Wildcats look to run, compete for Dairyland title

The Blair-Taylor boys basketball team will have many new faces, but the team again hopes to play at a pace that challenges its opponents.

Head coach Randy Storlie enters his 43rd season at the helm and will coach his 1,000th career game later this season, one of the first coaches to accomplish the feat in Wisconsin boys basketball history. With four wins, he will move into second place on the all-time wins list, be-hind only Jerry Petitgoue, formerly of Cuba City and Gratiot. 

Storlie will enter this season with a lot of new players as most of the contributors from last season’s 19-7 team graduated. The only returning regular is CJ Dummer, who was a sec-ond-team all-conference pick last year and was second on the team in scoring, averaging 13.5 points per game.

“He will be asked to do the bulk of the scoring for us,” Storlie said. 

While it lacks experience, the longtime coach said he likes the makeup of his roster this season. He said he has a “real team-oriented group” that he hopes will improve throughout the season. He hopes his team’s speed will be an advantage.

“We are very fast and will cause problems in the open court, we hope,” Storlie said. “We will take a lot of shots and we need to make them as we are very undersized overall on the de-fensive end.”

In addition to Dummer, Storlie said the team needs guards Austin Olson and Collin Johnson to make shots and post players in Brady Thompson and Adam Halverson to control the paint. While the team lacks height overall, Halverson is listed at six-foot-five and figures to see quite a big jump in minutes during his junior season.

Storlie said the conference is going to be very competitive, but considers last year’s most dominant teams, Osseo-Fairchild and Cochrane-Fountain City, to be the favorites. C-FC went 20-0 in the Dairyland Conference-Small Division and went on to win the WIAA State Championship last year. B-T tied with Alma Center Lincoln for second in the DC-Small. O-F easi-ly won the DC-Large division, posting a 17-3 record — seven games better than second-place Whitehall. Both C-FC and O-F are returning several key players. 

The Wildcats began their season with a home game against Osseo-Fairchild on Tuesday of this week. The team plays at Melrose-Mindoro next Thursday.