|
We had a decent year the year before and then this
year. The fourth game down tells you something about this team. We lost
to the alums! We had all these guys coming back from a team that was
14-7 and this team ends up 9-11. This was the first time in five years
that we didn’t play some kind of post season game. They played hard for
every one of those wins, but the rest of the league was pretty sound. I
thought with those big guys all coming back with another year of
experience and Soriano coming in with a renewed energy of liking
basketball we would have a better record. At least we did beat West
once.
We returned four players from the previous year;
Marc Soriano, Jerry Gundlefinger, Mark Bratonia and Steve Boyce. I added
seniors Rick Blatt, Gene Jarstad, Marty Love, Bob Machinski, Bruce
Miller and Larry Winslow to the team. And I included two more juniors,
Tom Berentsen and Clark Blaisdell in addition to Boyce.
Blaisdell was an exceptional young man. Blott
played well at times. I’ll tell you he could do the things that you
wanted him to do. He was a football kid too and he was tough. Machinski
was small and quick. Larry Winslow transferred in from West. Bruce
Miller was on the team and was a good kid. Marty Love was also a good
kid, played hard and tried his best. Love was a good player but he
wasn’t a great shooter. Miller was not a great shooter either, but a
terrific kid. He had a lot of fight to him.
This was Tom Berentsen first year on the team.
Berentsen was pure shooter and not very confident in himself, but boy he
did a good job. In fact the reason you’re proud of a guy is that he
plays as well as he can play almost every night and #41 was another one.
Jarstad was not in any way, shape or form what you would consider, at
that time, a basketball player but man he could run all night and he
loved the game. He could run and run and run and so he was a joy to
have there.
The front court guys were Boyce, Gundlefinger and
Soriano and that was the main source of our scoring. We lost our guards
from ’69, so we didn’t have any guards coming back. I kind of had a
choice of the four guards; Miller, Winslow Love and Machinski. Other
then Winslow’s six points a game, we didn’t get an awful lot of scoring
out of the guards.
Jorgy Nelson was our manager for three years. Jorgy
was smart and quick witted. I can remember this one time as the game is
going along and a kid came out of the game and sat down on the bench and
said, “Jorgy, get me a drink.” And Jorgy said, “Go get it yourself, I’m
watching the game.”
The first game
against O’Dea was an awful lot of fun to coach because you could start
making all the mothers happy. You could get their kid in there and they
could play in front of the crowd. You look at the scores of the rest of
these games and they weren’t real high scoring games. As opposed to some
of the other teams where you’re scoring in the 80s and 90s playing the
same style of play and doing exactly the same stuff, we were now in the
60s and 70s. The exception was the North Kitsap game where we scored 97.
North only scored 36 in that game so that’s a 61-point win. A bright
spot in what was not a great year. |
