After making their first trip to the boys’ state basketball tournament last season, the Upsala boys’ basketball team has been excited to get back on the court since last March.
The Cardinals fell to the eventual state champion Springfield in the first round of the state playoffs last season. They also graduated many key players from last season’s team.
This year they will usher in a new squad and are a young team with only one senior.
Despite being so young, head coach Vern Capelle, who was named Class A Coach of the Year last season, is confident the team will not need to reload thanks largely in part to nine returning lettermen and acquiring players from a very good B team.

“Normally a team would need to rebuild after graduating so many players, but our kids are going to be ahead of the scale,” Capelle said. “We will be experienced, but just don’t have varsity game time experience.”

Despite many good players filling in the holes of last year’s starters, the Cardinals still have a few question marks in their game.
“Right now, we need to see if we can rebound well enough to help do the things we want to do like playing fast and doing things in transition,” Capelle said.

Capelle believes the strength of this squad will be their quickness, athleticism, and depth. These factors should help counter some of their weaker points of the game.
Many of the kids want to get back to the state tournament, but Capelle has had one goal he always asks the players to reach.

“Our major goal every year regardless of what we’ve done in the past or what we think we can do, is to get to the end of the year and look back and think we did the best we could, then that will be success,” he said. “I think we can compete in the conference and section. We have nine lettermen back and each one of them would say we want to get back to the state tournament.”

Capelle believes the Prairie Conference will be overall pretty tough this season.

“Everyone else is pretty experienced compared to us, but I think we’re right in the mix with all of them,” he said.

The Upsala team has played a lot in the offseason. Eight of the returning players played last spring in some tournaments.
They also attended a team camp up at Cass Lake.

“We played a lot of basketball from April to July, that will improve our experience,” Capelle said. “It’s going be an exciting year of basketball.”

The Cardinals open up their season on the road against LPGE on December 6.

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