Hey, Ravens Flight Corps, the joke’s on you. During a third-hour winter sports pep assembly last Friday at Olathe Northwest High School, the school’s spirit and leadership council set up an elaborate prank for science teacher and Ravens girls basketball coach Joel Branstrom.
Reminiscent of the hijinks CollegeHumor.com pulled at Maryland men’s basketball last March, Branstrom was blindfolded in front of the entire student body and told that he’d win Final four tickets if he made a half-court shot.
The catch is that the students were told to cheer wildly when Branstrom presumably missed the shot, hoping to dupe him into thinking he’d won tickets when, in fact, he hadn’t.
But Branstrom, who wasn’t familiar with the setup, got the last laugh by swishing the 47-foot heave. no joke, a shorter version of the video on YouTube generated more than 2,400 hits by early Monday evening.
“I hadn’t seen (the College Humor prank) until this weekend, but I also knew they were trying to punk me,” he said. “But I let them go along with it, because I’m all for school spirit.”
Branstrom actually feared he was being set up for a more mundane and conventional gag.
“When they took me out of the gym, put me in the school uniform with a skull cap, I thought I was going to get hit in the face with a pie,” he said. “That’s why I put the ball in front of my face when it was first handed to me. I was trying to protect my nose.”
It wasn’t until he’d been handed the ball and hadn’t been hit with anything that he realized he actually had to take the shot, a shot improbably made.
“I didn’t know for over a minute that I actually made it,” Branstrom said. “(Boys basketball coach Mike) Grove was being overly adamant that I had made the shot. I even told him to give it up, but he was so insistent. Honestly, if it wasn’t on tape, I probably still wouldn’t believe it.”
Thus, Branstrom’s fame was born — and has spread rapidly.
“There have been a lot of smiles. I think I’m going to permanently look like The Joker, I’ve been smiling so much, but that’s great,” Branstrom said.
“It tickles me to do something that brought so much joy to the students and to the school.”
ESPN was expected to be at Olathe Northwest this morning to interview Branstrom for a “Cold Pizza” segment with Dana Jacobson and Jay Crawford.
When a TV station asked him on Monday to recreate the shot for a segment, Branstrom again swished the half-court shot.
It was considerably less impressive, though, considering he wasn’t blindfolded and Final four tickets weren’t on the line.
About those tickets?
There never were any, of course. Branstrom wasn’t supposed to make the shot. but the Ravens Flight Corps did the next-best thing, presenting the good-natured former Kansas basketball player with a gift card to Chipotle with “NCAA” scrawled on it later last Friday.
@ go to KansasCity.com to see video of Joel Branstrom’s shot.
To reach Tod Palmer, send e-mail to tpalmer@kcstar.com