3-point shooting percentage. Seven months out of high school, Mitchell leads the Big West in assists, steals and assist-to-turnover ratio, and she scored 31 points Saturday night in a wild 74-73 loss at Pacific. The Vandals are 12-2 overall, 4-1 in the Big West, and 10 days ago they stunned league powerhouse UC Santa Barbara 84-80 in Moscow.
Mitchell is not only smooth and deceptively quick, but she's flattering: She has a cinematographer's instinct for casting the proper light on things. Faurholt, who has become her best friend, noticed this quality immediately during those middle-school recruiting sessions.
"She was incredibly unselfish and talented -- those two things are perfect for a point guard," the sophomore post said. "She knows when to take the shot. She knows when to get people the ball and where. Now she's obviously grown and gotten better, but she was always dominating."
In those days, Mitchell wore her hair in a 3-foot-long ponytail, a not entirely voluntary nod to her mother's Pan-Asian heritage. "In Malaysia," Ellie Mitchell explained, "all the girls have long hair. When she turned 16, I let her cut her hair. It was her first real haircut."
Ellie Mitchell had grown up at Darwin, in the northernmost region of Australia, where her forebears had made wartime migrations from Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, India and elsewhere. Her future husband, Dennis Mitchell, met Ellie on a Mormon mission to Australia, and they settled in the Tri-Cities in 1974.
Four sons were born before Ellie welcomed her first and only daughter, giving her a Polynesian name she had always admired. None of these older brothers would play college basketball, but Leilani traces her development in that sport to her outdoor contests with them.
Humility is a family trait, blended inextricably with an interest in sports. Dennis Mitchell, who works at the nuclear power plant at Richland, remembers admiring the demeanor of former Seattle Seahawks player Steve Largent, who "was one of the best receivers in football, but you never saw him dance around in the end zone," he said. "He just went out and did his job, game after game. I like that. I'm kind of old-fashioned there."
His daughter, also a devoted sports fan, lives in a Moscow duplex with Faurholt, Thoelke and another basketball player from the Tri-Cities, freshman Emily Halliday of Pasco. Mitchell and Thoelke spend hours watching football on television. Back in the Tri-Cities during the summers, Thoelke, Faurholt and Mitchell sometimes meet after work at the Columbia River to go boating or wakeboarding.
It's difficult to gauge exactly how much interest Mitchell drew from college recruiters. Some may have wondered if a 30-game college season would take its toll on a slightly built 5-foot-5 freshman, and some national recruiting services ignored her entirely.
Yet coaches in the Northwest were keenly aware of her. Walla Walla Community College coach Bobbi Hazeltine said Mitchell was the best prep point guard she had seen in Washington or Idaho since she took the Warriors job five years ago.
Idaho head coach Mike Divilbiss said he has never consulted a recruiting service in his life. "We recruit through relationships," he said, and Mitchell is a living validation of this approach.
"Leilani is just a gift," Divilbiss said. "She could play in any system, any program, and be awesome. She gets the ball from baseline to baseline quicker than anyone I've ever seen. She just understands what you want a point guard to understand, and that's how to make the people you play with better.''
This same selflessness, however, made the recruiting process difficult, if not downright embarrassing.
"They'd call and leave a message with my parents," she said, "and I was kind of nervous. Actually, I didn't call anyone back. I didn't know what I would say to them. I figured if they were really interested, they would call back."
Some did, some didn't. Early in the game, Mitchell made it clear she was considering only two schools: Idaho and the University of Oregon, and she scheduled campus visits to each.
By that time, the old Kennewick gang had gravitated to Idaho. Roeuche had joined Divilbiss' staff in his first season at UI in 2001, and Thoelke transferred from Eastern Washington. A year later, Faurholt bolted to Moscow from Seattle Pacific and another former Kennewick player, Autumn Fielding, joined the Vandals for a season before illness forced her to give up basketball.
Mitchell visited the Oregon Ducks first. The school was impressive and the athletic facilities were amazing. The only things Oregon lacked were Emily Faurholt, Heather Thoelke, Autumn Fielding and Debbie Roueche.
The poor Ducks didn't have a chance.
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Grummert may be contacted at daleg@lmtribune.com
