When Xavian Rushing hears the “Super Senior” chants directed at him, he cracks a smile.
Then tunes it out.
Opposing fans at basketball games are who Rushing says heckle him the most. The Seton Catholic standout knows he’s 19 years old — in fact, he turns 20 this summer — and a high school senior for a second time.
But here’s the kicker: Rushing, the Cougars’ leading scorer and rebounder, actually is a sixth-year high school student, and not ashamed of it.
He’s proud of how far he’s come, and more importantly, where he’s going. Rushing doesn’t get flustered when taunts are aimed at him, nor does he want empathy.
Rushing figures few people outside the Seton Catholic community know he spent five years bouncing around foster care, and couch-surfing between friends and extended family with sometimes no more than a backpack full of belongings.
They don’t know that when he couldn’t find a place to crash, he’d miss school because he was afraid he would fall asleep in class. Or that he spent his 15th birthday hospitalized with a skull fracture caused by his mother hitting him with a shotgun.
Dark times meant Rushing searched long and hard for love and hope, but what he has always had is determination.
That’s seen in basketball, too, where Rushing — granted a sixth year of eligibility by the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association to begin this season — is a two-time all-Trico League honoree for Seton. The Cougars (13-10) face La Salle of Yakima (18-5) in Saturday’s regional round of the 1A state tournament with a chance to make the program’s first appearance at the Yakima Valley SunDome.
Seton head coach Kris Small calls Rushing a gift. But also, Seton Catholic is Rushing’s gift toward fulfilling a future that once looked bleak.
“Coming here,” Rushing said earlier this week, “made me realize what I want for my future.”
His fourth high school
Seton Catholic is Rushing’s fourth high school. He calls the past two years at Seton some of the best — and happiest — of his life.
The school’s rigorous academics challenge him in different ways than the three prior high schools he attended in and around Spokane — Riverside, Lewis and Clark, and Shadle Park. The most time he spent at one school before Seton was Lewis and Clark, with an enrollment of around 1,800 students.
Fewer than 200 students attend Seton Catholic.
It’s hard to find anyone at the small Catholic school who doesn’t know Rushing on a first-letter basis — “X.”
Senior Zach Cowger is Rushing’s teammate and good friend. He also tutored Rushing in math when Rushing needed extra pointers. Cowger said Rushing’s fun personality is infectious, and makes an immediate impact on everyone.
“He’s super easy to talk to,” Cowger said. “He can have a conversation with a brick wall.”
Rushing calls his teammates, classmates and the school community a family he never thought he’d have, but can’t imagine living without.
“It started from Day 1,” he said. “I always think about it.”
Rushing is the middle son of five boys, but after age 13 is when things back home in Spokane nosedived.
His father was incarcerated for reasons Rushing doesn’t know. Physical and verbal abuse by his mother reached the extreme when at 14, Rushing said she aimed a 12-gauge shotgun at him. A physical altercation gave Rushing a skull fracture caused by the gun’s barrel, he said.
Rushing never knew if the gun was loaded. He didn’t press charges on his mother, but did spend his 15th birthday in the hospital recovering.
Instability soon followed. Rushing bounced among various homes of friends and extended family to two stints in foster care. When nights were lonely and no true place to call home, he often pondered what’s next.
“A lot of sleepless nights,” he said. “I thought about it a lot, and kept thinking about it because I had no answer.
“I didn’t know where I was going to be every night. It wasn’t easy. I had to learn a lot of things quickly and on my own.”
School attendance was hit and miss, too, but it wasn’t because of a lack of motivation. A good week meant going to school all five days.
A bad week? Three days.
Grades plummeted and so did his graduation track. By the end of 2018 — his originally scheduled graduation year — Rushing’s credits equalled two years of high school.
But the same summer he turned 18 is also his first visit to Vancouver, which led him to Seton, which led to playing high school basketball for the first time. It also led to a new track to graduation this spring.
Coming to Vancouver
In the summer of 2018, Rushing came to Vancouver to hang out with some friends. At the time, he had no intention of moving across the state.
He went to a barbeque attended by Donald Wilson and his wife, Alysha, who heard Rushing’s story. It wasn’t long before the Wilsons offered to take Rushing in.
Donald Wilson said the couple dreamt of growing their family larger through adoption one day. This gives them a head start. The couple have children ages 11, 9 and 3 … and now a 19-year-old in the house after the Wilsons became Rushing’s legal guardians.
“It’s funny how life works out,” Donald Wilson said. “It’s always been words, but when we heard (Rushing’s) story, (Alysha) said, ‘this is it.’ It’s been a great experience.”
Donald Wilson is an assistant girls basketball coach at Seton. He believed the school would offer Rushing a chance to thrive.
Rushing chose to enroll at Seton. He wants to attend college and be a police officer, so he chose to earn a high school diploma over the alternative — a General Education Development (GED) certificate.
“I’d rather jump through these hoops and end in a higher place,” Rushing said.
Rushing doesn’t pay tuition at Seton. Donors who contribute to the school’s scholarship fund take care of that. Those same donors make sure he eats lunch at school daily.
Basketball became another opportunity, too. In November 2018, a District 4 eligibility committee cleared Rushing to play as a Seton junior, but awarding another year of eligibility for a kid who first attended high school in 2014 wasn’t a guarantee.
WIAA bylaws grant a fifth year of high school eligibility to a small number of students for reasons that involve health or family problems. Only in extreme circumstances are sixth years granted. Rushing’s case — a sixth-year waiver — is rare, said Casey Johnson, the WIAA’s sports information director.
At age 19 before Dec. 1, Rushing already surpassed WIAA’s maximum age requirement to play a winter sport. But there’s more to it than that, said Phil Kent, the school’s athletic director.
“He really only went to school for two years before Seton,” Kent said. “He’s not really getting a sixth year; he’s basically finishing his fourth.”
Kent also is a retired Portland Police officer, and a background working with Portland youth.
“I saw many, many stories like this that went completely the opposite way,” he said.
A gift of a foundation
At 6-foot-4, Rushing is a guard who plays forward out of necessity. He’s averages better than 15 points per game, and is almost automatic inside 10 feet from the basket, his coach said.
In last Saturday’s district title game loss to La Center, Rushing had 10 of his team’s points in the fourth quarter and overtime. Small, Seton’s second-year head coach, said Rushing made the best play he’s seen a high school kid make earlier this season, soaring from the foul line to finger roll a lay-in still 3 feet from the basket at a home game.
“He looked like Julius Erving,” Small said, referring to the former NBA great of the 1970s and 80s.
Small continued: “I’d put him against any 1A athlete. I’m pretty sure he’d be right up there with them or maybe ahead.
“In that sense, we’ve got a gift.”
But the bigger gift is what Seton Catholic gives to Rushing.
“I needed some type of foundation — that’s the first thing I figured out at Seton,” Rushing said. “Find your foundation, figure out who you are, and go from there.”
