YAKIMA — Coming off of their first losing streak of the season in their two biggest games of 2025-26, the Tumwater Thunderbirds needed an anchor to steady the ship heading into the 2A State Tournament.
That anchor was named Landon. Landon Anchors, that is.
Tumwater, the fifth seed in the tournament, needed all 24 points it got from its junior forward in a 47-39 defensive battle with West Valley (Spokane) won by the T-Birds, who scored 31 of their 47 points in the second half Wednesday night. The T-Birds advance to the state quarterfinals and will face No. 6 seed Anacortes Thursday night.
Defensively, Tumwater limited West Valley to a 25% shooting clip from the field and managed to hold the Eagles to just seven second-chance points despite allowing 14 offensive rebounds. It was a huge flip for a T-Birds team that allowed a season-high 73 points in a blowout opening-round loss to Pullman on Saturday.
“I told them that if we come out here and play defense, we can win the basketball game. I’m glad I was right, because we didn’t do much offensively outside of Landon,” Tumwater head coach Josh Wilson said with a chuckle. “It was kind of your classic defensive win. We did things better than we’ve done all year defensively, for sure.”
Scoring was a chore for both teams in the first half. Anchors tallied the first two buckets of the game on a pair of layups before the Eagles tied the score at 4-4 midway through the first. Ethan Bello broke a two-minute scoring drought with a layup, and Anchors finished the first period with a 3-pointer off an offensive rebound to give Tumwater a 9-5 lead through one.
West Valley tacked on a layup in the first 20 seconds of the second quarter, but no one scored again for over three minutes. No team broke the double-digit scoring marker until the Eagles hit a layup with 4:12 left in the first half. Tumwater finished the half ahead 16-14 while shooting 31.6% from the field against West Valley’s 23.1% shooting.
Luke Overbay jumpstarted the Tumwater offense early in the third, throwing down a two-handed slam to capitalize on a steal. Anchors followed it up with a triple, and he kept the rare offensive run going with a layup to put the T-Birds up by nine three minutes into the third.
The T-Birds took their biggest lead of the night at 12, but West Valley got five back before the end of the third. After scoring 16 in the first half, Tumwater added 15 in the third quarter alone to take a seven-point advantage.
West Valley continued its run early in the fourth, extending it to 9-0 to cut the lead down to three. Anchors came up clutch, drilling his third 3-pointer and thus stopping the Eagles’ spurt. Owen Reamer and Overbay added a pair of buckets, including Overbay’s second emphatic slam of the night, as Tumwater regained its double-digit advantage.
In the final four minutes, the closest West Valley could get was within five. Overbay delivered the dagger with an and-one layup two minutes before the final buzzer, and the T-Birds closed it out by taking care of the basketball and knocking down free throws. After an abysmal shooting first half, Tumwater shot 50% from the field in the second half.
“I think we had to get over the nerves. It’s everybody’s first time being here,” Anchors said. “Getting used to the environment really helped us explode in the second half.”
Anchors led all scorers with 24 points on an efficient 7 of 13 shooting and 3 of 7 shooting from beyond the arc. He also knocked down 7 of 10 shots at the charity stripe.
“I was really playing off of my teammates. They gave me a lot of great passes, and I hit my shots,” Anchors said.
“It’s always great to see [Anchors] stick shots because he’s such an important part of our team,” Wilson added.
Reamer added nine points, and Overbay contributed seven points and eight rebounds. Bello scored five points and dished out five assists.
The defensive turnaround from a 73-point nightmare last weekend to a 39-point shutdown Wednesday didn’t happen overnight for Tumwater. The T-Birds spent hours in practice hammering the small details, and the work translated to the game. West Valley struggled to get off passes cleanly against the lengthy Tumwater defenders, and the Eagles could likely count on one hand the amount of open shots they had all night.
“Defense isn’t rocket science,” Wilson said. “You’ve just got to put in that level of effort and communicate with each other and help your teammates out.”
Tumwater (22-3) now gets a chance to punch its ticket to the state semifinals against Anacortes Thursday night at 7:15 p.m. Despite two state trophies in the last four years, the T-Birds haven’t advanced to the semis in 10 years, when they lost to Shorecrest by six.
“We’ve got to do the same thing as we did tonight. We’ve got to play defense. Anacortes is a great team,” Wilson said. “I think that my team here can beat anybody when they decide that and stick to it. We could also lose to anybody at the same time. It’s the matter of who shows up tomorrow night, and if we have the defensive team that showed up tonight, I think we’ll be in good shape.”
