Hermantown boys basketball coach Andy Fenske after his team's impressive 82-69 win at Duluth Marshall on Thursday night:
"It was that team win that we needed. We talked before the game that we're going against a guy (Duluth Marshall 6-foot-5 senior power Brooks Johnson, a prized Bulldogs recruit) who is bigger, faster and stronger than everyone in their locker room and there's nothing we can do about that. One guy alone can't beat us. But it's the other guys that we can focus on, too. No matter how hard you make it, Brooks is the type of elite player who will get his 25, 30 points a night. I don't know what he finished with – unfortunately, with his injury there – but we held him to 19 points at the half, which is about right where we expected him to be.
We got that total team effort tonight. Landon Burg's hustle plays on defense that was making it hard for Marshall. Unfortunately, for him, he fouled out of the game there, but those efforts don't show up on the scoreboard. Then we had Corbin (Petcoff) and Lance (Jansen) cleaning up the boards, especially on our missed free throws when that's been an Achilles heel for us there the entire season. But it was a great team win. Definitely, one we needed after the stretch of the difficult games we had. And unfortunately, for the next three or four weeks here, we have even more challenging games coming up. There's not an easy game on our remaining schedule. But that's what we need as we battle to reach goal to be competitive in the March playoffs. As always, the objective is to win every night."
Fenske, on what he learned about his young team in the lopsided win against the Hilltoppers:
"Hopefully, the fact that we're continuing to play excellent team basketball, and that we can make what we can make what we call "kills' on defense by making three stops in a row. Tonight, our guys saw how that translates over into big advantages. Marshall was up on us in the first and then all of a sudden, we earned back-to-back kills. The next thing you know, Marshall didn't score for four minutes and we were able to take a six-point lead.
"You can't rush experience, which is established game by game and practice by practice. Due to injuries, we still haven't had a full roster yet so it's a constant battle. Sometimes players can get pretty sick of each other really quick at this point of the season, when you suffer losses, but that's not where these guys are at. They want to be here. They want to be getting better, and they want to do it for each other. We haven't lost the locker room, which is most important."