Hermantown boys basketball coach Andy Fenske on his high-flying, 5-0 Hawks:
“It was great to get out of our 19-day break between games. We hadn’t played since the Showcase down at Benilde until our holiday tournament. Down at Delano, we got the chance to run into Big Lake, who will be a contender in Section 5 this year. They are a deep team with many shooters on their squad. Our game went wire to wire with them, which ended up with the Hornets hitting a buzzer-beater to close the game to 3 points. That moved us to the championship game against Delano at their own tournament. We took our first-half lead of 2 points and blew it open to 10 points pretty quickly. Throughout the tournament, we never trailed by more than 4 points, which was encouraging to see after such a long break against two top teams in Class AAA.
From here on out we hit some major hurdles as we have a busier January having to reschedule a few games from December. This week we’re opening at North Branch, which is a section game tonight (Tuesday), then we finally get a home game Friday vs. an offensive-heavy Rock Ridge team, then we follow it up with a game vs. Sauk Rapids-Rice at Duluth East.
Some of our biggest games this month are going to be road tests, which is what we want right now. We need to be battle-tested on the road before we can make a run deep into the post-season this year. We need to head to Duluth East for a tough match-up on the 10th then at Bemidji on the 17th. Those are two big AAAA games that we’d love to snag on the road.”
HAWKS UPCOMING GAMES
Tonight — at North Branch, 6 p.m.
Friday — host Rock Ridge, 7:15 p.m.
Saturday — vs. Sauk Rapids-Rice at Lake Superior Classic (Duluth East), 1:45 p.m.
Jan. 10 — at Duluth East, 7 p.m.
Jan. 12 — host Cloquet, 7:15 p.m.
Jan. 15 — host Grand Rapids, 5 p.m.
Jan. 17 — at Bemidji, 7:15 p.m.
📷 Howie Hanson