Following an 18-10 season, four members of the boys varsity basketball team were honored with Suburban South Conference awards. Senior Nathan Biggs won Player of the Year and First Team All-Conference honors along with junior Jarrett Cox-Bradley.
“It’s pretty cool,” Biggs said. “We have a pretty tough conference, so it was a big honor to get something like that.”
This is Biggs’s second time as a member of the conference First Team. Cox-Bradley was an honorable mention in the previous season.
“I wouldn’t say I was expecting it, but it was a goal,” Cox-Bradley said. “Coming into the season I wanted to make at least an all-tournament team and First Team All-Conference. I didn’t get all tournament, although I still played pretty good, but to get First Team All-Conference is definitely important to me, so I was pretty happy about it.”
While Cox-Bradley had the award in sight at the beginning of the season, seniors Connor Kraus and Nick Helmbacher, who received honorable mentions, did not have it on their mind.
“I hadn’t really thought about it a lot,” Kraus said. “All season it was more about what we could do as a team.”
The boys obtained the best record the school has seen since 2003 and made it to the District Finals, where they lost to CBC.
“Any time kids get individual awards, my thought is hoping that it is going to make my team better,” head coach Mr. Rick Kirby said. “The great thing about those guys is that I can guarantee that they would have sacrificed those honors to have won a District championship. They are very team-oriented players.”
No matter what goals were set at the beginning of the season, Kirby said he was able to get the boys to buy in to the fact that success is almost never guaranteed and that he needed them to work hard.
“We work hard all summer, all fall and certainly the first day of practice through the last day of practice,” Kirby said. “It’s nice to see kids who work hard get recognized for what they do.”
Although Kirby had influence on the success that his players were able to enjoy, he still gives the credit to the players.
“Great players make great coaches,” Kirby said. “It’s funny how one year from now, when I’m missing a bunch of good players, I can become not quite as good of a coach.”