Gary Seymour, sports@wolfrivermedia.com
Photo by Jen Kuhn Kylie Guenther, a forward on Shawano’s eighth-grade team in the Youth Hoops program, drives on a Pulaski defender during a tournament hosted by Shawano on Jan. 31. The Youth Hoops program helps develop youngsters’ basketball and life skills.
There is a true story about a youth girls basketball team meandering off the floor after a game, with one of the players on the 7- and 8-year old squad peering up at the scoreboard that read, “Visitors 10, Home 6,” and asking a teammate, “Did we win?”
What makes that tale notable is not so much the endearing innocence of youth as it is that the girl making the inquiry would 10 years later become a first-team all-area guard for her high school team.
There is no denying that becoming familiar with the finer nuances of basketball is no different than playing a musical instrument or learning a foreign language: the sooner you start, the better.
In that vein, there are scores of Shawano girls and boys getting an invaluable head start on the path to acquiring the necessary skills to “have game,” thanks to a program that has gained steam in popularity since its inception.
Started in 2009 in an effort to give young players the necessary early development to keep pace with the game’s growing popularity, Youth Hoops — a program with teams for boys and girls in grades 2 through 8 — has tripled in size today from the 30 or so players who came out for the inaugural season.
The chief architect of the feeder program was Jeff Guenther, a former player and coach whose love for the game, and the desire to see his kids experience the satisfaction that basketball gave him, drove the venture.
“The program was well-received in the beginning, and it’s just unbelievable how it’s grown,” said Guenther, who paired with Katherine Bahl in running the program at the outset. “Katherine was outstanding — she deserves a lot of credit in the program’s success.”
Guenther would eventually run the program himself, expanding it through various skills camps and multiple tournaments. Throughout the evolution of Youth Hoops, the coaches and board members have imparted other lessons beyond the crossover dribble and boxing out underneath.
“We stress positive life choices, things like eating right, exercise, good education … important things to have in life besides basketball,” Guenther said.
A labor of love needs little encouragement, and all of the coaches and board members at every level of the girls and boys programs can take a measure of pride watching the erstwhile girls and boys become young women and men running the floor at Shawano Community High School. Every endeavor like this, however, requires a bit more than just the goodwill of good people willing to give their time.
“We couldn’t do it without other help,” Guenther said. “The community has been very supportive. The Optimist Club does a great job supporting us with funds, Dan Hartwig over at Twig’s Beverage supports our Sun Drop Classic (tournament) every year. And the athletic director at Shawano has been great, too. They don’t charge for gym time. We have four quality gyms — 11 courts at our disposal. If we had to pay for gym time we wouldn’t be able to afford uniforms, things like that.”
An accomplished former basketball player and coach in Orlando, Florida, before taking the athletic director post at SCHS, Charmaine Schreiber was on board with the youth program from the start.
“It’s important to have a feeder program like this, one where the philosophy that they’re coaching at the high school level is being taught to them at an early age,” she said. “By the time they get to high school, none of the concepts will be foreign to the kids.
“But the youth program is also important because of the life lessons they stress. Teaching kids about character, a strong work ethic, all of these things are important to impart to the kids at a young age. It’s a big thing to get kids inspired, and these kids do get inspired when they see the varsity players out there with them at their practices. I applaud our head coaches here. They’re working hard to develop the feeder program. They know that’s the future of high school sports.”
Time constraints from his job compelled Guenther to take leave of his spot as president of the Youth Hoops program, but an immediate successor wasn’t named because Guenther wanted to ensure that the next president would be a top-quality choice who knew basketball and had the kids’ best interest at heart.
They found that person in Kris Johnson, a health and physical education teacher at SCHS who had been coaching the 7- and 8-year-olds for three years before taking over as president.
“We had more than 80 girls in the gym on a Saturday morning,” she recalled. “Just to walk into gym and see 80 girls playing basketball on a Saturday morning … it made my day. As a general rule, girls are social creatures. For them to go out and shoot in the driveway is probably not going to happen. They want their friends around them. They’ll work hard, but they want the social element.”
Johnson played volleyball, basketball and softball in high school. As a hoops-freak youngster she played in some weekend open gym scrimmages and fundamentals camps, although at that time there wasn’t a separate clinic for girls. Once the drills finished and the scrimmages began, she and the one other girl at the camp became more or less invisible to the other players on the court.
There are no such exclusions when the kids playing are all girls, and there is no great emphasis on winning games on the younger levels of the Youth Hoops program.
“We don’t put much emphasis on winning until they get to the sixth- or seventh-grade level,” she said. “That’s the better way of doing it, teaching them how to play the game when they’re young and focus on the competition side of it later on. It’s helped the girls here; I think we’re seeing it right now. There’s a lot of freshmen on the junior varsity team because they were in the hoops program all the way through. …
“Until you coach, you really don’t get how gratifying it can be. The best thing for me as a coach is watching their development and seeing that moment when something clicks. It’s great to watch what they’re doing now and remember what they were like when they came in. When they start the program, they really don’t know anything about the game. Sometimes it seems like nothing’s happening, as far as making progress … and then it happens. It’s fun.”