COLUMN | South Seattle Gets the Full Tyran Stokes Experience

It is post game on a chilly December evening in a hallway between two cramped locker rooms at O’Dea High School on Seattle’s First Hill.

The crowd arrived as much as four hours before gametime, just to land a seat. Now they shuffle out of hallowed Phil Lumpkin Court as if they don’t want the Tyran Stokes Experience to end.

As Stokes and his teammates wait for a bus back to south Seattle, the Rainier Beach High School senior is holding an earnest conversation with a young fan, probably 6–7 years his junior. The dialogue is along the lines of “How can I become a star like you?”

Stokes has thoughts: No partying, no running with the wrong crowds, never ignoring the path you chose.

“If this is what you really want to do,” he says, “everything else is a distraction. Wherever you’re trying to go, this will get you in. I’ve been around the world because of basketball. It’ll take you places. It will make opportunities, open up a lot of doors for you.”

At which point, Jason Kerr, the O’Dea coach, peeks out of the Irish locker room and bellows, “Now you’re standing right outside my door?” A couple adults in the Rainier Beach contingent respond. They and Kerr launch into a profanity-laced exchange.

“Let’s go,” Stokes urges his teammates. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time is exactly what he’d just counseled the young boy against.

He’d already left his mark, after all. Some 15 minutes earlier, Stokes, aka, THE CONSENSUS NO. 1 COLLEGE PROSPECT IN THE COUNTRY, had orchestrated a raucous, 78-67 victory for Rainier Beach. And when we say orchestrated, we mean orchestrated in every sense of the word.

Hyped on pizza, soda, and expectations, the zealous O’Dea student section serenaded Stokes as if he were there to confiscate their smartphones:

“OH … ver … RAY-ted … “

“YOU … are … SAW-oft … “

“YOU.. can’t… DO that … “

Like a symphony conductor, Stokes often stood in front of them, and with his hands, waved on more intense heckling. Maybe the talk-talk-talk gesture, or rubbing eyes for crying. Once, he blew a kiss to the Seattle Prep crowd after sinking a 3-point shot.

Night after boisterous night, the scenes are straight out of WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment). Stokes’ teammates have come to regard the jeering as music to their ears.

“He has a fiery personality,” says Achilles Reyna, who transferred from arch-rival Eastside Catholic for his junior season. “I’m fiery, too, so I love it. He brings in a crowd every game, and I love playing in front of a lot of people.”

Tariq Shabazz, a senior transfer from Garfield, says, “I like it because he's not afraid to show his emotions at the time. It gets us pumped up because it's really funny when he’s talking back to the stands.”

“We love the haters,” says JJ Crawford, the team’s freshman sensation and son of former NBA and Rainier Beach great, Jamal. “They motivate us. If you don’t have any haters, you’re doing something wrong.”

In between being hated on, Stokes delivered 27 points, 14 rebounds, 8 assists, 5 steals, and 2 blocks. He also touched off a 20-3 Viking rampage that sucked the wherewithal from O’Dea. Similarly taunted by Seattle Prep students the next game, Stokes poured in 52 points and the Vikings beat a likely Metro League playoff opponent, 100-72.

“He’s a big energy guy,” Beach coach Mike Bethea says of his star. “He feeds off the opportunities in front of the other team's crowd.”

All of this — and more — is the Tyran Stokes Experience, where a lot of seemingly incongruent qualities can be true at the same time: leader, instigator, peace-maker, teammate, entertainer, heart-breaker, even money-maker.

In the era of NIL (Name, Image, Likeness), where college and certain high school athletes can earn money from and control their own brand, Stokes holds a ticket for guaranteed millions. He already has a multi-year, multi-million-dollar NIL deal with Nike and, according to industry observers, is in line to eclipse the NIL standard for college basketball, which is about $4.5 million per season. Also, the No. 1 college prospect, especially as emphatic as Stokes, often has a direct line to the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft, meaning a rookie scale wage starting around $13-14 million a year.

So, in case you missed it — or are about to — an 18-year-old, sure-fire, multi-millionaire NBA prospect will have, for not even four months, streaked through South Seattle like Haley’s Comet — hot, bright, and once in a lifetime.

And almost no one, even at Rainier Beach, saw it coming.

The Arrival of a Phenom

Tariq Shabazz knew about Tyran Stokes because Stokes is a persistent internet subject who seems to have more YouTube clips than Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Shabazz was an all-league receiver, safety, and kicker for the Rainier Beach football team in the fall. Back then, he hadn’t considered the possibility of a next athletic act in the Stokes galaxy.

“During the football season, I’d never have expected someone to say Tyran Stokes was coming to Rainier Beach for his senior year,” Shabazz says. “It was kind of surprising, but it has been fun because we get to experience his fame, in a way, because there are cameras following him everywhere.”

A natural entertainer, Stokes plays with élan, is so demonstrative, and conducts an almost uninterrupted conversation with everyone connected to a given game. Those traits sometimes lead to a perspective of him, in mostly opposing circles, as an entitled villain. Several adult fans, for example, created a tense scene after a game at Garfield, aggressively heckling Rainier Beach coaches for excessive on-court celebrations by their players, namely Stokes.

