TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — If not for basketball, Angel Goodrich and her school, Sequoyah High, would be as easy to overlook as the dusty farming towns that freckle northeast Oklahoma. Goodrich, a shy sliver of a guard, is the face of the Lady Indians, who are the three-time defending state champions in their classification and a rising force on the national scene.
They opened the season ranked in the top 10 in Sports Illustrated’s national poll. And this week they will participate in the Nike Tournament of Champions in Phoenix. Sequoyah is the first all-Indian school to receive one of the coveted invitations.
Read more about Sequoyah High’s Success, its players and coach.
Nobles, 46, is cross between Bobby Knight and the father of Hannah Montana. He puts his players through the wringer with his exacting standards, especially when it comes to boxing out for rebounds and trapping on defense. But then, after every game, Nobles collects the uniforms and takes them home to wash because the one washing machine on campus is always being used.
Though there is this error.
During the playoffs, Bush’s husband, David, does the radio play-by-play of the games in Cherokee, the language created by Sequoyah, the Indian for whom the school is named. It can be a challenge, he said, because many basketball terms are not easy to translate. For instance, he describes a foul as a crime.
Sequoyah, of course, didn’t create the Cherokee language. He developed an alphabet for it (and thus writing).