It was cold dreary night in December. The Wellington boys basketball team was playing in Andale, and was getting beat soundly.
Andale built a 16-3 first quarter lead early and coasted to a 61-35 win. It wasn't that close.
Wellington head coach Brian Buchanan had his face buried in his hands. His team was 0-4, and it looked like the 2009-10 Dukes had no hope of competing in the Ark Valley Chisholm Trail League, let alone with anyone else.
Fast forward to Feb. 12. Wellington was playing the same Andale team to a rowdy full house at home on homecoming night with K-State great Ernie Barrett in attendance. The Crusaders were a grooving, taking a 16-11 first-quarter lead and building it to 17 midway through the fourth quarter.
Wellington was out-shooting, out-rebounding, and quite simply out-playing the Indians en route to a 55-47 victory.
The contrast between the two games was startling. Wellington had arrived.
The Crusaders would go on to finish the season at 8-13, losing to a bigger Circle team in the first round of sub-state 44-35 Tuesday evening.
Even so it was yet another example of the progress this team had made. Wellington had lost to the same team in the same place 50-21 in January. Throw out the free throws, and Wellington wins this game. By the way, the Crusaders did beat the Thunderbirds the week before in a 57-51 home victory.
Neither one of these later games were aberrations. In the AV-CTL DIV there are two rotations. The league teams strap it up in December and go through January on the first rotation of games. The second comes three weeks later after two weeks of mid-season tournaments for boys and girls.
Against all five league opponents, Wellington did better — much better — than the first time around. Looking at the sidebar below, Wellington did better against every league team during the second rotation - and had a net gain of 110 points against the five opponents. That included Kingman and Cleawater which were on the road in the second rotation.
So when did this startling turnaround occur?
Buchanan said it happened in a seventh-place game vs. Mulvane at the Chaparral Roadrunner Classic Tournament in January on a Saturday afternoon when no one was watching.
"I felt as if that was the first time the team started playing together," Buchanan said. "It was like a light bulb went on, and these guys started taking ownership."
Wellington would win that game, and then gave Augusta a scare in its own gym — the first semblance that things were changing for the Crusader program.
The Crusaders then played through the Andover week against the twin tower high schools with mixed reviews.
That setup the second rotation of league, when Wellington's "second season" began. The Crusaders were 4-1 down the stretch before heading to Circle as a No. 5 seed in an eight-team sub-state tourney.
"If we had three more wins, we could have been played Circle at home instead of up there," Buchanan said of the first round sub-state game. "I told the boys playing on the road is good for a 10-point deficit before you step on the court. And, yet, we really had a chance of winning it."
Such talk would have been unrealistic in December.
Wellington came in the season having lost its top seven players from 2008-09. Of the 1,329 points scored last year, only 23 of them were made by players from this year's team.
Wellington then lost promising sophomore Taylan Ybarra, who injured his shoulder in football. It was chaotic from the start to say the least.
The Crusaders immediately clunked in the Kingman Tournament finishing in eighth place including a seventh place game to Kingman — the Eagles first varsity win in football or basketball.
There were murmurs in the community that Wellington wouldn't win a game.
Wellington would get its first win in January to Kingman, but it had to work awfully hard to get it. And when Wellington was scraping out victories against Clearwater and El Dorado, people were already calling the Dukes overachievers.
But some key elements occurred in the season that kept making Wellington better.
Jordan Edwards, a senior, really took the team on his shoulders and carried the Dukes down the stretch. He rarely had a game under single digits in the latter part of the season.
Also, Wellington's 2-3 zone defense worked wonders. Force a high school team to shoot outside, especially in today's basketball climate where good shooting is the exception more than the rule, and you have something.
The Crusaders also saw the maturation of two young players in Levi Gurley and Dylan Heath, who were becoming much more effective penetrating the ball inside. Levi Anderson was doing some good things at the forward position.
And now when it comes November 2010, talk of “expectations”, something the Wellington boys basketball program has enjoyed in the past, will resurface again.
"It all depends what we do in the off season," Buchanan said. "No one is going away, we have to work hard or we will be a step behind."
Chances are a step behind next year, won't be as far back as this team was to start this season.
Wellington’s AV-CTL DIV first rotation:
Game Point differential
Wellington 35 Andale 61 -26
Wellington 32 Rose Hill 61 -29
Wellington 50 Kingman 41 +9
Wellington 20 Circle 56 -36
Wellington 57 Clearwater 56 +1
Wellington’s AV-CTL DIV second rotation:
The third column “Point swing” compares the point differential total of the first rotation games to the second. For example Wellington lost by 26 vs. Andale the first time around, but won by 8 the second time around, thus point swing is 34 points.
Game Point diff. Point swing
Wellington 55 Andale 47 +8 +34
Wellington 35 Rose Hill 47 -12 +17
Wellington 63 Kingman 46 +17 +8
Wellington 57 Circle 51 +6 +42
Wellington 56 Clearwater 46 +10 +9
Total point differential: +29 +110 pts.
