COLUMN | The Hoops Connection at Rainier Beach That Spans Three Generations
Sometimes when Rainier Beach Vikings coach Mike Bethea peers out on a basketball court, he can’t help but feel that he is looking at a mirror into his past. The two teenaged brothers out there today are in their second year with him. Twenty years ago, he coached their father. Fifty years ago, and for decades after, he played with their grandfather.
Thing is, you can draw a through line from Jerry Meneese in 1975 to Tremaine Meneese in 2006 to Marques, a senior, and Micah, a junior, today. You might say their style of play – call them the clean-up crew – is the Meneese family business. They all rebound, they all hustle, they all know their roles, they’ve all been relatively unsung, and Bethea, in one way or another, has been a beneficiary.
“You coach all the kids the same, but it's just something different about a kid that you have a relationship with their parents and grandparents,” Bethea said wistfully after a recent practice. “It's just like playing with those guys. Like playing with Jerry again or coaching Tremaine again.
“You can just tell that, with both of those guys, they’ve got a combination of their dad and their granddad in their game. And then whatever Jerry’s deficiencies were, Tremaine’s deficiencies were, they basically made sure that these guys didn't have the same deficiencies. So they’re more complete players. They're really good players.”
Marques and Micah Ili-Meneese are essential players when you are entering the homestretch of a WIAA State 3A championship run, like Bethea and Rainier Beach are. The Vikings have Tyran Stokes, the consensus No. 1 prospect in the country, and JJ Crawford, widely considered one of the top one or two freshmen in the nation. Those two cover the high-profile aspects of championship basketball, but not every necessary aspect.
Neither of the Viking stars have played for a state championship; the Ili-Meneese brothers have. They screened and rebounded and dived on the floor and turned hustle plays into points for the 3A title this team is trying to defend. Michael Jordan, maybe the NBA’s greatest ever, once called such players, “my supporting cast,” in a way that came off as demeaning to some ears.
But there’s nothing demeaning about the roles the Ili-Meneese brothers are about to play.
“Those guys played an instrumental part in us winning last year,” Bethea said. “And they bring that experience to this team. Once we get here, you wonder if it's going to be so new to a whole lot of them, but you know what you're going to get out of them two.”
Back to the Future
Twenty-four years ago, Tremaine Meneese had not yet grown into the contributor he’d eventually become to the Rainier Beach program. At 6-foot-5, 215 pounds, he was a lanky freshman, more of a football player, who grew on coach Mike Bethea for his overall … willingness. Though Meneese was on the junior varsity team, Bethea took him with varsity to the Tacoma Dome to perform support functions.
“Tremaine was that guy that, should you tell him to run through a brick wall, he didn't question whether or why do I got to do anything,” Bethea recalled. “He’d say, ‘Hey, coach, you want anything left standing, or do you want me to take the whole thing down?’ He was that junkyard dog that every coach wants. His boys have the same thing in them.”
Nate Robinson had just graduated, and the Stewart twins, Lodrick and Rodrick, were in their last season for the great, back-to-back state championship team. Wide-eyed, Meneese took it all in, then became a regular starter two years later. The Metro League was in one of its hey days, with future NBA first-round pick Terrence Williams at Beach, future NBA first-rounders and McDonald’s All-Americans Spencer Hawes and Martel Webster at Seattle Prep, Sonic sons Mitch Johnson and Jamelle McMillan at repeat state champion O’Dea, and another future NBA second-round pick Marcus Williams at Roosevelt.
Meneese wasn’t on their level, but he knew what he did was important.
During his senior season, he said, “I played really well. I was never like a real big 3-point shooter or anything like that. But playing defense and getting the rebounds – pretty much what you see from my kids.”
"Tremaine cleans up everything for us,” Bethea told the Seattle P-I in 2005. “He's a starting tight end on the football team and he brings that football intensity to the court."
Bethea could have been talking about Meneese’s older son, Marques. The Viking senior is 6-4 but more solidly built, courtesy, his father says, of his Samoan side from mother Malia Ili. Tremaine Meneese was an all-league honorable mention tight end as a senior; his son is a first-team All-Metro tight end and defensive end who committed to Central Washington to play football.
On a basketball court, Marques is a one-man wrecking crew. He frequently is held up by Bethea as masterly in cleaning up mistakes when the Vikings apply their defensive pressure. He handled the ball, scored 11 points, hit a 3-pointer, and collected a dunk in last year’s 3A championship win over Edmonds-Wooday. He has flashed more of an all-around game, especially in practices, but says he has no regrets having a style and reputation as a player who does all the small things that help lead to victories.
“I just know we have a lot of weapons on this team, so I understand it, and I'm not mad,” Marques said. “I just want to win, at the end of the day.”
