Bears are ready to defend State title
LAUREL — Last winter, the Laurel-Concord-Coleridge boys basketball team not only found a way to beat the entire D1 field en route to a state title, but it also got past COVID-19 to get to the finish line.
The Bear boys were able to win the crown in Lincoln and just a few short days later much of the country shut down in the face of the pandemic.
Now, head coach Todd Erwin enters his seventh year with a defending state champion team that will wonder if it will have the whole scope of the season to play out the newest chapter.
“At this point we have to plan for everything to be normal until it is not,” Erwin said. “This year we need everyone to step up in the scoring department with the three seniors that we lost from last year that contributed a lot of our points.”
The Bears return six players who saw plenty of time running with the championship lineup so that could only aid their chances at another crown.
Returners like Cael Hartung, Evan Haisch and Austin Hall will help things along.
They should be a bit saltier after sitting through a recent school-wide quarantine due to the virus.
“It’s pretty annoying because we can’t even really go anywhere except our driveways to even play,” Hartung said. “It’s basically just shooting by ourselves in the driveway. I am not worried about team chemistry though, because we have all been good friends since we were young and always played basketball together. We meshed good with the kids last year and we have always played with the younger kids more on our team.
There may be some small difference between this year’s team and the Orange and Black team of 2019-20.
“I would bet that we won’t play as fast as we did, but we will probably try to speed it up because that’s just how we always play. I bet it will be a little bit slow at the beginning of the year, but we will have it figured out by middle of the season.”
Hartung notes the surreal nature of basketball with its past season reaching its apex just as the world came to a proverbial end of what the normal was.
Yet, COVID-19 will not photobomb the memory of raising the trophy last year.
“It’s just something else to think about, but it doesn’t ruin anything,” Hartung said. “We just went out there and had fun. I remember that it happened then, but it doesn’t affect the memory or anything else.”
Erwin does expect another dogfight to achieve a strong campaign as the competitive level can offer plenty of pitfalls.
“We are in North east Nebraska Competition and that is always at a high level,” Erwin said. “With all the variables going on this year that you can’t control, every team we play is a threat until we get past them that night.”
“We will turn and burn fast with full court press.”
Hartung said that the players did what they could to stay in shape by hitting the weights and getting shots off as often as they could to be ready for this moment of defending the crown.
“We got a grip on how we would do stuff this year,” he said. “I am a little bit worried – maybe on a 5 on a scale of one to 10. I am hoping we will be able to play.”
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