Redmen hope to gain from lessons learned on the court last year

RIB LAKE BOYS BASKETBALL PREVIEW

A year’s time will hopefully make a big difference this season for Rib Lake’s boys basketball team.

At this time in 2020, the Redmen were working with just one returning starter from the previous year’s sectional final team, a couple of role players from that team and a host of varsity newcomers. As one would expect, it took some time for Rib Lake to hit its stride in what eventually was a 6-14 season.

Now, the Redmen hope to benefit from the experience gained last year as everyone returns with the exception of Ryan Patrick and Brock Thiede.

The other key departure was head coach Carrie Ewan, who stepped down in the off-season to make way for assistant Todd Henderson to step into the top spot on the staff. Luke Gebauer becomes the program’s JV coach.

“I think it went pretty well,” Henderson said Monday of the team’s first week of practice. “The kids seem to be pretty excited about basketball. We have 16 kids out. It looks like they’re ready to work hard and play some basketball this year. I think they’re excited about the season and hoping that we can play well and compete for a conference title.”

Rib Lake ended the first week with a scrimmage at Three Lakes Friday night. The Redmen will be able to make some adjustments off of that before they officially open the season this coming Tuesday with a Marawood North matchup against visiting Phillips that starts at 7:15 p.m.

The Redmen are most experienced on the perimeter and they expect solid play this season from their guards.

Senior Logan Blomberg, a two-time letter winner, leads that group. He and sophomore Andrew Wudi both earned All-Marawood North honorable mention after their play last year. Blomberg averaged 10.7 points per game and is the team’s top returning scorer. He also pulled down 5.9 rebounds per game and is likely to be one of the team’s top 3-point shooting threats.

Wudi returns as the team’s primary ball handler. He figures to increase his 4.8 points per game average and is a solid passer and defender on the perimeter. Junior Michael Borchardt hopes to carry momentum from his strong finish into this year. He averaged 7.5 points per game for the season, but he averaged over 20 points per game in his last three outings and hit double figures in four of his last seven outings.

Junior Tanner Vlach looks to take his game up a notch after averaging 7.8 points, 3.1 rebounds and 2.6 assists last year. The Redmen hope he’ll knock down shots from the outside as well. Junior Ryan Buehler is back after getting some varsity minutes last year.

Inside, the Redmen don’t have much height, but they’ll look for seniors Jordan Yanko, Sam Gumz and Trey Klemann to make some things happen with their athleticism.

Senior Brandon Heiser, sophomore Jackson Blomberg and junior Dalen Gebauer round out the varsity probables to start the year, though Henderson said you never know another sophomore or two might be rotated into the mix.

“I feel like the strength of the team is that most of the guys have a good basketball sense or basketball IQ,” Henderson said. “They work well and pass the ball well together. That’s something that we try to stress is good team basketball and being unselfi sh and really trying to hit the open man and have that faith and trust in your teammates. If we can just be consistent from behind the 3-point line it will make a difference. If we’re not hitting 3s we’ll have to find another way to score without having much of an inside presence. We’re going to have to attack and get to the hole or get to the foul line.”

Success from the 3-point line is something that just never consistently came around last year. This year, Henderson fully expects the team will shoot better than its 24% clip of a year ago. It will need to because Patrick’s graduation does leave a void inside. The team’s unquestioned MVP of a year ago and a first-team All-Marawood North selection averaged 12.5 points and nearly 13 rebounds per game. “Last year was defi nitely a growing experience for a younger team that lost quite a few players from the year before,” Henderson said. “This year we’ll be adjusting to not having Ryan Patrick inside. He played great defense and I think he was in the top five in the state for rebounding. As a team we don’t have a lot of size. Logan’s our tallest guy at 6-2 and he’s a shooting guard. We’re really just going to have to work on defending well and communicating well as a team and then have everybody boxing out. If we let other teams just crash the boards on us and getting offensive rebounds on us, we’re going to struggle.” Rib Lake will have its man-to-man and some defenses in its playbook. The scrimmage with Three Lakes was valuable as Henderson showed some things the team will need to shore up in either approach.

“Physically we matched up well with Three Lakes,” Henderson said. “We did three different sessions and it kind of depended on which team had somebody who shot well. The first two were pretty even and the last one they had a guy that hit quite a few 3s. We were working on some defenses and we left a guy open when we were trying to rotate and adjust. We also found some things we need to work on with our man defense. It looks like we need to communicate better and our helpside defense needs to not stay so tight on our man. We need to be in the gaps and ready to help better.”

Whichever route Rib Lake winds up going with defensively, Henderson is hoping the Redmen will be able to create some turnovers and make things happen with their defense.

“We may try to be a little more up-tempo and try to get up and down the court,” he said. “I think with the athletes that we have, we’ll do better in a full-court game versus a slow-down half-court game. Hopefully we can be smart with the ball and turn the ball over less than the opponent. I think we have some depth this year that we should be able to play eight, nine, maybe 10 deep and be pretty good.”

The Redmen will again play a challenging conference schedule that includes the usual home-and-away matchups with North rivals Athens, Prentice, Phillips, Abbotsford and Chequamegon as well as the crossover matchups with South powers like Edgar, Marathon, Stratford, Newman Catholic and Auburndale.

Non-conference teams on the schedule include Tomahawk, Colby, Owen-Withee and Columbus Catholic, among others.

“Quite a few of the guys have put in a lot of work in the off-season,” Henderson said. “They’ve been in the weight room. They’ve been working on their game. Hopefully that pays off this year. They got to get into some summer leagues and were able to do some tournaments and things like that.”

As for taking over the head position after working with Ewan for a couple of years, Henderson said he’s ready.

“I learned a lot from Carrie Ewan and got to be a part of that and watch and learn,” he said. “We can keep a lot of the things the same as what we’ve been doing and what works. At the same time we can add some wrinkles or nuances with maybe something a little bit different on offense or some different defensive strategies. I think for the most part, we can keep it fairly consistent. It’s not a big change from what we’ve been doing. We have had some coaching turnover here in the last six years. That’s part of the reason I wanted to coach, to help bring some stability to it.”

Sam Gumz attacks defender Andrew Wudi during a transition drill in Rib Lake’s boys basketball practice Monday.MATT FREY/THE STAR NEWS