Brone rides basketball passion to rewriting G-E-T record book

Mason Brone has loved basketball for as long as he can remember.

One of his first memories is being three playing basketball on a mini hoop with his grandpa. When his father Mark, who played at both Cochrane-Fountain City and UW–Stevens Point, coached Mason’s older sister and her team, he would sometimes bring Mason along to the gym as well.

Right from those early days, Brone caught the basketball bug that has taken him all the way to rewriting the Gale-Ettrick-Trempealeau record book as the program’s all-time assists leader.

“Since a very young age, I’ve always been in the gym, always been working,” Brone said.

Current G-E-T head coach Ian Anderson can attest to Brone’s relentless drive. Anderson was already part of the program as an assistant before being elevated to head coach this season, so he already knew Brone plenty well.

But with Anderson looking to put his own mark on the program and needing to have a veteran player take on a leadership role, it’s been a boon for him to have a player like Brone leading the charge.

“It’s really fun to coach a player like Mason, first of all, because he puts in some much extra time,” Anderson said. “The amount of time he spends in this gym, spring, summer, fall, even during the season, mornings, weekends — sometimes I tell him he needs to take some time off. So, it’s fun to coach somebody that cares that much and is dedicated.”

Brone, who is currently a junior, came into the program as a freshman and immediately made an impact as a starter right out of the gates. His first two years, he had the opportunity to play alongside Cody Schmitz, one of the most prolific scorers in the history of Wisconsin high school basketball.

Brone credits Schmitz for helping him learn how to keep his body right and build up the necessary mental resolve to thrive on the court. Brone led the Red Hawks in assists as both a freshman and sophomore — with Schmitz frequently being the one finishing off the play by putting the ball in the cup.

With Schmitz gone, the responsibility has only ramped up for Brone this winter. He’s been asked to take on a much greater scoring role and leads the team with 19.4 points per game while still averaging a career-high 7.2 assists per game.

Earlier this month, Brone solidified his spot in the G-E-T record book by eclipsing Riley Bambenek’s mark of 359 assists to become the program’s leader in career assists. 

“He sees a lot of the passes that a lot of the other guys struggle to see, or they see it too late,” Anderson said of Brone. “He’s usually a step ahead with his vision, and that just benefits everybody in the whole program.”

Brone’s blossomed as a leader on the court as well, something his fellow team co-captains Jackson Burns and Brecken Ebersold can vouch for.

Burns recalls a game against Aquinas earlier in the season where things weren’t going G-E-T’s way and, when his head was down, Brone was there to pick him up.

“I think we turned the ball over. I might have had my head down coming back, and he just patted me on the back and said ‘you’re good, next one,’” Burns said. “Just keeping us up, knowing that basketball is a game of runs. So, we went on our own run and that game is close later on.”

In a recent rivalry game against Arcadia where tensions were high, Ebersold was hit with a technical foul and Brone was quick to get to him to calm him down.

“I can say personally when I got a little worked up and got T’d up, Mason’s the first guy to be there like ‘calm down, it’s not worth it,’” Ebersold said. “He’s always keeping us in the game and making sure we’re not drifting off and getting too high above ourselves.”

With the remainder of this season and all of next year still to play, Brone’s story as a Red Hawk has plenty of chapters still left to write. Though no matter what his basketball journey holds next, he’s immensely grateful for all that it’s given him already

“Pretty much everything, man,” Brone said when asked what basketball has meant to him. “All the connections you make — all my friends really came from basketball and those are friendships that’ll last me a lifetime. It gives me peace of mind. If I’m having a bad day, I just go out in the driveway, shoot some shots and end up feeling better. It’s just my outlet.”