Senior Moments

During Dave Blum and Troy Mohr’s days coaching the Glenwood youth travel team together they had a post-practice routine.

Part motivation, part inspiration, the coaches would have their youth team, who practiced at the high school gym in those days, gather at mid-court following a grueling practice.  The coaches would then direct the team to look up at the rafters where state championship banners typically hang.

The rafters were decidedly void of basketball banners.

“Our whole goal, we’d tell them, was to change that,” Mohr said. “There was nothing up there really for boys basketball at the time.”

Blum said the lesson was as much to get a sometimes rambunctious group of boys attention as it was a reminder to them of just how good they could be.

‘‘I’d say, ‘Hey, the reason you’re hurting and you’re sweating and we’re working you hard is because there are no banners on this ceiling,’” Blum said. “The kids had a great attitude so they understood as they got older. They needed to figure that they, maybe, could put a banner up on that wall.”

Less than a decade later, that rambunctious and talented group of youth ballplayers blossomed to form the core of a Glenwood varsity squad that did just that in a 66-62 win over Oskaloosa in the Class 3A state title game to net the school’s first state championship title.

And a state championship banner, as it were, to hang in the rafters.

The Rams’ varsity roster this season listed seven seniors: Nate Mohr, Andrew Blum, Nate Kennedy, Jake Murtfeld, Blake Von Essen, Nate Stouder and Cody Buresh.

All but one –Buresh, who moved into the district before ninth grade – came up through the youth ranks coached by Blum and Mohr. That Ram travel team played in leagues in Omaha and Council Bluffs and won a handful of championships in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and South Dakota.

The starting five for many of those teams in those years?

Mohr, Blum, Kennedy, Murtfeld and Von Essen. All five would go on to play key roles on the Rams’ state championship team.

Murtfeld and Von Essen were both off-the-bench contributors while Kennedy was a two-year starter. And Nate Mohr and Andrew Blum, the youth coaches’ two sons, would go on to start more than 70 varsity games each and end their careers as the Rams’ all-time scoring leaders.

Both Coaches Mohr and Blum recognized early on the group had special talent and oozed with potential.

It just took a little while to gel and for the competitive group to find its groove.

Around fourth grade, Blum said, he and Mohr upgraded the team’s schedule with purpose.

“After that first year, we decided we wanted to always face teams that were, in our minds, as good if not better than us to see what we could do,” Blum said. “When you talk about being competitive, you try and coach your team as best you can and help them win but you want them to get better too.

“We didn’t win all our games. We definitely got beat more initially because we were going against those better teams, but we learned from the losing how to get better.”

The fact this group went on to make such a strong contribution on the varsity -level doesn’t surprise Mohr at all. In fact, he and Blum had discussed that idea with Glenwood varsity head coach Curt Schulte years earlier.

“Dave and I had quite a few conversations along the way that he (Schulte) was going to be getting a pretty special group of boys that were pretty competitive and had high sports IQs,” Mohr said. “He knew what was coming and he took it and developed them even further and obviously did a phenomenal job. Just look where we ended up this year.”
Kennedy can still recall the buzz among his young teammates when Schulte turned up at practices and camps.
“We’d be like ‘That’s the varsity coach.’ You’d want to impress him,” Kennedy said. “But Coach Schulte was always a good guy.”

Schulte admits he had an eye on this group early on. He first recalled seeing the young Blum and Mohr and the rest of the senior group play as fourth graders. Even then, the Glenwood coach said, he could see they were special talents.

“Their dads did a wonderful job coaching them as they came through the program,” Schulte said. “Dave Blum and Troy Mohr, they did a great job teaching them the correct fundaments and putting a lot of time into the youth program and traveling around with them, playing all over. They did a fantastic job fundamentally with this senior group.”

All those games, all those tournaments, all that competition paid off with a tight-knit group that lead this year’s Rams’ squad. This group of seniors had always been close and the historic season only strengthened a bond formed nearly a decade ago.

“Starting playing together at such a young age, we’ve always kind of been friends,” said Kennedy. “This is who we’ve hung out with about every day.”

Every senior interviewed by The Opinion-Tribune credited their close relationships and familiarity with their teammates developed in the youth program as key contributors to the varsity’s success this season.

“Growing up, we won a lot of games and a lot of tournaments and we were always competing against good teams,” said Andrew Blum, who along with Mohr was named to the all-tournament team at state. “We had a good bond and we just sort of clicked.”

Murtfeld agrees. The bond born in youth basketball was evident on and off the court through high school.

“We get along really well, we hang out. We’re good friends,” Murtfeld said.

It’s that bond that not only carried the Rams to the state championship but also lifted them out of the disappointment of last season’s heartbreaking loss to Atlantic in the substate final.

That game, many of the seniors admitted, was a prime motivator heading into the historic 2017-2018 season.

“We all felt like we belonged at state,” Murtfeld said of the team’s mood following last year’s disappointing substate loss. “We all believed in ourselves and we were one of the best teams in Iowa not to get there. It was all just a matter of putting the hard work in with that belief and it all just came together.”

The players flipped that disappointment right into the off-season program Schulte never needed to motivate his team to commit to. Most of the player agreed it was the toughest “off” season they’d had in their four years of high school.

“I really think it’s what drove us to get better,” Buresh, the senior center said, of the team’s loss to Atlantic. “In the summer, all the morning workouts, the lifting, it just drove us because we did not want to feel that again. It was a brutal moment for us and I think it really made us better.”

Turning the page, however, from the loss to a laser focus on senior year wasn’t easy Andrew Blum said.

“You want to take a little time and reflect on it but then you’re back at it because every other team isn’t taking the offseason off to think about it,” Blum said. “When the season starts you want to be ready so you get back at it in the offseason where it counts. You get in the gym and in the weight room, getting your confidence back.”

Schulte adopted the “unfinished business” motto to serve as the team’s driving influence for the season. The motto was always floating just in the background of every practice and pep talk.

“It’s something we talked about after the loss last year,” Andrew Blum said. “And when we were setting goals before the season and talking about what we what to get done and how we’re not finished, we wanted to finish this season.”

“It was something that kind of just went unsaid,” Murtfeld said. “But everybody knew it was there.”

Winning the school’s first state basketball title felt like the end of a long journey to his group of seniors. Their sweat, hard work and dedication are felt all through the basketball program. It’s a group that likely won’t be forgotten at time soon.

“Coming into high school, it felt like were going to do something big the whole time,” Andrew Blum said. “We finally did.

It felt like, finally, we busted out.”

Many of the seniors admitted the Glenwood basketball program didn’t always get much respect and still doesn’t in some circles.

Perceptions are a funny thing. Things are one way until they’re not. A basketball program goes 30 years without a winning season and is in the dumps and then, well, it’s state champs.

“I think we’ve changed it now,” Buresh said of how Glenwood is perceived around the state. “I really think we embraced the idea we’re going to show people how good Glenwood basketball is.

“I think we did that.”

The proof will be hanging in the rafters.