By Greg Bates
SPORTS EDITOR
DE PERE – After advancing all the way to the Division 1 state semifinals in 2021-22, De Pere girls’ basketball coach Jeremy Boileau knew his program would be going through a little transition period.
Gone to graduation were four starters — including the program’s all-time leading scorer, a Butler University signee and Ms. Do Everything, Jordan Meulemans.
Heading into the summer prior to the 2022-23 season, Boileau was banking on his lone returning starter, Claire Bjorge, to become the centerpiece of the team and provide plenty of points and leadership. However, the Division I recruit, who averaged 15.7 points per game as a sophomore, suffered a torn ACL and MCL.
Bjorge’s junior campaign was over months before it was even going to start.
That meant its top six players from the previous season were gone. De Pere would go into the 2022-23 with an entirely new starting lineup filled with inexperience.
Predicted preseason by WisSports.net to finish in the middle of the pack in the competitive Fox River Classic Conference (FRCC), De Pere took its lumps early on and its 4-7 record reflected that.
But then the light bulb came on for the coaches and players. Switching to a new offense, the Redbirds’ players caught on and bought in. As a result, the girls won 11 of their final 13 regular-season games and secured a second-place finish in the FRCC for the third straight year.
“It’s definitely a gratifying end result when you can finish a season the way we did,” said Boileau, who was named the FRCC Coach of the Year for the second time in his seven years at De Pere. “Players never gave up when they had every reason to give up. They believed and followed the process to improve and get better.”
The fact that her team was predicted to finish out of the top five in the conference race was motivation for junior post Sophie Hafeman.
“I feel like we definitely did surprise some teams, because we were really overlooked at the beginning of the season, and we had to work really hard to get to a better place,” Hafeman said. “I think our practices, like the intensity, started going up and the communication was better. I think we realized that we can actually do something with the season and make it good.”
With it being her senior year, Alli Wettstein had high hopes for her team even though it was a bunch of inexperienced varsity players.
“I think once our record started falling below the .500 line, we all started to see that we needed to pick it up more, put more effort into it,” Wettstein said. “We also (saw) the importance of going game speed at practice and doing our best in practice, and that really carried over into our games as we started doing much better in our games.”
Hafeman — who finished as the team’s leading scorer at 14.1 points and leading rebounder at 7.7 per game — couldn’t practice the first week because of an injury.
De Pere was so depleted through its first practices of the season that Boileau had to bring up freshmen so there were enough players for his varsity to go 5-on-5.
Boileau couldn’t find consistency from his players early on.
“Going into it, we knew we had a lot of teaching and a lot of patience,” Boileau said. “We got tested a lot in the first two months and as a team we couldn’t grasp how we needed to do things from a philosophy standpoint within our offense, our sets. We had to stop adding stuff, we had to take stuff away to keep things simple. The big thing was just getting everyone healthy and kind of together in what we’re doing.”
Sophomore Jaden Ciesielczyk missed 10 games from mid-December to the end of January, but De Pere overcame just another challenge.
“After some very tough losses and some injuries, we just kind of turned it around and we found our way of playing,” junior guard Kaylei Anderson said. “We learned to communicate and we had a lot of determination on and off the court. We learned how to step it up together and not just individually.”
Boileau pinpoints the turning point of the Redbirds’ season when it traveled to Green Bay Southwest on Jan. 10 and pulled off a 32-27 victory in scrappy fashion.
“Not very good offensively, but good enough to win,” Boileau said. “It showed that, all right, we’re defending, and at the end of the season we allowed the second least points in the conference behind Notre Dame. … Defense carried us, and we take a lot of pride in our program in how we defend and I feel like that won a lot of games for us.”
Right around that time, Boileau did something he’s never done during his coaching tenure: switched his team’s offensive system.
The De Pere players had been taught a 5-out scheme since they started in the program. Boileau was changing to a 4-out system to utilize his 6-foot post, Hafeman.
“It took a lot of work,” Anderson said. “We spent many hours in the gym just trying to figure out what was the best for us and how we could incorporate everyone. We had a lot of where we weren’t using our left side or we weren’t using our post, and we had to learn how to use everything and learn about all the things we could do with 4-out and not just what we could do with 5-out. We had to switch that around and learn how to use Sophie.”
De Pere banked on its defense to keep them in games while its offense slowly came to form.
In the final 13 games of the regular season, De Pere’s defense allowed just 38.6 points per game.
“We definitely didn’t learn the new offense overnight, but we just trusted in our coaches, practiced it a ton and it grew with us and we grew to play it well,” Wettstein said. “Once it started going well for us, we started trusting in it even more and we eventually learned different variations of it where we could just do it without thinking and we perfected it.”
In the first 13 games of the season, Hafeman averaged 10.1 points per game. In the final 12 games, she put in 18.4 points per game.
“I usually would be at the 3-point line like cutting in and then finding opportunities in the post, but I just stayed [in the post] the entire time instead and tried to get my teammates open as well, so that’s kind of how it changed,” Hafeman said. “I just sat there mostly, like getting people open.”
Despite its great second-half push, De Pere was given a No. 12 seed in the playoffs and had to travel to No. 5-seeded Divine Savior Holy Angels. The Redbirds battled but fell, 44-42, ending their season at 15-10.
Along with Boileau winning FRCC Coach of the Year, a few of his players were honored by the conference coaches. Hafeman was named second-team all-conference and Wettstein and Anderson were awarded honorable mention.
De Pere heads into next season returning five of its top scorers from this season as well as Bjorge, who will be back for her senior year.
There’s a lot of optimism from the players and coaches.
“We’re really looking to build on what we did this year,” Hafeman said. “I think that it will be really good with Claire back. We’re hoping to come for some of the teams that we did end up losing to like Bay Port and Manitowoc (Lincoln) — games that we maybe shouldn’t have lost.”