For small schools, winning is about more than final score
Staff writer
The buzzer sounded, and cheers erupted along the coaches’ bench.
The players, sweaty and grinning, ran over to embrace their head coach, Chris Freeman.
If there was a Gatorade cooler anywhere on the premises, it no doubt would have been dumped over his head.
Wakefield had snapped a 49-game losing streak, beating the Centre Cougars, 38-34.
The Cougars are now 2-7 on the season, having lost five straight.
One of those two victories had come against Wakefield. But now, missing captain Robert Spohn, the Cougars came up short.
After multiple key members of the team graduated last year, the team has been left with only one senior, Spohn.
After Spohn suffered a knee injury a few games into the season, coach Richard Idleman’s starting varsity side now consists of a junior, two sophomores, and two freshmen.
“They’re just very young,” Idleman said. “They’re having to learn real quick. We’ve got a junior varsity team learning to play varsity basketball.”
Idleman has coached basketball for 17 years and the Cougars for 10.
Despite being a man who, with quiet voice and wiry glasses, wouldn’t look out of place in an accountant’s office, one gets the sense he lives and breathes the game.
Idleman led the charge the last time Centre won the eight-team Wheat League back in 2018, a memory he looks back on fondly.
Oddly enough, that was the only other time in his coaching career that he was starting a freshman on his varsity roster.
The Cougars’ practice Thursday began quietly, as the team watched tape in a dark social science room.
The sound was off. Idleman and first-year assistant coach Jalen Studstill spoke about the weekend’s plans, the need to play with confidence.
After ten minutes, the players alighted onto an empty court where Spohn — blond, skinny, and heading to McPherson College on scholarship next year — led the team in a warm-up.
A brace lined his dislocated left knee.
He hopes to return next week, which would provide respite for the team’s depleted offense.
As the players stretched, Idleman walked through the field of bodies, holding curt discussions with his players about injuries.
In some ways, being a coach now is more difficult, he said as he attempted to address players’ mental health as well as their physical ailments.
“The game’s changed,” he said. “You’ve gotta look out for your kids.”
After stretches came a lay-up drill.
A streak of misses led to cries of “Come on!” from exasperated team members, and eventually, a brief team meeting with Idleman.
“We haven’t had a winning record in any year that I’ve played so far,” Spohn said. “It’s definitely frustrating.”
A tense, three-point drill followed.
“Stay off the dribble!” advised Idleman, as his players mumbled curses under their breath with every missed shot.
Then there was an exercise in which the Cougars attempted to hit as many shots as they could in two minutes, beginning with layups and slowly moving further away from the hoop.
Players scuttled around the court, methodically throwing up shots and crying out with approval whenever a teammate drained a three.
“I want 40!” yelled Jaden Hiebert, one of the team’s more vocal upperclassmen.
Micah Carlson, a quiet sophomore with black tape around his knees (“Osgood-Schlatter,” Spohn said), stood out with a refined jumper.
After a few go-rounds, team members reached a number of buckets they were happy with.
“Doesn’t that feel good?” Idleman asked.
While Idleman has a serious way of speaking to his team, practices are a democracy.
Players frequently chat with each other, Studstill, and Idleman about how best to approach the game.
All voices, even those of rookies, are heard and considered.
In a county where one basketball team, the Peabody-Burns girls, already has quit on its season after a poor start, it wasn’t been entirely clear what kept the Cougars together.
(Peabody-Burns superintendent Antoinette Root declined to allow her school’s players to be interviewed, citing privacy concerns.)
Maybe this emotional blend — competition, compassion — was what did it.
Most of the team has been playing together since elementary school, according to Carlson.
Asked whether he got existential about the team’s record, he shook his head.
“We just fight, all the time,” he said.
Junior Kaden Hutchison was similarly zen.
“I just play because I enjoy the sport,” he said.
Spohn, under slightly different circumstances than the rest of the team, is trying to enjoy what time he has left with the Cougars.
“I don’t really have much time to keep my head down,” he said.
One positive that has come out of this, he said, has been seeing younger players develop.
“They’re playing pretty good so far,” he said.
The first-team varsity players took on the school’s junior varsity squad, plus assistant coach Studstill, in a scrimmage.
Spohn reclined on the sidelines, not yet ready for the hard running the game entailed.
“Guys, I said this already,” Idleman warned. “Do not hurt anyone on our team.”
He watched on, occasionally shouting out numbered plays.
His voice became husky and deeper during the scrimmage, and he wore a slight smile on his face.
The match, like the drills before it, was tense.
“That was so sloppy,” one player said to a teammate after he’d misplaced a pass.
“Shut up,” the passer retorted.
Despite the best efforts of Studstill, who played NAIA basketball with Bethany College, junior varsity lost control of the game.
The team was down 15-2 when one of its players, freshman Hunter Rogers, was fouled hard and fell to the ground.
Again, it was a tense moment. After a second of silence, Idleman stepped in to defuse.
The varsity player helped Rodgers to his feet.
“No teabagging,” someone joked.
Again, friction had served to make the team closer.
“Today was nothing,” Brady Idleman, the sophomore son of the head coach, said after practice.
His father tries to ramp intensity up before game day, but today’s practice apparently had been on the lighter side.
“I’m not going to say they don’t have fear,” coach Idleman said of his players. “They get that look of fear.”
He has been impressed with the spirit of his team this season. Quitting is easy. Playing with a inexperienced and beaten-up squad is more difficult.
“Even though they’re playing varsity when they usually wouldn’t be, they fight,” he said. “They don’t give up. That in itself is a big win.”
The inexperience of Centre is not unique in the county, as public school enrollment in rural Kansas has declined in lockstep with the general population.
Goessel’s boys team, for example, graduated seven seniors last year after finishing the season above .500.
The Bluebirds are 1-11 this season, picking up their first win Tuesday night against Udall.
“It cycles so much in a small school,” Goessel coach Curtis Guhl said.
Idelman agreed.
“Our school’s enrollment has dropped,” he said. “We’ve seen it in football, in basketball. But there is a core, and these guys are part of that core that keep it going.”
After practice, four Centre players — three from junior varsity, as well as Spohn — continued to shoot under the basket.
The rest of the team walked in clusters to cars outside, laughing about the kind of things high school boys laugh about, their breath visible in the cold air.
Tomorrow, the team would lose to Peabody-Burns, then Wakefield. The day after, they would beat Goessel to improve to 3-7.
But this evening, results felt irrelevant.
They got into their cars, revved their engines, and drove into the sunset.