The Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé Crimson Bears boys basketball team will travel to Ketchikan this weekend and get a final look at their Southeast Conference foe before the two teams go elbow-to-elbow in the Region V tournament at Kayhi in three weeks in the Clarke Cochrane Gymnasium.

“Ketchikan is always a gracious host,” JDHS coach Robert Casperson said. “They do a great job down there. The community is highly supportive of basketball, and we always expect they’ll be energetic and lively and we look forward to that. It makes for a fun atmosphere to play in. And they’re good. Ketchikan has a good team this year, they are doing well. They have also played a tough schedule…We are trying to build some depth and compacity as we move into March because we all know that is when it matters most. So we are looking forward to this. Ketchikan is a very fun place to play because it is so tough to play. We expect and accept the challenge.”

The Crimson Bears boys are 7-12 overall and 0-2 in their conference. They are ranked 16th in the state among 4A teams.

“I like where we have been all season,” Casperson said. “I know that might seem strange to people in a sense, but the big picture (is) we have had a really tough schedule and we are playing a lot of really good teams around the state. Those challenges are going to make us tougher and we are always building towards the end of the season. We haven’t always played up to the level I would expect with our intensity and our execution, but I really do believe that we’re in a good spot. We’re learning, we’re improving.

The Kings are 12-6 overall and 2-0 SEC, and ranked sixth behind Grace Christian (Northern Lights Conference), defending state champion Bettye Davis East Anchorage (Cook Inlet Conference), Colony (NLC), West Valley (Mid Alaska Conference) and Service (CIC).

“We feel like we are progressing fairly well,” Ketchikan coach Eric Stockhausen said. “We know the challenge that coach Casperson and the Bears pose. We have a lot of respect for them. They play incredibly hard. They had two pretty dominant wins this last weekend, scored a lot of points, so it is going to be a huge challenge for us.”

The JDHS boys lost to the Kings 52-48 and 70-63 on Jan. 3-4. They so far have played no common opponents this season but both will face North Pole before the Region V Championships, and Kayhi will also play Mt. Edgecumbe, a team that defeated JDHS 80-66 and 68-47 on Jan.31 and Feb. 1 in Juneau.

“I feel like we are in a good spot at this time of the year,” Casperson said. “There is still room to grow, we’re still getting better, but I like the progress I’ve seen so far.”

JDHS is coming off two wins last weekend at Kodiak 67-43 and 71-62.

“We had one play this weekend that really stood out to me,” he said. “It is one of our offensive sets and Kodiak has some really quick kids and they work hard. They made us get to the fourth option of this set that we run and it resulted in a layup. It was because we were able to execute each step along the way as needed that we finally got that layup at the end of it based on what the defense gave us. For me, that’s encouraging. I’m seeing our guys fully understand what options are available on offense and we had a nice 30-point quarter in Kodiak that was keyed by defense, it wasn’t trading baskets or anything, we were defending and rotating and coming up with steals that create offense.

Ketchikan is coming off a series of four straight big wins, defeating state second-ranked 3A Sitka 62-54 and 61-52 and an always-spirited 2A Wrangell Wolves team 72-41 and 68-36.

“We played fairly well but it’s the difference between a 4A and a 2A speed of the game,” Stockhausen said of Wrangell. “And it was at our home.”

Before that, the Kings tested themselves in the Jan. 23-25 Alaska Airlines Classic at West Anchorage. Kayhi fell to state 11th ranked 4A West 65-60 in the opener and then faced one of the nation’s best in Columbia, Georgia, falling 70-36. They finished the trip with a 63-52 loss to state fifth-ranked Service.

“The Georgia team was phenomenal,” Stockhausen said. “Athletic and the coach has won, like, 750 games or something. That’s why you go play as tough of opponents as you can to expose your weaknesses, and I think we are slowly growing to the team we hoped we could be. Maybe in some areas we are exceeding it but we are aware of our fragileness with size and speed and depth and all those types of things that Juneau definitely poses a challenge.”

“They play as hard as anybody in the state and have since I’ve been here. Complete respect to the program that they get their kids playing extremely hard. They are very well coached in a lot of areas, especially on defense and spacing on offense, which are probably the keys to success in basketball. And that is why they have been extremely successful. We know we have a huge challenge. We look at this as we’re the underdog against our conference opponent and I think we need to look at every game that way and not get satisfied with some success here and there. We came in with nobody knowing anybody but one of our players and we enjoy that we’re slowly, quietly, having some success.”

Starting with the Sitka wins, the Kings began a 10-game home stand that will take them into the 2025 Region V Championships, which they host in the best-of-three format March 6-8.

It is the first time since Sitka dropped down to 3A in 2008-09, the year before TMHS had formed, that the 4A side will be a best-of-three series between two teams.

“We’ve done that in the past and it definitely felt like a big change at that time,” Casperson said. “It was a double-elimination tournament anyway where you had to win at least two games…The region has weathered a lot of changes in Southeast, whether it be teams reclassifying or ASAA changing the numbers for each classification, or whatever it is, there have been a lot of changes in the 25 years I have been coaching now and 30 years I’ve been involved, but it is always fun. It is always a good experience. We’ll be in Ketchikan for regions, too, so maybe this is a precursor to that. Certainly a good opportunity for us to get our feet wet in that environment before we have to play regions, so we’re looking forward to that too.”

Said Stockhausen, “It is like my first year in ’08-’09 and the fact we didn’t win it, I don’t like it. Had we won it you’d get a different response.”

In the next two weeks the JDHS boys and girls host Monroe Feb. 21-22 and North Pole Feb. 28-March 1. The Crimson Bears boys lost to Monroe 84-71 on the road Jan. 17. The Kayhi teams host North Pole Feb. 26-27 and MEHS Feb. 28-March 1. JDHS lost to MEHS 80-66 and 68-47 Jan. 31-Feb 1.

In reality, the JDHS team has not been together long. Last year the now-defunct Thunder Mountain boys graduated 10 players and last year’s Crimson Bears seven.

“That’s a big piece of it,” Casperson acknowledged. “And maybe more so than I wanted to completely acknowledge initially just because of how well the guys get along. They get along really well but that doesn’t mean that there is a lot of history with time on task together. And that’s what we have now through this point of the season. We have great kids, they’re very good players, it is just learning the nuances of each other in a game…For a lot of these guys they are in brand new situations together. That is definitely a factor. I definitely see now where we are melding more offensively and defensively and understanding the things that we need to do with the team and how they can count on each other in a game.”

• Contact Klas Stolpe at klas.stolpe@juneauempire.com.