<p><strong><em>I</em></strong><em>n a normal year, the spring sports postseason would be upon us. Alas, the COVID-19 pandemic wiped the entire spring schedule clean, bringing the 2019-20 athletic campaign to a premature end.</em></p><p><em>Over the coming weeks, we’re taking a look back and reviewing each Johnson County high school’s year in sports. Today’s focus: the Greenwood Woodmen.</em></p><p>Back in the second week of March, Greenwood boys basketball coach Joe Bradburn was in the locker room, sitting in a recliner and watching sectional game film of Evansville Reitz, which was supposed to be his team’s Class 4A regional semifinal opponent in Seymour.</p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]<p>As he paused and rewinded a handful of plays made by Panther point guard Khristian Lander — an Indiana University recruit and a top-20 national prospect for 2021 — his players started filtering in and making comments.</p><p>The IU fans coming to watch Lander run up and down the floor and score 30 points, they laughed, are going to be pretty disappointed when the game ends up being 10-10 at halftime.</p><p>They weren’t really joking. Greenwood allowed a total of just 30 first-half points in its three sectional games, so 10-10 halftime scores were always in play with these guys.</p><p>Strangely, they loved it. And their fans did, too.</p><p>Most high school kids wouldn’t embrace the deliberate, blue-collar style that the Woodmen played; it was not particularly sexy or stylish. But it grew on you. More importantly, it worked — Greenwood went 19-6 and won its first sectional championship since 2002 — and the team came to embrace not only how successful their game was, but how much it bothered opponents.</p><p>“Oh, 100 percent, yeah,” senior Nick Duffey said in March, days before the team’s postseason run was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. “At first, coming into the program and playing for coach Bradburn, it’s almost something you question — it’s not fun in the eyes of the fans. But it’s fun when you’re out there getting the other team frustrated, making them mad, and it gives you a chance to win. Because those teams that go up and down … when they have to slow it down, you see it in their face that they’re frustrated, that that’s not how they want to play, it’s a great feeling when you can do that to the opposing team.”</p><p>“This is what we want,” classmate Spencer Aaron added. “To be defensively stout, and just make people’s minds hurt because they can’t score the basketball for two minutes.”</p><p>Greenwood ranked second among all IHSAA schools and well ahead of all Class 4A teams in scoring defense, yielding just 39.6 points per game. Only six teams reached the 50-point mark against the Woodmen.</p><p>How the Woodmen played almost defies description. It wasn’t sexy, but it wasn’t “stall ball,” either. Attempting to break it down or label it led back to the same conclusion every time:</p><p>They just did what they did.</p><p>“They know what their role is, and they know what their strengths are,” Bradburn said during the tournament. “I think that’s the biggest thing about this team — we know who we are. We know what we’re good at on offense, and we don’t let people push us into doing stuff we shouldn’t do.”</p><p>Such a patient style of play might not have worked without the right mix of players. Heck, it was a struggle for Bradburn to make it work when he arrived in 2017-18. That team was arguably far more talented than this one was, but it never came together like this year’s group did.</p><p>Not every team is made up of guys who can sublimate their individual egos for the greater good. This one most definitely was. And while it would have certainly been an underdog in a regional that also featured top-ranked Bloomington South and eventual Mr. Basketball Anthony Leal, Bradburn liked Greenwood’s chances of building on its sectional success.</p><p>“We weren’t a high-powered scoring team,” the coach said, “but we also felt good about our chances because we understood how to control tempo of the game and how to defend — and when you get teams that get in that groove, that’s pretty dangerous in a tournament.”</p><p>The community had rallied behind the Woodmen, too — the vibe around school was different, and fans of all ages were getting caught up in the wave. As the team celebrated its sectional championship win over Center Grove, grown men who were two generations removed from their own high school glory days were reduced to tears.</p><p>Aaron recalls what wound up being the team’s final practice on the Friday morning before the regional that never happened — the IHSAA postponed the tournament a few hours later and then canceled it the following week. He remembers Greenwood administrators proudly watching the team work out, hopeful that those games might still happen.</p><p>“There was just an excitement and a buzz in the gym that — that they were proud of us,” Aaron said. “We were like, ‘Man, this is really special.’ That was at least cool on the practice side, to see that we had kind of touched people in the community and gotten them ready and excited for what we hoped to be the game the following day.”</p><p>Alas, it never happened, and the lack of closure to the season — not knowing that the last game was the last game or that the last practice was the last practice — left a hollow feeling not only for the team, but its supporters.</p><p>There hasn’t even been a chance yet for folks to gather and talk about the season. Bradburn said he hopes that the team will be able to get together sometime this summer for one final reunion before kids head off to college and go their separate ways.</p><p>“It’s hard to tell the mood around town, because nobody’s really been together,” Greenwood athletic director Rob Irwin said. “It just kind of stopped. And that’s probably the worst part about it, is that you didn’t get to talk about the next game.”</p><p>When the next game — in any sport — might be remains anybody’s guess. The abrupt end to the boys basketball tournament and the loss of the spring season have dulled the momentum that the school had been generating from its success on the court. That momentum is more vital at a place like Greenwood, which is the smallest school in the Mid-State Conference and thus the one most prone to more peaks and valleys depending on the athletic talent in each class.</p><p>Irwin, though, is hopeful that the Woodmen can carry it forward into the 2020-21 school year, both in basketball and in several other sports.</p><p>“I think winning gets a different atmosphere in your building,” he said. “It all goes in cycles, but I think right now the vibe here is, ‘We’ve got something pretty good going; let’s figure out how to keep it going.’”</p>
