A tip for those trying to get a leg up on scouting the Greenwood boys and girls basketball teams and their new head coaches — don’t bother trying to dig up any recent game film.
Both of the new hires, made official at Tuesday night’s school board meeting, have head coaching experience, but neither has been in charge of a program for a little while.
Joe Bradburn, who replaces the recently retired Bruce Hensley as the coach of the Woodmen boys, has helped out in an unofficial capacity at Indianapolis Scecina while venturing into the business world for a bit, but his most recent head coaching stint was at Huntington North, where he served for three seasons from 2008-11.
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“I kind of knew I wanted to get back into coaching for the last couple of years,” Bradburn said, “and I wanted to cherry-pick and just go somewhere I felt had strong leadership. … When I’ve had strong leadership, we’ve had very good success, and that’s what was attractive.”
Overall, Bradburn owns a 205-155 career record in 18 seasons at four schools, including a 134-74 mark at Yorktown, where he guided the 1998 team to a semistate appearance.
New girls coach Bill Torgerson has been away from Indiana basketball — and Indiana as a whole — for even longer.
After serving as the head coach at North Miami from 1994-99, Torgerson moved on to Fort Wayne Carroll, where he served as an assistant under current Greenwood athletics director Rob Irwin.
From there, Torgerson opted to go to graduate school at UNC-Charlotte. While there, he spent one season as an assistant at Vance High School, which happened to win the state championship that year (beating a West Forsyth team led by current NBA All-Star Chris Paul along the way).
Since that season, though, Torgerson has settled into a career in academia; he’s spent the past decade-plus working as a professor at St. John’s University in New York City. Splitting time between the Big Apple and Asheville, North Carolina, he’s also written three novels and done some film directing.
Now, with two daughters ages 11 and 8, Torgerson is looking to settle down and spend more time with family, and the Greenwood opening presents the perfect opportunity to do so.
“Realizing that the thing I like doing the most is working with young people through the vehicle of basketball,” Torgerson said, “I decided I wanted to teach and coach, and I decided the place to do that was Indiana.”
Torgerson is also looking forward to reuniting with Irwin, who he calls a “trusted friend.”
“We challenged each other a lot about our ideas regarding basketball, which I’m really looking forward to,” Torgerson said.
Bradburn also has a connection to Irwin — the two coached against one another in 2005 when Irwin was at Carroll and Bradburn was at DeKalb, with Carroll winning a double-overtime thriller. Irwin also took over the Huntington North program one year after Bradburn’s departure, coaching the Vikings for three seasons before coming to Greenwood as the AD.
Also approved Tuesday night was the hiring of new boys soccer coach Dan Weber, a longtime club coach in the Franklin Township area.
This will be Weber’s first stint with a high school program, and he’s excited to help the Woodmen rebuild following a one-win season.
“I’m the kind of coach that likes to teach the fundamentals,” Weber said. “Everything’s about technique and fundamentals, and then we go from there. We learn our tactics, but you can’t do tactics unless you can pass and receive the ball.”
