Ryan Bozer:
Good Thursday morning, I'm SDPB's Ryan Bozer. Joining me is our sports and recreation reporter, Nate Wek. And we're here to bring Your Morning in Play. Nate, you're off of a weekend of girls' basketball championships. How was it? I know I caught a couple of pretty riveting games myself.
Nate Wek:
Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Anytime state basketball comes around, it's an absolute joy to be a part of it, joy to cover it. And for those that tuned into the coverage from all three of the girls' state basketball tournaments, there was some great games, new champions being crowned. It was just a lot of fun.
Ryan Bozer:
Any notable standouts from it, as far as champions, people getting into that final round that hadn't been there before?
Nate Wek:
Yeah, so O'Gorman, they ended up having a perfect season. They won on the girls' AA side. They almost got upset in the quarterfinal round by number eight seeded Rapid City Stevens. That one actually went into overtime. Stevens actually even had a possession at the end of regulation to potentially win it. That didn't come to fruition. So it went into overtime and then O'Gorman survived. But yeah, O'Gorman won in AA. Vermillion won their first girls' basketball title since 2007, I believe. And that was an exciting game they had. I believe every one of those games was just pretty much deadlocked coming down the back stretch in the fourth quarter.
And then, at the B tournament, you had Arlington and Centerville playing for a state championship. Neither one of them had won state title before. So when Centerville won it, we knew right away in all this, their first time state basketball champion girls' hoops. So it was a lot of fun to see the celebration. I was in Rapid City to witness Centerville winning it. And just the amount of people, I can say that all of Centerville was in Rapid City for that tournament. It was a great atmosphere. It was a lot of fun.
Ryan Bozer:
That's awesome. It's nice when the whole town can come out and support the team, right?
Nate Wek:
Absolutely. It's like a three, four-day festival. Basically.
Ryan Bozer:
Right, absolutely. And then we've been talking basketball stories, you guys have that phenomenal documentary, Tales from the Hardwood. And we got one more of those stories that we haven't talked about yet about a kid named Josh. What can you tell us about Josh, Nate?
Nate Wek:
Yeah, so Josh Olthoff is a senior for the boys' basketball team at Brandon Valley. Now, Josh, his story is a little bit different because he was actually born deaf. And his parents basically made the decision at about one year's old that they were going to go with this cochlear implant thing to allow their son to hear. And that's something I think, as an 18-year-old kid, this is just something that he's grown up with. He's never had to learn sign language because he can hear because of this cochlear implant. But it's a much deeper conversation when you go back 17 years, and you have a mom and a dad trying to make this decision. So we do have some tape here. This Josh's mom talking about the process of having the cochlear implant done when Josh was one. And then you'll also hear Josh react to it a little bit.
Luanna Olthoff:
The blessing was that, in Sioux Falls, there was a physician who would do the cochlear implant surgery. But he would not do it in Sioux Falls, and he'd only done six patients. So when we got to Memphis, we got him to be seen by a physician who had implanted over 160 kids. And the surgery ended up being at the children's hospital.
Josh Olthoff:
I'm definitely happy that they did because, without it, there's a lot of things about my life that would've been different, a lot of things that I wouldn't have been able to do. So I'm definitely happy, for sure.
Ryan Bozer:
I don't think I would personally think about how impactful having that ability to hear on the court would be. But aside from just hearing your coach, being able to hear your teammates, being able to catch just the little things that occur in the middle of a game, to be able to pick up on those cues.
Nate Wek:
Right. And you think of a basketball game, there's a lot of things I think that a person that can hear takes for granted, the pep band, the public address announcer, the fans. You think of the fan energy and stuff like that that you have at games. So if you do watch, which I do encourage you to do, and that Tales from the Hardwood show is available at sdpb.org/basketball, you'll notice too that we did try to work some of the sounds of the game into that story, just to give people an idea of these are the types of sounds that are active at a game that a lot of us just take for granted on a regular basis.
Ryan Bozer:
Yeah, there's so much going on in the background that we don't think of, but, yeah, wow. So it hasn't affected his playing. He's obviously great player. He comes from a basketball family too, doesn't he?
Nate Wek:
He does, yep, he comes from a basketball family. And one of the other things that I thought was interesting... So Greg Beesley was the one that produced this. When he went and met with Josh the first day, he said, "So, Josh, do you know any sign language?" And it was one of those things because if you think about if there's a kid that's born deaf, you think, "Well, maybe they know some sign language and stuff like that." But, again, from the time he was one until present day, he's always been able to hear. So he's like, "No, I've always been able to hear. So, no, I don't know any sign language," type of thing.
So it's just one of those things too that I think, again, people that can hear don't necessarily think about. And, yeah, so Josh has a very, very normal life. But I do encourage people to check out that story because it does go in depth with Josh's folks weighing the options. Is this the thing we should do? And you think, 17 years ago, where maybe the internet wasn't as prominent as it is now, with all that information being just a click away, it's much different than just sitting in a room and having a five-minute conversation, and say, "Yep, we're going to do this."
Ryan Bozer:
Right. Well, and that's a decision that you make and you go, "Hey, this affects his entire life," right?
Nate Wek:
It's a very tough decision for any parent to have to make. And just listening to Josh, you can tell he's very grateful that his parents did make that decision. Because it has allowed him to live a very normal life with all of his other teammates.
Ryan Bozer:
That's awesome. I love that. So we got then more basketball coming your way. You had a couple of days off away from the courts. But you're back court side again because we've got state boys' basketball championships coming up today. How can we watch that?
Nate Wek:
Yeah, so there's three more tournaments going on this week. We've got the AA boys at the Denny Sanford Premier Center in Sioux Falls. We got the A boys from the Summit Arena in Rapid City. And then we've got the B boys up in Aberdeen at the Barnett Center. So there's a lot of action, once again, taking place. I'll be heading back out to Rapid. So I'll be at the A boys tournament. I believe the B tournament is going to be on SDPB1 TV. The A tournament on SDPB2. And then the AA tournament on SDPB3. All of the games will also be streamed live on our YouTube, just search for SDPB on YouTube. All of the games will be streamed live there. And then, of course, too, they're all going to be streamed live as well as live statistics. We're going to have updated brackets. We're going to have stories. We're going to have all that other extra information as well at sdpb.org/basketball.
Ryan Bozer:
Sweet. Well, I will let you get back to the games. Hopefully, I can swing by one of these days and catch some of the games myself, hang out with you all for a bit courtside. And we'll talk the results next week.
Nate Wek:
All right. Well, thanks, Ryan, I appreciate it.
