By Mike Drooger –

There was good news for both teams Thursday night, March 2, at Tracy, and there was bad news for both teams when the Edgerton Flying Dutchmen battled the Tracy-Milroy-Balaton Panthers in the play-in (or pigtail) game of the Sub-section 3A tournament. 

The good news for Edgerton, which was the bad news for TMB, was TMB’s super sophomore Trevor Smith would not be playing. Smith became a 1,000-point scorer on February 10 at Slayton with a three-point bucket. He scored 22 points that night. He played three more games and then his season ended when he had surgery on his hand to repair a football injury. Smith decided to play basketball until he had reached the scoring plateau then he had surgery so he’d be ready for baseball.

The bad news for Edgerton, which was the good news for TMB, was even without Smith in the lineup and 26.7 percent shooting (16-for-60) by the Panthers, the Dutchmen still came out on the short end of a 53-46 score. As poorly as the Panthers shot, the Dutchmen were a little worse at 25.8 percent (15-for-58).

With that many missed shots—and that doesn’t include the game’s combined 30 missed free throws—there were plenty of opportunities for offensive rebounds. The TMB boys are big, broad, burly, and bulky under the bucket. That allowed them to grab 23 offensive rebounds against the outsized Dutchmen who had just ten. The defensive boards the Dutchmen needed in order to gain on the Panthers were few and far between, which led to the 2022-’23 season ending for EPS with a record of 1-22.