Boys Basketball Season Tips Off

The Greendale High School Boys Basketball team is in its third week of the season, and the team will play three games this week: Tuesday at Bradley Tech, Thursday at home against Ronald Reagan, and Friday at Milwaukee South.

Even though the Panthers just played their first regular season game on Tuesday, they have been practicing since Nov. 13 and also played three scrimmages last weekend at West Bend East.

Senior Vlado Zrnic explains what the team needs to do to be a conference contender and how they prepared for the season over the summer.

“We played summer league, had team workouts, and some individuals played AAU,” Zrnic said. “We need to be fundamentally sound. We need to set the tone and have balanced scoring from six different players. We also need to do many defensive drills, drills that require us to practice our fundamentals, and we also need to work on shooting drills.”

The Panthers have had a lot of recent success. They made the state semi-finals in the 2013-14 and 2014-15 seasons. The last two seasons they made the regional semifinal and the regional final.

Senior Andrew Sodemann has goals he hopes the team can achieve.

“I think our team goal is to make another deep run in the playoffs,” Sodemann said. “If we play together we can surprise a lot of people. Everybody needs to contribute, whether they’re starting or not, and they have to make plays in whatever situation. I thought we played pretty good for our first game. A lot of people made plays when they had the chances.”

Although they played well, the Panthers ended up losing their first game against Bradley Tech 82-77 in overtime.

“I think we have a nice team,” Panthers head coach Ryan Johnsen said. “We have a great group of kids who are eager to get better. They’re also all very easy to coach. Our team has strengths of shooting and our main weakness is lack of experience.”

The Panthers bounced back with a win on Thursday in blowout fashion against Ronald Reagan. The score at halftime was 22-15, and then the Panthers completely dominated the second half, winning 61-21.

The Panthers have one more game tonight against Milwaukee South. As the seniors and head coach said, the Panthers have many positive areas and have good ways to improve throughout the season.