It’s been an amazing six seasons watching Port Angeles’ Millie Long grow.
She grew physically and as a person and is off for her next adventure at Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, Calif.
I’ve told a couple of her coaches this. And I mean it. She is simply the best all-around athlete I’ve personally ever covered.
I still remember her first game as a freshman for the Port Angeles soccer team. I had heard about her exploits with the Olympic Avalanche basketball team, but I had never seen her play. She was a bit smaller back then, it seems like she’s grown half a foot since then, but I already saw she was the fastest kid on the field. And she just kept getting better and better.
And I covered a kid in Friday Harbor who ended up being a starting point guard for Pacific Lutheran. I covered another kid in the same town who became a starting baseball player for Gonzaga. I covered a kid in La Grande, Ore., who set a state record in the javelin.
I’ve covered a few state champions in track and wrestling. Long is still the best. Because she didn’t specialize in one thing like a lot of state champions do. I might argue that Sequim’s Riley Pyeatt is the second-best athlete I’ve ever covered. As great as she was, even Pyeatt specialized in one sport — running, though she is great in a variety of distances, which is pretty hard to do.
Long was usually the best player to step onto the court when she played basketball. She was usually the best player on the pitch when she played soccer. Both at the high school level and at Peninsula College.
And on top of all that, people forget that when she stepped onto a track, she was usually the best hurdler out there. She almost seemed to run track and field as a whim, and ended up winning an individual state championship in the 300 hurdles.
At the newspaper, we would literally avoid talking to Long. I ended up apologizing to her and her family a couple of times about this. We were so concerned about detracting from the other players on her teams, but to put it mildly, she simply dominated nearly every game she played.
Her college basketball coach Alison Crumb said what I’ve been thinking for a while. She’s going to be inducted eventually into both the Peninsula College Hall of Fame and the Port Angeles Roughriders Hall of Fame.
Maybe one day, she’ll be inducted into the Cal Poly Humboldt Lumberjacks Hall of Fame, too. It wouldn’t shock me at this point.
I see lots of prep kids that shine in multiple sports during the school year. Forks always seems to have a lot of these kids. Port Angeles’ Parker Nickerson, the Roughriders’ starting quarterback in football and a 25-point-a-game scorer in basketball, is another one. But you don’t often see them win league MVPs in multiple sports. And you never see them carry that over to college.
Kids always have to pick just one sport in college. They simply have to. Most schools won’t tolerate kids trying to play multiple sports. Not everyone can be Bo Jackson or Jim Brown. What Long has already accomplished and is continuing to accomplish is exceptionally rare. And should be appreciated.
By the way, Cal Poly Humboldt is a school I came very close to covering for a newspaper in nearby Eureka, Calif. Port Angeles offered a job first and I’ve never regretted that decision, though I wanted that job in Eureka, too. It seems like a perfect place for Long, very much like Port Angeles. Cool, rainy, surrounded by redwoods and a bit isolated (San Francisco is 300 miles to the south).
We’ll continue to check in with Cal Poly Humboldt from time to time to see what records Long continues to shatter.
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Sports Editor Pierre LaBossiere can be contacted at plabossiere@peninsuladailynews.com.
