The winter sports season will be in full swing Tuesday, and Aplington-Parkersburg will host Sumner-Fredericksburg for a North Iowa Cedar League crossover doubleheader.
It’ll be the season opener for the Falcon boys, who are coming off a 17-6 campaign last year. With two returning starters, Head Coach Aaron Thomas expects to have a deep rotation to begin the year.
“I do see us playing quite a few guys, especially early, to kind of just figure out who’s going to do what until we figure out an exact rotation,” Thomas says. “Obviously you’re going to have guys, Caleb Campbell and Benny Waller, that are most experienced guys back. They’ll probably lead us in minutes played. It’s great to have Mason Ridder back. He’ll probably start at center, which, you know, we didn’t have a center at all last year. And then after that, it’s pretty wide open. Like I said, with the health of some guys, we got to get some guys healthy and just see where it balances out. But we’ve got about nine, 10 guys right now fighting for those varsity minutes, obviously it’s hard to play 10, but I could see us playing eight for sure, possibly even nine guys in our varsity rotation.”
Benny Waller was second on the team in points per game at 15.7 last year, and Caleb Campbell recorded the second-most rebounds last year with five per game.
The Cougars went 10-14 last year, and Thomas says it’ll be a physical battle.
“They’ve got some good athletes, which we know from football. Coach Quigley always gets his guys to play very hard. It’s usually a very aggressive man to man where they get at you. We were able to jump all over and we shot it really well up there last year. So we’re gonna have to match their physicalness. We’re gonna have to take care of the basketball. That’ll be the keys there.”
The Falcon girls (0-1) will look to bounce back from last week’s 45-33 home loss to Hampton-Dumont-CAL, where they shot just 24 percent, including 1/16 from three-point range.
Coming off a 13-11 season, Sumner-Fredericksburg will play the second half of a back-to-back after Monday’s opener at Tripoli.
The girls game will begin at 6:15 p.m., followed by the boys game.