One experienced referee, who has handled some of Stokes’ games with Rainier Beach, says the Vikings star is misunderstood.

“He has an off-the-chart basketball IQ,” the official says. “All people see are all the dunks and 3-point shots and talking to the crowds. That’s because that’s all the content creators show on the internet. What people don’t see or understand is that every time he’s approached me, it’s always been thoughtful and basketball-related.”

This official has heard the opinion that he and his colleagues need to clamp down on Stokes’ on-court antics, but he says, “It’s hard to penalize a kid when 500 people in the stands are going after him and, once in a while, he responds a little. That’s not a technical foul, that’s being human.”

All eyes have been fixed on Stokes at least since he was an eighth grader playing up in the summer of 2022 at Nike Peach Jam, the most prominent exposure tournament in the country. A Louisville native, he moved with his family at 9 years old to San Diego, then Atlanta, before landing at Prolific Prep, a basketball academy in Napa, California. Seeking a more-rounded high-school experience, Stokes transferred for his junior season to Notre Dame, a private school in Sherman Oaks, California, where he also played high-school football for the first time.

After withdrawing from Notre Dame shortly before his senior season, Stokes transferred to Rainier Beach, which offered a public-school environment, championship pedigree, new facilities, and racial diversity. He has Beach climbing national team rankings and a candidacy for prestigious national post-season tournaments.

Along the way, Stokes has excelled on the exposure circuit, which revolves around the nationwide Nike EYBL (Elite Youth Basketball League). He also collected three gold medals with USA Basketball – in the FIBA Americas Championship in Mexico, the U17 World Cup in Turkey, and the U19 World Cup in Switzerland. In the latter, he had the first-ever triple double for a U.S. player in U19 World Cup competition, amassing 19 points, 11 rebounds, and 10 assists during 24 minutes off the bench in a 140-67 victory over Jordan. He has been selected to play in the U.S. vs World, Nike Hoops Summit in Portland on April 11.

The sum of the past four years has landed Stokes atop every college recruiting ranking in existence and has him poised to choose his college destination from three long-time favorites — Kansas, Kentucky, and Oregon — and perhaps two late-developing candidates, Washington and Vanderbilt. There’s been some talk that Stokes is the best high-school prospect ever – a consideration that includes luminaries such as LeBron James. Most agree that, at 6 feet 8, 235 pounds, Stokes has the power, ballhandling skills, and court vision of James, but exceeds the NBA great as a long-distance shooter.

Bethea calls Stokes, “a once-in-a-lifetime type of player.”

Stokes offers rare combinations of finesse and power, raw and calculated. Those result in, for one, an uncanny ability to draw contact and fouls. The height of these powers were his back-to-back, 4-point plays against Seattle Prep. The plays were so far out on the court, he was nearly in the lap of ex-mayor Bruce Harrell, seated at courtside. Those also came during a 22-point third quarter for Stokes, who tallied 52 points with Washington assistant Quincy Pondexter and Kentucky assistant Jason Hart, also seated courtside. His first 4-point play fouled out Seattle Prep’s all-state guard Niko Christofilis.

Which also is to say, Stokes has a knack for showing up in big moments.

A sampler:

• Stokes christened the new Jamal Crawford Basketball Court and Mike Bethea Athletic Center with 31 points during a 90-52 Rainier Beach win over Blanchet. The coup de grâce was dunking after passing the ball through his legs in mid-air — the so-called “East Bay Funk Dunk.” The first such dunk was achieved by J.R. Rider in the NBA Slam Dunk Contest in 1994 and was considered an astonishing achievement. Stokes has repeated the feat, during a game, no less, at least two more times this season.

• Beach trailed Duncanville (Texas) by two after three quarters at the HoopHall West Classic in Arizona. Stokes rallied the Vikings to a 74-70 victory with18 points in the fourth quarter. That outburst featured a scintillating sequence that included a power drive, a dunk off the drive, a power drive layup, coast-to-coast dunk, slalom drive through four defenders, and power drive into baseline jumper.

• In front of 24 NBA scouts and some 70 college scouts in the shadow of the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, Stokes had 37 points, 11 rebounds, 5 assists, 5 steals, and 3 blocks against Bishop McNamara (Maryland). Freshman JJ Crawford, Stokes’ “little brother” and heir apparent to his stardom, had 10 of his 32 points during overtime of a 91-85 Rainier Beach victory.

• The top-ranked Vikings staved off an upset bid by No. 2 O’Dea at Rainier Beach after Stokes scored 16 of his team’s last 21 points before Kellon Hightower’s game-winner with two seconds remaining.

• Stokes scored his 2,000th career point at Garfield before a packed house that included former Seahawk running back Marshawn Lynch and New Orleans Pelicans guard and former Rainier Beach star Dejounte Murray.

• On Senior Night, Stokes set out to break the school’s single-game scoring record and, of course, did so with 63 points. There was a packed house, including assistant coaches from Kansas and Kentucky. So, naturally, on one breakaway, Stokes tossed the ball off the board, caught it, and dunked.

