Mar. 10—MITCHELL — To reach the Class AA state tournament, the Mitchell High School girls basketball team didn’t take the easy route. There wasn’t one available.
But in the end, the Kernels’ path still led to Rapid City.
A rash of preseason injuries, including two season-ending setbacks, dealt a blow to team morale before the Kernels even played their first game. Then, a 1-3 start to the year ensued.
With the team in need of a reset, head coach Dave Brooks introduced the map.
On a simple printout of South Dakota, Brooks mapped out a route from Mitchell to Rapid City, but not via the direct line provided by Interstate 90. Instead, he laid out a path with a detour south through Parkston and then west on South Dakota Highway 44. The mostly straight, gently meandering path of I-90 was replaced by a much less direct route, one that winds and zigzags through the West River terrain and the Badlands until reaching its destination.
The map illustrated a point Brooks wanted his team to believe better than words could at the time: It’s not going to be easy, but we can still get to where we want to go.
“We had a rough, pretty startling start to our season. That beginning was not how we planned it to go,” said sophomore Londyn Hajek. “What (Brooks) did made sense, and I think it was good for us to realize that it wasn’t going to be an easy road. We were going to have to figure some things out and string some wins together, and I think we did a good job of that.”
The mapped route was divided into segments, and with every victory, the Kernels took a yellow highlighter and colored in the area around the path, which was laid out with a thick line in black ink. It quickly became a staple of the Kernels’ postgame locker room routine, a regular reminder of how far the team had come on its journey.
“Just to color in that next mark was knowing we’re that much closer to our goal,” Hajek said.
“This is a pretty good group, and they all bought into this idea,” Brooks said. “The next thing I know, they’re the ones reminding me that we have to mark the map.”
At the end of the Kernels’ SoDak 16 victory over Spearfish, the win that qualified Mitchell for a fourth-straight trip to the Class AA tournament, the team didn’t have its normal postgame gathering. That meant filling in the final leg of the trip on the map was saved for Monday at practice.
“It really solidifies that we made it to state,” said senior Addie Siemsen. “This was our goal, and even with the bumps in the road we had throughout the season, the hard work has paid off.”
As the No. 7 seed in the Class AA girls basketball state tournament bracket, Mitchell faces a tough task in trying to unseat two-time defending champion and No. 2 seed O’Gorman.
At 20-1, the Knights haven’t lost since their season opener against Brandon Valley, the No. 1 seed in the Class AA bracket. That loss in December snapped a 50-game win streak for the Knights, who are 108-9 over the past five seasons.
Meanwhile, Mitchell enters the tournament with a 13-8 record, including a 65-34 loss at O’Gorman to end the regular season on Feb. 26. In that matchup, the Knights’ team speed and activity level, particularly on the defensive end of the floor, put the Kernels on the back foot early and they never recovered.
“Their press and their speed kind of shocked us, but I think after seeing it, we won’t be so flustered this time around,” Hajek said. “We’re going to work on our game plan, and I think we’ll be able to bring a tough game for them, win or lose, in that first round.”
Also on the Knights’ and Kernels’ side of the bracket are No. 3 Sioux Falls Washington and No. 6 Sioux Falls Jefferson. The Kernels played both teams at the MHS Gym this season, beating Jefferson 60-55 on Feb. 3 and falling 51-41 to Washington on Feb. 17.
No matter which side of the bracket the Kernels move to after the quarterfinals or who the opponent is, the goal is to finish the season — the last for lone senior Addie Siemsen and departing Coach Brooks — on a high note. Each of the past three seasons, Mitchell has won at least one game at the tournament, and last year, they won a pair after an opening round loss to take fifth place.
“If you don’t win ’em all, you really want to go 2-1. We don’t just want to be happy we made it, we want to play well while we’re there,” Brooks said. “But no game out there is going to be easy.”
“We know what it takes to win games at the state tournament,” Siemsen added. “I really think that will help us this weekend.”