Heat look back on season

Ricky Depoe

What was your proudest moment from this year’s basketball season?

It seemed like one kid was hurt all the time, and then we finally got healthy. All of those kids came together and had that great game against Plains. That was kind of a big moment for us.

What was your team’s biggest challenge? How did they respond?

Overcoming injury. Injuries were our big thing at the beginning of the year. Truthfully, in our starting five there were really only three kids that had much varsity experience.

From the end of last year, until the end of the year it’s amazing how far they’ve come, just as individuals and to battle through the injury part of it.

Our younger players and players that didn’t get a chance to play much had to step up and they stepped up quite a bit actually.

In what area did you see the most improvement?

Teamwork; as far as how we worked together. In years past we’ve had one exceptional athlete for several of them and it was one kid who did most of the work or a couple kids doing most of the work.

I think with this group, on any given night, one of the starters, or even one of the bench players, would step up and help their team. It might not be points wise, it might be something else. What’s great about this team, is I could go down to seven players on the bench and on one night or at one point there was a place where every player was needed to help win a game. We might have come up short as far as winning the game, but it was great that they put us in that situation.

When and how did you see the greatest character exhibited by your team?

I’ve always known they had character. I don’t remember an exact point, but after Christmas break we figured out who we were as a team: what offenses we could run and different defenses we could run.

In our game after Noxon smoked us here at Hot Springs, we got on a good roll and starting winning. That’s been the character of this team for the last several seasons. It seems like we always have trouble going at the beginning of the year, and in the middle we start winning a few games, and we play well at the district tournament. This year we came up a little short, but I think we had an exciting year.

What are you looking forward to the most about next season?

I’ve got some really good sophomores to be juniors and freshman to be sophomores coming up.  And even eighth graders, I’ve got a pretty good young bunch coming up and it will be pretty exciting to see what kind of summer things they do.

Do you have any final thoughts on the season?

This has probably one of the more challenging seasons I’ve had.

I think this has been the best team as far as heart [that I’ve coached], you can’t take anything away from that. They were a never quit bunch, and you can’t coach that. A lot of teams will just give up, but they never gave up and I’m pretty proud of that.