2017-18 Season Preview

Pine City Pioneer, Jesse Logan
Picture: Mike Gainor

With a deep senior class and five underclassmen who appear ready to make significant contributions, the Pine City Dragons boys basketball team appears primed for success during the 2017-18 season. After posting 20 wins for the second time in three years last year, this incarnation of the Dragons has the potential to be one of the best in school history. Pine City finished 22-7 a season ago while earning second place in their subsection, and will return four of their five starters.

“It feels good to be back at it,” said Head Coach Kyle Allen. “We’ve been getting ready for six or seven weeks now, there’s a lot that goes into it. We’re excited. We’re going to be relying on a lot experience that we bring back. A lot of guys got experience last year but some have experience from the past two or even three years at the varsity level. This is a group that has gone through it, they know how we do things.”

The Dragons have a quick start to the season with two games in the first 24 hours of action, and will play a total of three games in the Twin Cities during the month of December, including a game at Target Center on Saturday, Dec. 2 against Duluth Marshall. Tougher opponents have also been added to help push this Pine City team early.

“This group has been to the Target Center before, so we were comfortable with that going in,” said Allen. “We were also really excited to add Minneapolis Southwest to the schedule, it’s a Class AAAA school so we will absolutely have our hands full with them. But it’s great to be able to add a team of that caliber to our schedule that wants to play us.”

The Dragons have come a long way over the seven years that Allen has been at the helm of the program. After ranking 117th out of 124 teams in Class AA in QRF in his first season, Pine City’s improvements have been steady. Last season’s one-for-the-ages storyline even saw the team featured in a national piece by the Wall Street Journal, with added media coverage by Fox 9, KFAN, GoNews, and others. With nearly all of the key pieces returning, high hopes are abounding.

“I have been better at allowing myself to look at the program as a whole and see the big picture,” Allen said when asked to reflect. “Sometimes we get caught up looking at the next game or next practice, but we have a bigger purpose. We’re trying to create great young men. We have huge, high expectations for these guys. We want them to be elite young men. It’s a big part of what we do and what we believe in. We hope the things we’re doing help them be better prepared for the world that awaits them once their time here is done.”

The returning roster is centered on three seniors who have played together since fifth grade. Jake Rademacher and Clay Logan are returning All Section and All Conference award recipients, while Jake Lunceford is a returning All Conference Honorable Mention player. The boys have established a bond and have a real trust for one another on the floor and off. The senior group is large with Casey Foster Damien Schwab, Kordell Major, and Riley Palmer all ready to have roles as well.

“This team has been together for a long time,” said Rademacher. “We have a huge group of seniors. It’s coach Allen’s biggest group of seniors yet and we’ve been through a lot. The JV Coach is my dad, Jason Rademacher, and when we were younger he coached us at tournaments all over Wisconsin and Minnesota. He’s been there with us all the way through. We’ve all gotten to know each other inside and out, so that also makes it special.”

In addition to relying on each other, Rademacher, Logan, and Lunceford will look to outstanding junior shooting guard Nick Hansmann to help put points on the board in their up-tempo style. Hansmann is also a returning All Conference player who comes in off of a breakout football season as the Dragons starting quarterback. Hansmann began to build on his relationship with Logan, the football team’s starting wide receiver.

“Nick is a really good shooter,” said Logan. “He’s a really good defender. This past football season I got to be on the same team as him and in the same locker room as him. We might not have connected on a whole lot of plays but I just came to respect him for how hard he works and how hard he plays. He fits really well with us on the basketball court.”

The team also has other talented underclassmen in juniors Quentin Miklya and Jake Adams, and sophomores Seth Logan and Konnor Jusczak. In all, Pine City has about 75 kids out for basketball in grades 7-12. Still, with a lot of mouths to feed and only five players on the court at a time, the team will be led by the three senior returning starters.

 “Jake Rod I trust,” said Allen. “He’s a returning captain and he’s been a captain since he was a sophomore. He learned how to be a captain by studying Kole (Jusczak) and Noah (Adams). He’s our Swiss army knife, he can do everything on the court. Clay is one of the best high school scorers in the area. He has the ability to put the ball in the hole, no two ways about it, and in multiple ways. He’s upped his game over the summer and has added more to his repertoire that’s going to make him even more deadly. Lunceford we trust to go and hunt down the other team’s best player. We turn Lunce loose on whoever that is. He uses his athleticism, mobility and strength to do that. He’s really come a long way in that.”

The Great River Conference was won by Hinckley-Finlayson last season, a break from the norm in a long line of Braham-dominant years. The Dragons play in Section 6 AAA, which may well be the most difficult section in the state, all four classes combined. Even so, the goals haven’t changed.

“Coach has always talked about putting a year on the banner,” added Logan. “That’s what we want to do. We were close last year and we made a good run in the playoffs but we didn’t get that year on the banner. That’s what we want. We want to win the conference and then have a full head of steam, playing great heading into the playoffs.”

The season begins on Friday, Dec. 1 at home when the Dragons face the Ogilvie Lions.