The Boys Basketball team will be on their way to finding a new identity for this upcoming season. Although a majority of the team is able to return for the 2024-25 season, the team loses a key player in Justin McIllwain. Let’s take a look at what is ahead for the Varsity Boys Basketball Team.
There were 3 seniors on this year’s Varsity Boys Basketball team. Those 3 were Liam Pothoff, Jace Mitchell, and Justin McIllwain. It is no secret that the team will feel a loss in the graduation of 3 year starter, Justin McIllwain. Justin has played a large part in the success of the Boys Basketball program. He has helped to lead the program to its first district championship in years and their first conference championship since 1987. Justin’s departure will leave a large gap to be filled by those coming up from JV and the juniors on varsity who will have to step up to a bigger role on the team in the upcoming 2024-25 season.
Without these seniors, the juniors will need to step up to fill the role that they played for the program. No doubt, the juniors will be able to lead the team through the 2024-25 season and reach peak performances. These upcoming seniors will have no troubles being leaders for their team and help them reach championships.
Next year, the team will have a plethora of experienced varsity players, which will greatly benefit the incoming varsity players who will fill the spots of graduating seniors. The varsity team will have plenty of sources of leadership because of the amount of current varsity juniors on the team. Some current JV players are already involved in the team, such as Jax Wedeven, who was pulled up for districts this year. Wedeven and other players such as Hudson Hulst are on track to be on the varsity team next year, and are already preparing for what that will require of them.
When looking forward to next year’s season, the change in conferences is a huge factor. Every four years the conferences are realigned in the MHSAA, this was one of those years. This means that the last conference realignment happened in the school year 2021-2022. Hamilton was then assigned to the OK-Blue playing Allendale, Coopersville, Fruitport, Holland Christian, Spring Lake, Unity Christian, and West Catholic. Now we have been assigned to the OK-Black conference and will be playing Holland, Holland Christian, Unity Christian, Spring Lake, Zeeland East, and Zeeland West. This will change the competition dynamic because of skilled teams like Zeeland. Boy’s Basketball lost to Zeeland East early in this season but have worked hard for the remainder of their season and are preparing for next season to be playing these tougher teams. Holland Christian, Unity Christian, and Spring Lake will be fairly familiar as we are staying in the same conference with the addition of Holland. The loss of West Catholic and Coopersville will help our sports as they were some of the best schools in our previous conference at basketball. The new alignment has some positives and negatives but Boys Basketball is always looking for a challenge to make them better!
This upcoming season for Boys Basketball will be different, but exciting, as they return in a new conference and will have a large group of returners.