After a few games & seeing some teams, aside from Newman, the middle of the conference is going to be a slugfest of teams capable of beating each other on any given night.
Northwood has played North Butler, Nashua Plainfield & just played West Fork last night.
North Butler has a good team & a nice inside presence in Lewis & Hawker, and then Alemlien being a good outside shooter. Play solid defense & like to push the ball in transition.
Nashua Plainfield relies on their guards to make the offense work & then once teams start guarding them outside, looking for the cutters inside to get quick baskets. Harrington & Franzen both shooting well to start the season & Wilken is helping them out quite a bit also.
West Fork was winless until last night, but played really well against Northwood. Couldn't miss a shot it seemed & moved the ball really well on offense. Lots of backcuts away from the ball that lead to easy inside baskets from crossers into the lane. Shot really well from outside last night also.
Went and saw St. Ansgar play against Hampton last weekend & they have some good players, but just not much depth on the bench. Schutjer can score inside & can get after the boards. Hackbart is a lunch pail type of kid that will get you a little bit of everything on the floor. If they can get the guards to be a little more comfortable with the ball, they will be able to do some things this season also.
Don't know as much about the rest of the teams, but looks like Rockford does well funneling the offense through Lyman & letting him do some work. Wyborny & Arends also help out on the scoring & rebounding side of things.
Central Springs looks like a good portion of their offense goes through Jose & Marino helps out also, along with Froiland doing some lifting on the offensive end. Drew Kelley does a little bit of everything for them also.
Osage has a good solid team that will keep them in every game. Havel & Oberfell lead them in scoring & also rebounding. Knudsen plays a solid game on both ends of the floor.
Newman seems to be the train that will be hard to stop. Taylor & Jennings really get them going on offense & there are plenty of kids that can score on that team. Burt is an assist machine & gets after the boards also. Hamilton, Burt & Castle all are over 30 points scored after just 4 games, so that always helps to have much other scoring to go with 2 kids scoring over 69 points in 4 games. Going to take a total team effort to get a win against Newman.
Will be fun to see how the season rolls along & how the middle of the pack does against each other.