Another season filled with more highlights than lowlights

As a high school boys basketball beat writer for the Daily Herald, I'm fortunate to chronicle the often amazing accomplishments of area players and coaches throughout the course of each season.

What follows is a sampling of a few highlights of the 2007-08 campaign in random order.

 If you had told me right after the holidays that Elgin -- a struggling basketball team with a record of 6-7, a team so beaten up by injuries that it resembled a used pinata -- would be the last area team standing in a Class 4A supersectional at NIU… Well, I might have checked your forehead for a fever.

A strong fever.

However, the Maroons bought into what interim coach Mike Sitter was selling and transformed themselves over the course of the next two months.

Elgin won 5 straight playoff games and, in the process, re-ignited a slumbering fan base that had stopped paying attention after a decade of postseason frustration.

Kudos to Sitter -- who will be named the team's permanent coach barring a comet impacting earth between now and next season -- and his assistants Jeff Howard, Quentin Howard and Bryan Creed. They got a talented group that had never won a title of any kind to play defense, rebound and play team basketball.

As a result, the Maroons won Elgin's first sectional title in a 10 years, the 21st in school history.

as there a better story than what Burlington Central guard Mike McCurdy pulled off this season?

With his team's star guard gone after a surprise transfer, McCurdy filled the void as the Rockets' primary scorer and exceeded everyone's expectations.

He went from averaging 8.4 points a game as a junior to averaging 24.7 points as a senior, one of the top 50 scoring averages in state history.

We hear coaches use the phrase, "We need somebody to step up," all the time. I don't think I've ever seen a basketball player step up for an entire season ala McCurdy.

That was flat-out impressive.

I personally enjoyed seeing Tyler Beachler and Joel Benson of Westminster Christian win that school's first regional title.

In this business we don't root for teams, we root for great stories. Well, it's a pretty sweet story when two kids who suffered through an 0-26 season as freshmen finally get a taste of honey before they finish high school.

Congratulations to both players for sticking with it and to coach Bruce Firchau, the IBCA hall-of-fame coach who turned the program around in three seasons.

Bartlett has rightfully been known as a strong football school since it commenced varsity sports in 1998. Coach Tom Meaney's Hawks have qualified for the state playoffs for eight straight seasons.

But the basketball program hadn't escaped regional play since 2001.

That streak ended this year as new coach Jim Wolfsmith, junior transfer Marc Little, sophomore shooter Luke Labedzki and seniors Cory Hrynyk and Kamil Janton led the Hawks to a school record of 22 victories and a berth in the Class 4A sectional final.

There were as many Hawks fans in the stands at the East Aurora sectional as I've ever seen at any Bartlett football game. Nice to know Hawks can still fly in winter weather.

And finally, I enjoyed the fourth and final season of the "The "Johnny Show" at Jacobs.

John Moran, the ultimate team player, would trade just about anything to have gone deeper in the postseason than the sectional semifinal round, but a 3-point loss to Rockford Boylan did nothing to diminish Moran's greatness in my mind.

Though he set eight school records during his four varsity seasons, Moran holds another unofficial record in my book: He is easily the classiest star player with whom I've ever dealt.

Truth is, John doesn't even read the newspapers after many of his games, he told me earlier this week. Yet, even after his toughest defeats he always spoke to the assembled media, many members of which were on hand mainly because of him.

I don't want to put any added pressure on the young man because he puts enough pressure on himself -- why do you think he's so driven? -- but I have little doubt that over the course of the next four years we're all going to be talking about the Cinderella run Northern Iowa is making deep into the NCAA Tournament.

Best of luck, John.