Boys building on years of experience together

Head Bigfork High School boys basketball coach Lyle Whiteman and his assistant coaches Jason Hall and Michael Edwards spent the beginning of last week watching potential players show off their best moves. But in the end Whiteman had to narrow down the group of about 50 candidates to three teams.

The result is a varsity team comprised of seven seniors and one junior. A few other players on the junior varsity team will play up, but the full-time varsity team at this point includes seniors Brock Boll, Leo Daigle, Zac Hansen, Jake Milner, Garrett Pewe, Scott Taylor and Donny Tudahl, and junior Keenan Evans.

“I really like the way they are working hard,” said Whiteman, who is coaching the team for the first time in several years. “They seem to come with that. They were working hard last year too from what I hear, even when they weren’t winning a lot of games.”

Although the boys are adjusting to a new coach this year, they aren’t having to get used to a lot of new teammates. All of the varsity players are returning from last year, with the exception of Daigle.

“We have some decent size and we have some pretty good speed too,” Whiteman said. “So we’re trying to take advantage of that. We’re trying to put pressure on the defense and take advantage of quick breakaways.”

Whiteman said he is making some adjustments to the team’s style of play from previous years.

“I think we have some work ahead of us defensively and they are learning a new offense too. It’s a more up-tempo offensive strategy. It will take a little time, but they’ll get it.”

The junior varsity and freshman teams, each with 12 players, are working on similar things with coaches Hall and Edwards, respectively.

“The hardest thing now is that they’re all competing for a job,” Whiteman said. “We have some good juniors and sophomores on the JV team that want to be playing up, so they’re competing hard too. Sometimes I have to remind them that they’re all on the same team, but I think it’s just good healthy competition.”

The new varsity team will have their first chance to try out what they’ve been working on at this weekend’s Hamilton Tip Off Tournament. The boys will take on both Hamilton and Corvallis.

“It’s going to be a great opportunity to see the teams in our conference and the teams in the rest of the state,” Whiteman said. “I don’t know what to expect really from the other teams. I don’t know much about the other teams, and really I haven’t had too much time with our team and they’ve learned a lot of new things, so we’ll see how they do with it all. We’re trying to approach it that we don’t need to be concerned with the other teams. We need to focus on our team and we need to do the best we can and learn as much as we can from this experience.”

The JV team has its first game today, Dec. 11. They host Flathead High School at 4:15 p.m. The freshman team travels to Glacier High School on Monday. All three teams will go to Missoula to take on Big Sky High School on Tuesday. The Vikings host their first home game next Thursday, Dec. 18, when the Libby Loggers come to town.