EVANSVILLE - Steve Schreiber is the new head coach of the Brandon-Evansville girls basketball program and as the start of the season approaches, he isn’t rushing into things too much.
“This is the third program that I’m stepping into and I think one of the things I’ve learned is that slow is good and that we really need to make sure that we’re understanding what we’re doing,” Schreiber said. "We're going to keep things really simple. I want the girls to have the opportunity just to kind of feel what's going on around them and then react to it.”
Schreiber accepted the B-E coaching job back in May after previous head coach Zach Traphagen accepted a job at Minnewaska Area High School.
Schreiber moved to the area in early August and got to know the team within the rules that the Minnesota State High School League provides.
“We got quite a bit in but it wasn’t like I would do for a normal summer,” he said. “The tough part was I didn’t live down here yet. With the travel, I was still two and a half hours away. So I feel like I got to know them a little bit and know where their skill sets were at. It was more of a learning situation for me than it was of me implementing my program and everything else that will have to happen throughout the course of the year here.”
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In addition to working with the players on the court, Schreiber is excited to once again teach in a smaller school district.
“I love it here so far,” he said. “I really enjoyed the teaching aspect in Menahga. I'll see these girls in ninth grade, 10th grade, and 11th grade. So you really get to know them. Working at Bemidji was great. I only got to teach 7th-grade science, so I never got to teach them those students again after that. That was kind of a bit of a push for me to get back to a smaller school.”
Schreiber coached at Bemidji for the last six seasons where he had an 80-77 record and coached the team to two Section 8-3A championship game appearances. He coached the Bemidji team during its transition to the 4A level this past season.
Prior to coaching at Bemidji, Schreiber coached for seven seasons at Menahga where the program posted a 75-106 record during those seasons.
Schreiber is excited to work for the school district and work with the program moving forward.
“I’m just excited to be here,” Schreiber said. “This is a team that I think we can do great things with, I think you will see great growth. I think in three to five years, we'll compete with anybody in the area here and this year, I think we will surprise some teams as well.”
The Chargers are coming off of a season where they finished with a 12-15 record and were the No. 4 seed in the Section 6A North. The Chargers beat Murdock-Kerkhoven-Sunburg 51-48 in the first round of the playoffs but lost 74-43 to eventual Section 6A champion, Hancock in the subsection semifinals.
With the start of the 2022-23 season nearly here, Schreiber is giving his players the green light to shoot if they have a good opportunity.
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“We'll set up a skeleton offense with the mantra of, ‘if you can score, score,’” he said. “What I do with my offense is we look through a scoring progression. So in our sets, we're going to say, ‘if this happens, this is how you can score, and we'll work on that next sprint progression. If this happens and we can't score out of it, this is the next one. And then we kind of work our way down the ladder.’ They're going to get a skeleton offense and get 10 scoring progressions that they can work through throughout these first couple of weeks.”
The Chargers have liked working with their new head coach.
“It’s been really productive,” senior Sydney Schaefer said. “He provides a lot of opportunities for us to get better. We've already had camps, and clinics. We've had a lot of opportunities to help with the younger girls. Coming up this winter, we're going to have a lot more with our younger programs.”
Schreiber has emphasized the importance of toughness and rebounding to the team.
“If we're not going to be tall, we're going to have to be tough,” he said. “We talked about it and said, ‘the team that ends up on the floor more than the other team typically can compete. A team that can rebound can compete. And if we're not going to be tall, we're going to have to work hard to get those rebounds.' I think our stress to them this year is going to be work ethic and just going out and trying to outwork the other teams. I don’t think we’re going to be taller than most teams, and there are going to be teams that have stronger basketball skills than we do. I think we can make up for some of that in our fundamentals and if we can kind of build some more basketball IQ as well. I believe if we outwork most teams and learn the game on the fly, we’ll give ourselves a chance against most teams.”
Fundamentals have been a big emphasis so far in these early practices.
“We’ve been working on fundamentals a lot since we’re all getting to know each other,” junior Kylee Dingwall said.
Schreiber and the team are excited about working with middle and elementary school students to enhance the youth basketball program.
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This has been one of Schreiber’s main goals with the program.
“He's trying to like instill in the younger kids that our program is a good program that you should want to be a part of,” Schaefer said. “We work with kids to make them better, to make them feel special and I think he just wants to get everybody involved.”
The Chargers begin their season on the road on Thursday, Dec. 1 at Upsala.
“We’re really excited about this year,” Schaefer said. “We definitely want to be better than we were last year and our big goal is to catch up to some of the teams in our section that have done really well in the past. We want to be right there with them.”
Kami Dingwall and Heidi Elmer are assistant coaches for the team.
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