Moses Lake freshman basketball team finishes with undefeated season

MOSES LAKE — About halfway through the season, Moses Lake High School freshman boys basketball coach Ryan Carlstrom and his players noticed something – they were undefeated. They wanted to keep it up. 

“It kind of became our goal about halfway through the season. After we started winning, we kind of thought, ‘Well, we should just keep winning, I guess,’” Carlstrom said. “It helped as a way to kind of motivate these kids and keep them working all year. That was our goal.” 

The freshmen did keep it up, finishing their season with a 20-0 record.  

“I’ve never had a team go 20-0. This is my eighth year with the freshman group, and we’ve never had anybody go 20-0,” Carlstrom said. 

The MLHS coaching staff decided to keep the freshmen playing together as a group rather than moving some to the junior varsity or varsity, Carlstrom said. 

“Coach (Craig Groth) wanted to keep this crew together,” he said. “They’ve been playing together for a long time, so we kept this group (as a team), so they continue to play and grow together.” 

Familiarity and friendship are part of the reason for their success, he said. They played on AAU teams in the summer and with and against each other at Frontier and Columbia middle schools during the school year. 

“They’ve all kind of been playing together, a lot of them, since second (or) third grade,” he said. “I think one of the things about this group is they’re all a pretty good group of friends. They’re all very unselfish. I think in almost half of our games everybody on our team was scoring. We had seven or eight players average more than five points a game.”  

The freshmen acted like a team, he said. 

“They all took turns together being a good team. They've a very unselfish group of kids. They get just as excited about making a good pass to a kid as they do about scoring, which is not always the case,” Carlstrom said. “They take the job of motivating each other and rooting for each other to do well. I had some kids who were used to being the star who were willing to (step back), cheer on teammates and things like that.”  

The team members were familiar with each other and with the coach. Carlstrom said he worked with some of them as the CMS coach the last two middle school seasons.  

The move from middle school to high school did require some adjustment, he said. Middle school teams play seven to 10 games a year; the high school season was twice as long. Players had to adjust to practice six days a week.  

The team played a Big 9 and 4A schedule. This season brought with it the additional adjustment of a rejection of the district’s educational programs and operations levy proposal in 2024, which meant the program relied on money raised from the community and volunteers for things like transportation.  

“This season we only had three bus trips, so every other one we were depending on the families getting them (to the game). Sometimes it’s hard – you’ve got to figure out what parents can get off work and who can transport kids. But we had a handful of families who stepped up, and whoever needed a ride to Spokane (got) a ride to Spokane, or Tri-Cities or wherever. It was pretty neat that that was never an issue,” Carlstrom said. 

It also helped that the freshmen like basketball. 

“Their season is over, and we’ve had a handful of kids that are still coming in and practicing and shooting. They really are basketball kids,” Carlstrom said.  

    The 20-0 Maverick freshman basketball team breaks the huddle.