Introduction to Girls section of
T of C program
After more than three decades of watching the boys Tournament of Champions grow and mature, finally the girls were invited to the party.
Using the Tournament of Champions as its template, Tulsa Public Schools launched the girls counterpart in the final year of the 20th century.
And, if a tournament were to successfully compete for the publicity with an established event, what would best further its cause than to tip off with a bona fide star? Playing in a blue-ribbon facility.
When the curtain went up on the first Oklahoma’s Best tournament, a star was waiting to take the stage. And what a stage it was.
Iciss Tillis, a 6-4 senior at Tulsa’s Cascia Hall Preparatory School, had been preparing for such a coming-out party for a couple of years. She was the most talked about girls player in Tulsa and in Northeast Oklahoma.
It wasn’t until she led Cascia Hall onto the court of the 12-month-old Donald W. Reynolds Center on the University of Tulsa campus that most basketball fans would have their first look at the phenom.
She would prove over three days in December that she was worthy of all hyperbole and expectations. She led Cascia Hall to three consecutive wins by double digits to win the championship. And along the way, she led all rebounders, averaged 14 points per game and picked up the Most Valuable Player award.
In 2008, Tillis became the first player inducted into the Oklahoma’s Best Hall of Fame.
Tulsa Public Schools had been harboring hopes of creating a girls tournament to pair with its 34-year-old boys event. When the boys tournament took shape in 1966, Tulsa Public Schools was not sponsoring girls athletics on a competitive level.
Then, the boys Tournament of Champions which had carved out its niche with a late-season January date had repositioned itself 10 years earlier into a Christmas holiday tradition.
The new venue, with comfortable seating in excess of 8,000, on the TU campus would enable the girls tournament to step out in style with an advantage the boys did not enjoy for the first 19 years: A non-high school setting.
The tournament, and the facility, succeeded in short order.
After Tillis gave the tournament individual star power in the first year, the second tournament began with Class B Bluejacket taking down Tulsa Memorial in the first round.
By the third year, teams from across the state were clamoring for invitations. In the 2001 finals, the top two teams in Class 5A, squared off for the championship.
No. 1 Claremore defeated No. 2 Woodward, 46-40, in a game that would go a long way toward establishing Oklahoma’s Best as one of the elite, if not THE elite, girls tournaments in the state.
In rapid order, small-school titans joined the parade into Tulsa for the early-season showcase.
Like the boys tournament, teams were invited on the basis of their expected success and their most recent success. TPS officials and Tulsa World sports writer John D. Ferguson filled the brackets each summer. Eventually, with Ferguson’s departure from the World, his role in team selections was inherited by tournament director Tommy Thompson.
Since 2012, TPS Assistant Director of Athletics Mick Wilson has served as tournament director, and has been in charge of invitations and pairings and the operation of the tournament.
The 2006 championship game became the gold standard by which all ensuing games would be compared.
Tahlequah Sequoyah, with Angel Goodrich, defeated Sapulpa, with Allyssia Brewer, 40-38, in the first overtime finals. Goodrich, a senior who was named MVP, would wind up as the tournament’s career scoring leader, just six points in front of Brewer.
By 2011, the girls had gained equal footing with the boys.
Tulsa Public Schools and tournament director Thompson had determined during the summer to merge the boys and girls into one event, Oklahoma’s Tournament of Champions.
It was an insightful move.
With the merger came a change in location for the girls. They joined the boys across town in the Mabee Center, on the campus of Oral Roberts University.
The new venue, the new date (during the Christmas break), the new name transformed the already-good girls tournament into an even-better event and added a special twist to the boys game.
With eight games in one day, 24 games over three days, all featuring the best teams and best individuals in the state, the Tournament of Champions became a state-wide, holiday spectacle.
For the girls, the new format paid solid-gold dividends in the second year.
Class 4A Anadarko defeated 5A Tulsa East Central, defending tournament champion, in the finals before a crowd of some 3,500, best-ever for the girls event.
What had been Oklahoma’s Best was now, indeed, a tournament for champions.
The field for the 2016 tournament includes the most dominant program in event history, Class 5A East Central, winner of four championships.
The girls Hall of Fame, launched in 2007, now embraces the rich history of the tournament, with names such as Iciss Tillis, Alyssia and Angel Goodrich serving as reminders of an event that has gone from Best to even better.
--Terrell Lester