He gets more excited talking about the basketball evolution of his younger brother, Micah. A second-team, All-Metro Sound Division selection, the 6-3 Ili-Meneese plays with a little more of the flash and dash that’s earned him the nickname from fans as “Micah Jordan.” That edge comes from years of playing up a level with his brother, as well as his father Tremaine constantly going to what he calls “the basketball uncles” for development.
Those “uncles” are the circle of Seattle basketball luminaries that has emerged from the connection between Bethea and Meneese’s father, Jerry.
“He’s grown so much,” Marques said of his brother. “At first he was just a slasher, but now he's expanding his game, doing more than just getting layups and rebounds. He's pushing it, he’s playmaking, all this stuff. So it's really fun.”
Building Blocks
Height obviously skipped a generation because Jerry Meneese, at a little over 6 feet, didn’t contribute much to his son or grandsons, who tower over him. What’s more, he says his favorite sports by the time he reached Franklin High School were baseball, then football, and basketball because it was something to do in between the other two.
That’s all changed, and not just because of the hoops history of his son and grandsons. His connections at Franklin to Mike Bethea; Wayne Floyd, the former Garfield head coach, and Trent Johnson, who has coached collegiately at six schools, pulled him firmly into basketball circles as a player and, the past four decades, as one of the area’s most prominent referees.
As a referee, Jerry Meneese says he sees no faces, only numbers. To wit, 20 years ago, he called a Rainier Beach game and fouled out his son, Tremaine. Last year, he called the Vikings’ 139-51 blowout of Nathan Hale and whistled a foul against then-sophomore Micah.
“You’re calling a foul on your grandson?” Bethea asked, incredulous.
“You know I’m going to call a foul when I see it,” Meneese replied.
Meneese was small, says he had a two-handed jump shot, but was willing to hustle. One of 75 who tried out for the Franklin junior varsity basketball team, he earned one of the coveted 12 spots because of that hustle. The sophomore was called up for several varsity games, so he spent some time on the bench while Bethea, two years ahead, was playing. That started a bond that kept the two together on various men’s and pro-am league teams, on which Meneese continued his penchant for guarding absolutely anyone, including once the Sonic Xavier McDaniel – the exact quality Micah attributes to his older brother, Marques.
“I loved to rebound,” Meneese said. “Tremaine pretty much got that from me. He was one of those guys that, with his team up 25 points, he’d go diving into the bleachers for the ball. I’m telling him, ‘Dude, you guys are up. You don't have to give your body up like that.’”
That particular unlearned lesson continues to be handed down among Meneese generations.
The Ties That Bind
Tremaine Meneese works for Community Passageways, a non-profit organization that aims to disrupt the cycle of violence among Seattle’s youth. He was among the first on the scene at a bus stop at S. Henderson and Rainier Avenue S., on the afternoon of Jan. 30. His sons had a game later that night at Roosevelt High School, but it was cancelled.
Meneese was the first to tell his sons the tragic news: Their friends Tyjon Malik Stewart, 18, and Tra’Veiah Houfmuse, 17, had been shot to death. They’d been among the first to embrace the Ili-Meneese brothers when they transferred to Rainier Beach from Renton High School last year. Now they were gone forever.
The brothers’ world was shattered and it took everything that had coursed through their community and their basketball team, and handed down through the generations, to begin putting things right. They took days away from school and practice. They skipped the make-up game at Roosevelt the following Saturday.
“I told my team that if I had played that game, I wouldn’t have been able to produce,” Micah said. “My head wasn’t ready for playing basketball.”
This was not the family business, but in a way it came to be. The Meneese family values came into play. Do the small things, the right things.
“I’m proud they found positivity in it,” Tremaine Meneese said of his sons. “They allowed it to hurt them, then they destroyed everybody in front of them. Some kids might have tried to retaliate in a certain way. They took it to, ‘I’m going to go (destroy) somebody in a different way. Give me a basketball.’“
Like their father and grandfather before them, Marques and Micah Ili-Meneese are taking pain and channeling it forward. They and their teammates already had been mourning the passing last summer of assistant coach Dave Belmonte, Bethea’s head coach at Franklin. A chair is left empty on the Viking bench in his memory.
The killings of Stewart and Houfmuse are fuel added to their basketball fire, the brothers say.
“Now we have to do this,” Marques said of taking a second straight state 3A title. “There's no other option but winning.”
Their coach, Mike Bethea, hears about this source of motivation and nods. Things are as they should be. As they’ve always been in this decades-long relationship.
Glenn Nelson’s Fan Guides to the 3A Tournament
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. You can follow his daily coverage from the Tacoma Dome at Beach Boyz Buzz and the Emerald.
Help keep BIPOC-led, community-powered journalism free — become a Rainmaker today.
