(Greenfield) Game one of a district basketball doubleheader on KSOM Monday night will feature Nodaway Valley opposing Exira-EHK.
Wolverine coach Jeremy Blake got an opportunity to scout the 13-8 Spartans last week and describes his squad’s first round opponent as a tough, physical team. “They are a big team, but a lot of teams have been bigger than us this year. They’ll give some problems with matching up on defense, but I also feel like we are going to give them problems with being able to pull guys out.”
Nodaway Valley started the year at 1-8, but then won seven of their next nine games. “I knew it was going to take some time to get to here. The kids and I knew how good we could be. We wanted to be there right then and there, but we were still figuring things out with our defensive and offensive philosophies. I was trying to figure out what their strengths were and making sure I was putting them in the best positions on both sides of the floor. We’ve got a lot of that figured out and now it’s just cleaning it up more.”
These two coaches have a lot of familiarity with one another. “We both run a lot of the same stuff. That’s from our late night conversations and weekends when we were up at Coach Jenkins house in Elk Horn and we’d spend four or five hours on a Saturday night just talking hoops. We were all breaking out papers and throwing strategies out there and different situations out there. It’ll be interesting. Watching them on film some of the same plays that we run, they run.”
The winner will take on either CAM or IKM-Manning in a district semifinal on Thursday.
Nodaway Valley coach Jeremy Blake:
