Pittsville girls hoops rebuilding in third year under Knott

MARSHFIELD – Two years ago, the Pittsville girls basketball team was 10 points away from making its first State Tournament appearance in 20 years.

Last season, a senior-dominated Panthers team with high hopes of breaking through was knocked out in the Regional Finals round of the playoffs.

Now, this season has been somewhat of a rebuilding year for third-year Head Coach Jason Knott.

“Last year was my second year with the program, and I had that group of then-juniors when I took over two years ago, so we had nine seniors graduate off of last year’s squad, so a very veteran team, and now the opposite this year. I think we lost something like 96 percent of all of our stats,” Knott recently told Gene Delisio, WDLB/WOSQ.

The Panthers came into the current season with just one senior on the team.

“One returning player, Lana Vollert, my one senior who has significant experience, any relevant experience, on the varsity level, so a lot of inexperience, but it’s been quite a shift from the last two years to this year, but that’s one of the wonderful things about coaching is that some years you’re going to have those kids that you can have for multiple years and some years you’re going to have a roster turnover where you get to get back to the basics. This has been a fun group. It’s been fun to have a group that, they’re like sponges soaking it all in and learning and they get better every game,” Knott said.

This year’s group of players has been led by Vollert, the lone member left from the squad that went 24-5 two seasons ago and lost to Lena in a Div. 5 Sectional Final, 66-57, at Antigo High School.

“Lana’s a great story,” Knott added. “Lana was kind of in the shadow of that senior class that graduated, and with her being the senior this year, she has really stepped up into a leadership role on this team. She leads us in points, she’s second in rebounding, leads us in steals. She’s just doing all those things that one would expect from a senior leader on the team.

“We’re about defense. That’s something that I tried to instill in the program three years ago when I took over. Defense meant a great deal to me growing up, took a lot of pride in it. If you can play good defense, you’re going to be in every game every night, because even when the ball’s not going in the basket, as long as you can keep the other team from scoring, you’re going to be in games.”

On the offensive side, the Panthers are trying to replace not one, but two 1,000-point scorers from the past couple years — Reese Grimm and Brynn Friday.

Knott said that job has fallen to everybody on this year’s team, which had five different leading scorers in its first six games.

“You know, it’s nice to have a Reese, a kid who can put up 25, 30 [points] on any given night, but there’s something to be said as a coach about, on any given night, if someone’s cold, someone else is going to put the ball in the basket. And that’s the thing with this team – they’re very selfless. They will get the ball to whoever’s open and put the ball in the basket and there are no hard feelings over who’s scoring or who’s getting the rebounds, and it’s just like a next-person-up approach and I really enjoy that and respect that as a coach.”

Aside from Vollert, this year’s Pittsville squad has primarily featured juniors Addison Elsasser, Brilee Luepke, Halle Friday and Bailey Smazal, sophomore Kendall Knott and freshmen Harper Abel and Brynlee Grimm.

“If you were to look at our minutes played, it’s about equal for all those eight kids,” Knott said. “And everybody has stepped up and kind of taken the spotlight at various times. Right now, that’s been the key to this. There’s not one kid you can stop.”

This year’s roster also includes sophomores Kailyn Grossman and Sloane Withers and freshman Breenna Smazal.

And because of the roster he has this season, Knott has had to adjust his traditional offensive philosophy to fit this year’s squad.

“I’m an inside-out guy as a coach,” Knott admitted. “Well, I have a roster this year that has a lot of kids who can shoot three-pointers, so I had to change my philosophy as a coach. We’re spreading the court and we’re taking way more three-point attempts in a game than historically as a coach that I’m comfortable with, but we’re putting the ball in the basket. When you’ve got five or six kids who can put the ball in the basket from three, the odds of all of them being off on the same night? Not very likely, so eventually we’re going to get to someone who’s going to be hot that night. It’s been a true team approach this year.”  

Something that Coach Knott hasn’t wavered on, however, is first and foremost selling the defensive side of the game, especially to the younger players in his program.  

“We talk about it all the time,” Knott told Delisio. “We want people to go after it and we encourage it in practice. And I coach in our youth program and we play man-to-man defense in our youth programs, too. I’m a basketball purist. I’ll be honest, it’s hard for me to fathom 6th, 7th, and 8th grade teams playing zone defenses, if you’re teaching those concepts. There are games we could win in the youth league by sitting in a zone because there aren’t a lot of kids who can shoot from the perimeter at that age, so when you pack it in in a 2-3 zone at the youth league, I don’t know if that’s what you want to teach. We teach man-to-man defense. We may lose a game by 10 points, but we play man-to-man, even when we’re over-matched physically, so it’s what we do. And we have a saying. ‘Defense plays.’ I’d like it if you put the ball in the basket once in awhile, but if you can play defense, you’re going to find your way on the court for us, and I think that’s the message to kids.”

The Panthers are currently just over .500 overall and sitting at 6-3 and in third place in the Central Wisconsin Conference-South Division.