Ben Murphy
Sports Scene
After last year’s record-setting campaign, this year’s Bay City Western boys’ basketball team has had to grow up fast and replace all but one starter.
But that one starter, senior Matt Costello, has the ability to carry the team on his back, with the hopes of carrying the team back to the Class A state finals.
Costello showed how valuable he is to the Warriors in a January 20 double-overtime thriller against Flint Southwestern Academy that Bay City Western won 80-75. Costello scored a career-high 49 points and grabbed 20 rebounds, as the Warriors improved to 7-3 on the season.
Costello’s 49 points was just two shy of the Bay City Western school record of 51 points scored by Mark Wittbrodt in the 1990-91 season.
“We are a very inexperienced team with only one starter back [Michigan State University commit Matt Costello] from last season and other seniors with very little game experience,” Western head coach Chris Watz said. “We are learning to play as an entirely new team due to being inexperienced and young – learning to develop our own identity.”
In a game played January 10, the Warriors topped Midland 61-54. Connor Foley had 20 points, Matt Costello had 18, and John Costello had 11. The Warriors are beginning to come together as a team, and the other teams in the Saginaw Valley League are taking notice.
“Based on our personnel and our inexperience, our team is playing about where I thought we’d be,” Watz said. “We had a slip up early on in the season in a game that I think we should have won but we didn’t. We learned from that and have played pretty solid since then. We still have a long way to go, however.”
Watz remains optimistic, partly based on close losses to Detroit Martin Luther King (73-72 on December 29) and Saginaw Arthur Hill (73-63 on January 6).
“We’ve played top-tier teams very well, and we’ve had underclassmen step into roles and perform them well,” he said. “I’m looking for daily improvement in our understanding of the game and our intensity in the game.”
Also playing into the fact the Warriors have more losses this year is that they aren’t flying under anyone’s radar after claiming their first regional championship in 2011.
“We are now the hunted instead of the hunters,” Watz said. “That is a new dynamic for our program. We need to understand this concept and play at an extremely high-effort, high energy level from the beginning of every game to the end of every game.”