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All things considered, it was a pretty good season for the Hornets. Their boys finished 15-10 and earned a playoff berth, a feat that was tarnished by a late-season player dismissal and three straight defeats to end the year.
"We weren't mentally tough enough to handle it," said head coach Art Wade, a self-proclaimed perfectionist who thinks next season, his third at the school, could finally be the time for the Hornets to reach the next tier. Western will lose five players from this team, but Wade is "in love with the pieces" coming in, including 6-foot-4 eighth-grader Donovan Gilmore, a "pogo stick" who "is close to touching the top of the square. He's not a stiff at all." Wade said that will open a new realm of offense for the Hornets, whose lack of size the last two years has meant a lot of four-guard sets. "The kids coming in are extremely raw, but they offer a lot of upside," Wade said.
The underclassmen-heavy Hornet girls had a losing record but were still way ahead of pace in head coach Jeremy Heinold's second season, pulling things together in time for a surprise playoff run as a wild card. They'll bring back 6-foot-2 junior center Catrina Green and explosive freshman guard Brittany Clency, both All-Conference selections.
Heinold is a former assistant for Graham head coach Kyle Ward, whose team just painfully lost the 2-A state title game for the third straight year.
"The running joke is now we call him Marv Levy from the Bills," Heinold said with a laugh, referencing the NFL coach whose Buffalo teams lost four straight Super Bowls in the early 1990s.
And how does Ward like that joke?
"I don't think he shares our comedic response for it," Heinold said, "but he's OK. He's still got a lot to be excited about."