The North Olympic Peninsula’s basketball courts haven’t served as stages for many players like Christian Welp.
Not many 7-foot German exchange students, and certainly not many players the caliber of Welp, who died Sunday at the age of 51.
Lee Sinnes and Larry Hill, both members of the Washington Interscholastic Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame, don’t have to dig deep to unearth memories of Welp playing at Olympic High School.
“He’s the best player I’ve ever seen in high school,” current Sequim assistant coach Larry Hill said by phone Monday.
“He was physically head and shoulders, literally and figuratively, above everybody else.”
Hill was an assistant under legendary coach Rick Kaps during the 1982-83 season when Welp led the Trojans to a state championship.
Sinnes was in between stints as head coach of the Roughriders, but was serving as an assistant to Tom Lowry when Welp was at Olympic.
“In the Olympic League, we’ve had some good players over the years, but he would have to be, next to Marvin Williams, probably the best that the league has ever had,” Sinnes said in a phone interview Monday.
Williams, who played at Bremerton when the Knights and Roughriders were in the Narrows League, currently plays in the NBA for the Charlotte Hornets.
When Welp transferred to Olympic, the 3-point shot was new, Sinnes said, and the high school level had yet to adopt the shot clock.
“A lot of teams tried to do a lot of things, and one of them was to stall and not let him get the ball,” Sinnes, who last month completed his first season as an assistant to his son Matt with the Fife girls team, said.
“He was very smooth. He had a good outside shot. He could make left-hand jump hooks, right-hand jump hooks.”
Making Olympic an even tougher matchup was the talent around Welp, including Joe Asberry, 6-foot-6 athlete who ended up playing college basketball at Pepperdine.
“The two of them inside, nobody else in the league could come close to guarding them,” Sinnes said.
“It created some really interesting things [for opponents].”
Hill also was impressed by Trojans guard Jarvis Jennings.
“That team was loaded. They had at least three guys who were legit Division I,” Hill said.
“They were just unbelievable. The only way you could stay with them was if they got bored.”
Welp could have scored whenever he wanted to, but kind of took it easy on Olympic League foes.
“The other guys were actually more of a problem,” Hill said.
“He was such already an accomplished player that he was really good about getting teammates involved.”
One tactic the Wolves tried was using Paul Kaminski, Sequim’s tallest player at 6-4 who was more of a football player, to bring the ball up the court so Welp would have to check him.
“We tried everything we could think of, but there just wasn’t anything we could do,” Hill said.
“We actually kind of stayed in the game with them here, as I recall, but they annihilated us down there.”
Neither Port Angeles nor Sequim were able to find a winning combination against Welp and the Trojans in 1982-83.
Welp would go on to be the leading scorer in University of Washington history and play a few seasons in the NBA before having a successful run playing professionally in Europe.
Hill said that Welp already acted like a pro when he was at Olympic.
“I remember being impressed with him, just after the game, how he conducted himself,” Hill said.
“He had a lot of experience in how he handled himself before and after games.
“He had a really good demeanor. He seemed so much more mature and beyond a high school player.”
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Sports Editor Lee Horton can be reached at 360-417-3525 or at lhorton@peninsuladailynews.com.