“He’s got the motor and mentality to dominate,” Jason Jordan, a longtime national recruiting analyst, wrote in a text message. “He would be No. 1 in most classes. I looooove his mentality – bully and so confident.”

The Show Around the Star

To pronounce Tyran Stokes as can’t-miss entertainment is rather an understatement. He is more like entertainment waiting to happen. He is perpetually in front of cameras – shooters are crammed along the baseline every game, especially at Rainier Beach, like pigeons on a power line. Their hope is to capture some viral moment that seizes the attention of Stokes, who in his multi-millionaire future might need the services of a so-called “content creator.”

A person can dream, right?

The internet personalities who’ve already made it also are checking in. Cam Wilder, with more than 2 million subscribers on YouTube and 7 million followers on Tik Tok, has twice taken in the Tyran Stokes Experience. Cullen Honohan, who has 324,000 subscribers for his YouTube channel, “All Hail Cullen,” came to Seattle with a videographer from Pittsburg and dropped a 22-minute production about Stokes that has more than 310,000 views.

Then there is the litany of celebrities, big-name college assistant coaches, and politicians who have swung on by a Rainier Beach game. Chris Paul in Arizona, Damian Lillard in Portland, Beast Mode himself at Garfield. Former Viking Nate Robinson, the NBA’s first three-time slam dunk champion, is practically a season-ticker holder. Dozens of other Rainier Beach alums, many a part of the program’s 10 state championships, nine under Bethea, slide through on the regular. Shoot, Jamal Crawford, maybe the best ever to come out of Seattle, is a volunteer assistant coach.

Bethea jokes that the team needs to print t-shirts emblazoned, “Beachmania,” a takeoff on the Beatlemania craze of the 1960s. Fans banged on the Vikings team bus at West Seattle. They attack ticket sales like ants at a picnic, turn out for freshman and junior varsity games to get a choice vantage point, sit with mobile-phone cameras trained on the court, just in case the impossible happens, which it often does.

Every road game for Rainier Beach this season has been a sellout, often in advance, which actually is out of the ordinary for Stokes. He estimates that of the some 105 games he played at Prolific Prep and Notre Dame, only 6-8 games — total — were sold out.

“It’s surprising,” he says of the Seattle reception, “but Jamal (Crawford) had warned me that things might get a little crazy around here.”

A little.

The Vikings’ first game at Renton High School required athletic director Alfred DiBlasio to hire more staff to facilitate a crowd of about 2,000 because the usual count is closer to 400 or 500. Garfield had metal detectors at the doors, an edict that anyone who leaves the premises cannot re-enter, and several Seattle Police in plain sight. The game at the 1,200-seat gym at Eastside Catholic sold out in minutes; Jeff Feller, the school’s executive director of athletics, said a more typical crowd is about 300.

Sam Reed at Seattle Prep staffed up like the others, called in a couple of police officers, then did something extraordinary.

“I’m going to do the same thing for our next game against Blanchet,” Reed explained, “so it doesn’t seem like I’m just doing this for people from south Seattle.”

It is closing in on 10 p.m. on a school night. Sandwiches and drinks are being set up in front of the Rainier Beach locker room. After an all-out assault on the school scoring record, followed by a lengthy ceremony for senior cheerleaders on Senior Night, Tyran Stokes is in stocking feet and a receptive mood as dozens of people check in, taking photos, getting autographs. They are kids and adults, alike, from the school and outside, getting a memento of what could play out as never-again celebrity in a neighborhood that can use the uplifting.

These are the moments the content creators don’t reveal. They are not hype enough. Stokes always is the loudest voice and biggest energy in practice, hazing a recent callup to varsity by calling him “J.V.,” taking an underclassman aside for some counseling, hitting three straight free throws with his left hand, leaving a drill to sit and chop it up with an injured teammate. He may dominate the spotlight and the ball unlike any teammate they’ve ever had, but they believe that he believes in them.

JJ Crawford’s favorite play of Stokes’ is illustrative. Late in a taut contest with Eastside Catholic at home, Crawford tees up for a dagger 3-pointer and misses. From the frenzied scrum for the rebound, Stokes taps the ball back to Crawford. As Crawford launches, Stokes doesn’t even watch. He turns upcourt, flashing his favored “shark” celebration, before the ball splashes through the net.

“People expect him to be perfect,” says Achilles Reyna, who was the featured transfer for Rainier Beach before Stokes arrived. “But he’s not a 20-year vet. He’s still a kid. People forget that.”

What undoubtedly will not be forgotten for a long time is that the Tyran Stokes Experience, a blockbuster orchestrated by an 18-year-old man-child, had a short but meteoric run in a neighborhood and a city that has not seen better.

Glenn Nelson covered the Sonics and the NBA at The Seattle Times for 17 years. He was a founding executive at Rivals.com, a co-founder at Scout.com, and the founder of ESPN HoopGurlz, a national website about women's and girls' basketball. He has won regional awards for his columns about race for the South Seattle Emerald.