What happens to a team when the roster shrinks? For the girls’ basketball program, that question is no longer hypothetical.
A program once poised to expand, boasting large numbers from the incoming class of 2028 from last year and expectations for even more from the class of 2029, now faces a stark reality. After losing three seniors and four freshmen from the previous season, the team has entered an unforeseen rebuilding stage with a minimal number of players.
“It really is a situation that is just so unheard of until probably recent years, for a high school to have this issue with numbers that we’re having right now,” senior forward Maeda Bradbury said. “When we came in my freshman year, we had roughly 25 to 30 girls on a team. There were eight girls in my grade, specifically.”
The drop in participation has forced the program to merge what was once a full junior varsity and varsity lineup into a single, minimal rotation. With only five players returning who have varsity experience, getting rest during games has become increasingly difficult.
“We only had one freshman come out this year from the middle school without recruiting,” Bradbury said. “Since then, we have been able to recruit a few more, but as far as basketball prior knowledge and prior skill, prior training, there really is just none there besides people who are returning.”
This season’s varsity roster includes nine players: three seniors, one junior, one sophomore and four freshmen. The wide range of ages and experience levels has created a unique environment for the season, especially for first-year varsity player Kali Messer.
“It was a huge switch,” freshman Messer said. “I wasn’t ready to be on varsity straight out of middle school. There’s a lot more pressure on me, but I think I’ve been doing well.”
Players have felt that pressure early, as the team has opened the season with four losses to Lafayette Central Catholic, Twin Lakes, Tipton and Wabash. Despite these early blows, the team has shown improvement, scoring a season high of 33 points against Wabash.
This difficult start raises the important question of why such an unusual situation happened in the first place.
“High school basketball is hard,” Bradbury said. “You come from playing against seventh and eighth graders, up to a level where you’re fourteen playing against eighteen and nineteen-year-olds. It’s a lot you have to prepare for mentally and then just go out and do it, and I don’t feel like a lot of people are mentally strong enough to handle that and withhold that.”
Some student-athletes who demonstrate that mental and physical grind choose other options and decide to participate in different winter sports instead.
“I noticed a lot more freshmen chose to do girls’ wrestling rather than basketball this year,” Messer said.
Regardless of the reasons behind this surprising decline in numbers, the players who remain are determined to make the most of the season and enjoy it together.
“Honestly, this year with our lowest participation that we’ve probably ever had in the history of Logansport High School,” Bradbury said. “I’m having the most fun. Everybody that’s there right now wants to be there and wants to work hard. We’re all very positive with each other, so I think in the case that we had a bigger team with terrible attitudes and a very small, unskilled team with great attitudes, I would pick this team every time.”
