Olathe West’s first varsity basketball season showed us a first glimpse of what students can look forward to in the future for the team. Although the record shows 10-12, the boys basketball squad notched big wins over Olathe Northwest, De Soto, and two wins over Turner. With one word, Head Coach Bradley Ball described the season as simply “fun.”

“I thought we grew and started to figure things out as the season went on. We really did a good job of going to practice every day and getting better,” said Coach Ball.

As we all know here at West, we have no senior class, which means that in sports this season, varsity players were made up of underclassmen. Freshman and sophomores had to step into a bigger role, playing against bigger senior players on other teams. Coach Ball said that varsity is a faster game, but the boys stepped up.

“We had so many guys that hadn’t played varsity basketball before. The game is faster and a little bit more complex than it is at sub-varsity level. But our guys started to figure out ways to be successful and they started to figure out their strengths and weaknesses as they started to play together as a team,” Coach Ball said.

Good seasons or not, every team has something they can work on. Even NBA level players are in the gym getting stronger day in and day out, getting shots up, whatever it may be. When Coach Ball was asked what improvements could be made, he mentioned something the boys had worked on all season.

“If we can get better defensively I think we can really improve in our transition game offensively. And also I think we rebounded better at some times than we did at others and that again leads to starting our transition offense. It’s something we worked on all year and we got better, but it is still a place we can get improvement from,” Coach Ball said.

The Olathe West basketball team has high hopes for the future, and we as students hope to see that happen.