Once again, as we are reaching the end of our season I would have to say it has been a relatively successful season. I believe the varsity squad has probably overachieved to this point and has 10 wins with a number of games where we have had halftime leads that we have let slip away. Our lower levels are also enjoying a great deal of success. Both the JV and freshmen find themselves in second place in the conference trailing only WISCO.

At the varsity level, considering we had to replace four starters at the beginning of the year, I am very pleased with the way our players have adjusted to varsity play. To make it a little more difficult, before we even played a game, we lost our only returning starter from last year, Matt Vraney, to a season ending knee injury. While we performed pretty well during the early non-conference portion of our schedule, we struggled at the beginning of the conference season with double digit losses. But with improved play from seniors Jordan Teschendorf, Kevin Burns, Brennan Quinn and sophomore Kirk Emmer we started to put some pretty good games together and began to win a few. We have gotten very steady play from our role players, seniors Dan Dubnicka and Steven Schwarz, juniors Kyle Behrens and Dan Wimmer, as well as sophomore Dan Sabin. We have become very competitive in games and given ourselves a chance to win every night out.

It seems like every year, when I write this column at this time of the year, I tend to say the same things. We are a rebuilding team that shows great improvement and becomes very competitive as the year goes along. It must sound like all I do is just change the year on each column. So, why are we able to continue to re-tool our team and take players with little experience and watch them develop into teams that play good basketball? I think a great deal of the credit has to go to our coaches at the lower levels. It starts with the guys that work with our youth tournament teams. Guys who volunteer their time and effort so that Slinger basketball continues to have success. But I think the guys who have the greatest effect on our varsity players are the guys working with our freshmen and JV teams. At the JV level is Rick Held and Pete Fritz, and at the freshmen level is Tony Dobson and Josh Feller. All of these guys are outstanding teachers of the game, and do a great job of teaching our system to the younger players so they are ready to step in at the varsity level. And finally is the contribution of the varsity coaching stall. Nate Grimm, Steve Dummer, Doug Riesop, and Hank Karius are tireless workers who are very good at working with kids.

It has been a pleasantly surprising year and we are very excited to see how it will play out as the season winds down. I want to thank you all for your continued support and hope that you can still get out to see us play this year. It would be great to fill the gym for our last home game and first round state tournament game on Tuesday, March 2 against Stevens Point. Hope to see you there.