School portraits / School life · 2025–26
Seven Pages for a Jump Shot
Faced with a choice between basketball and travel, two Bush seniors and their coach answered with a seven-page brief.
Most basketball teams open a season worrying about layups or conditioning, but in the fall of 2025, The Bush School faced a rather different athletic crisis. The girls’ program was months from collapse with only six committed players. The trouble was an administrative collision: school policy barred winter athletes from taking travel Cascades, and given the choice between a winter in the gym and an off-campus trip, most seniors chose travel.
That left Edom Alemayehu and Ligaya Santos as the only two seniors committed to the team, and both still intended to travel. When they approached head coach and English teacher Bea Chang, the three built a seven-page case for letting students do both.
An imagined parent looking in on that effort might reasonably assume a seven-page brief was an essay on Shakespeare or an ambitious household negotiation over curfew. Writing seven pages is an unusual warm-up for running sprints.
The proposal was approved. As March 2026 student reporter Ben Foltz recorded for The Bush Rambler, word traveled quickly through the school, and by opening day the roster expanded from six players to twenty-one. The season went forward, leaving the program with a rather eccentric triumph: the coach had secured a full bench, provided she was willing to let them leave town.