A season with a lot of growing pains ended on a high note for the Powell Middle School eighth grade boys’ basketball team, as a late season push saw the Cubs make the championship game despite finishing with a losing record.

The season started 0-3 for the Cubs before getting their first win against Cody, before another two game losing streak made the Cubs 1-5.

Powell earned a win against Rocky followed by another three game losing streak, before the Cubs defeated Cody again to earn their third win.

The season ended with two more losses to Lovell and Worland before the conference tournament.

In their first two games of the tournament, the Cubs got revenge over Riverton and Lander, both of whom had defeated Powell twice during the regular season.

“One of the times Riverton beat us by a buzzer beater, and we ended up beating them in the first round by a buzzer beater. Lander was a team that beat us by 20-plus points two times in the season and we ended up beating them by two in the semifinals,” coach Chase Kistler said.

In the championship the Cubs took on Lovell, who ran past a tired Cub team to take the championship and place the Cubs second.

“We played really well for about two quarters, but in the second half we just ran out of gas,” Kistler said.

Despite the loss in the championship game, Kistler was proud of the improvement that his team showed by the end of the season, growing as a group from start to finish.

“The guys were just willing to learn, they were really coachable and they showed up to practice every single day,” Kistler said. “It didn’t matter where they fell, if they were on the ‘A’ team or the ‘B’ team, they worked hard every day just to get better.”

He said some of the main leaders for the Cubs were August Teten and Trey Schultz, while also getting key contributions from Isaiah Torres, Wyatt Hill and Wyatt Bost who developed well for the team.

“We got significant growth from our three post players (Torres, Hill and Bost). Torres was my defensive guy. He’d go in there, he’s like a pit bull and would just get after it defensively and rebounding wise,” Kistler said. “We knew that turnovers and rebounds were going to separate us in tournament play and they bought into that big time.”

One of the biggest adjustments Kistler saw from his players was their ability to perform better against different defenses. He said the Cubs improved a lot on how to get out of a press without turnovers.

“At the beginning of the year, teams would press us and we would have so many turnovers for layups that we would lose by 20-plus points … I was shocked at how many teams ran so many different kinds of defenses,” Kistler said. “A lot of teams ran a 1-2-2 or a 2-3 zone and didn’t really run man-to-man. Our team’s ability to be efficient against zones and then be aggressive against the zone, that’s tough for eighth graders to learn. They picked that up really well over the course of the season. We kept things simple.”

Kistler said the main thing the kids need to do moving forward is to get in the gym over the summer.

“They’ve got a lot of work that they need to do in the offseason. The biggest thing is they can’t wait until basketball season to pick up a basketball. They’ve got to continue working on their shooting, their layups and finishing and then just being in those gameplay situations was all new to them this year,” Kistler said. “Your basketball IQ, you really only get that by playing the game. They need to get in the gym in the offseason and then obviously the weight room is huge.”

Following the strong finish to the season, Kistler said that he sees a lot of potential coming out of this group heading to the high school level, comparing them to this year’s varsity team.

“I think they can actually be a pretty strong group,” Kistler said. “They kind of resemble the team that they had this year at the varsity level. Physicality was definitely one of their nemesis, but once they figure out how to be physical in their own sense I think they’re going to be just fine.”