A Season of Firsts

The 2014-15 high school basketball season has been anything but normal for the student-athletes, parents, coaches and fans of Fort Benton and Geraldine high schools. In fact, at times it has been downright strange with the uniform swaps and nickname changes on a nightly basis.

But that's to be expected after an emergency co-op.

Entering the season, Fort Benton was already undergoing some changes. The former Class B power was getting ready for its first season in the District 9C, moving north out of District 8C, when suddenly, out of necessity, everything changed.

Geraldine, a school that is just 24 miles down the road from Fort Benton, had seen its enrollment dropping and this season the numbers were just not there for the Tigers to field a girls basketball team. It was at that time that the idea of a co-op with Fort Benton first came into play.

"Geraldine was really short on numbers," Fort Benton girls basketball coach Cassie Scheffelmaier said. "Even with eighth graders being brought up, they were only going to have five or six girls."

Geraldine approached its rival about an emergency co-op and after Fort Benton agreed, the measure was approved by the Montana High School Association for this season, and suddenly the Longhorns and Tigers became the Longhorn-Tigers or Tiger-Longhorns, depending on whether the home games are in Fort Benton or Geraldine.

"(Geraldine) approached us about it, and we were very open to it," Scheffelmaier said. "We thought that it was only going to make us better. Make our practices more intense, give us better numbers and bring some kids over.

"I was excited," Makae Nack of Geraldine said about the co-op. "I don't really care which town I'm playing for as long as we get to play because, if we wouldn't have had the co-op, we wouldn't have gotten to play. You can't play basketball with four girls."

While the co-op has been a success because it has given kids an opportunity to continue to play basketball when they otherwise might not have been able to, the move was not without its challenges. Merging two programs into one is not as easy as it seems.

Most high school teams only need to worry about traveling back and forth to games, but Fort Benton-Geraldine has to also worry about travelling to practice. The two schools alternate the locations of practices, so one night the girls are in Geraldine and one night they are in Fort Benton. The same goes for the boys team, which means at least one team has to travel 48 miles on a bus just to get to practice and back home again.

"It's actually not bad having to practice because we get done earlier," Fort Benton senior Katie Witt explained. "We always used to have to wait till 7 or 8 to get home but now both teams can practice right after school, so it's actually pretty nice."

While the teams have adjusted to the new practice schedule and they adopted Fort Benton's game schedule, one thing that has been different for both teams is finding a new identity. Not only did they need to meet their new teammates and learn to play with one another, the team is still one without a fixed mascot or uniforms.

"It's weird not being the Longhorns every night," Fort Benton senior Ben Hulme said. "Every other game we switch jerseys. So we wear their black jerseys, which is kind of hard to get used to wearing a black jersey instead of a red one because you are always looking for a red teammate. But I think that it's been good. We have more players now and more variety of players like posts and guards. And we have all gotten along really well, so I think it's a good thing and I think it would be a good thing to keep doing.

"We try to have fun with it," Fort Benton boys basketball coach Tyler Pasha added. "I let the guys choose a different nickname for themselves each night. We wear the Fort Benton uniform and we are the Longhorns or the Geraldine uniform and we the Tigers. But we also choose our own name to make it fun. I think one night we were the river monsters.

"We have tried to do some things like that to bring the kids together and have them bond a little bit," he continued. "But overall, I think it has been really successful. The kids have got along well and as they have gotten to know each we have really grown as a team."

Halfway through the season, everyone involved agrees that the co-op was a good move. Not only have the two schools merged their basketball programs together with ease, but each team has had its fair share of success thus far this season.

Midway through the 9C schedule, the girls team has an overall record of 8-2 and is 5-2 in district play, which is good enough for second place. That means that Fort Benton-Geraldine will have a great opportunity to make it out of the district tournament and into the Northern C Divisional tournament, a possibility that would not have existed without the co-op.

"As seniors we just said this is going to work," Witt said. "There were some girls that didn't know the girls from Geraldine as well so it made it tougher in the beginning, but we had no problems with it and we really ended up coming together as a team."

The boys team has fallen on some difficult times after a promising start and currently they sit in fifth place in the 9C with a 3-7 record overall and a 3-4 record in district play. Their record has as much to do with the difficulty of the district as much as anything, but the important thing is the number of boys and girls that were given the chance to compete and represent their school.

"To be honest, it wasn't really liked at first," Geraldine junior Riley Kurtz said. "We thought we were going to have enough boys go out and thought we were going to have an OK chance. We knew we might not be the most competitive team, but we liked our chances. But after a while, we could see that if we didn't co-op, we wouldn't have a team. It's either don't play or co-op. We have played Fort Benton all our lives, so we know each other, just mostly as competitors so that helped the process out a lot."

There is no arguing that the co-op was a success and the Fort Benton-Geraldine team will be a welcome addition to next month's 9C tourney in Havre, but the question going forward is what will happen next year? At this point nobody knows. Most agree that it would be a good long-term solution for both schools, which have struggled with enrollment numbers. But at the end of the day, the players don't seem to care, as long as they have the chance to keep playing.

"It could go either way for me," Kurtz said. "If we co-op again or don't, it really doesn't matter too much to me, as long as I have somewhere to play basketball. That's the important thing to me."