As the winter season approaches, the boys’ basketball team is getting ready to bring some heat to the court. With 13 varsity contributors returning, the boys’ basketball team is looking at a successful season. 

As the last season (2024-2025) came to a close, the team finished with a 4-18 record and finished last in our conference. This year, with so many returning players, Trojan fans are hoping for a successful season. Their season starts on December 1, 2025, with a big home game against the team of North Polk. Throughout the season, they play 21 games before regionals. Eleven of those 21 games are played at home, while the other ten are on the road. Six of those games are also against teams outside of our conference. 

This season, the staff will remain the same with head coach Dalton Franken and assistant coaches Jeremy Blake, Nathan Block, Zach Christianson, and Jacey Hoegh. Blake and Block are also jv/freshman coaches. This season’s roster for each team is undecided; it is also currently unknown how many players will participate. However, it is expected that there will be a good turnout, and 13 varsity players shall return. 

Here’s a peek at the insights of the Trojan players and coaches with their goals and areas of improvement for this season. Throughout the season, the team did not win a high percentage of their games; as said before, their record was 4-18. Coach Franken said that the team needs to “improve 3-point shooting, free throw shooting, and take care of the basketball.” He said the team was ranked towards the bottom of the conference in all 3 of those categories last season. “That is not a recipe for winning basketball games,” Franken says. The coaches are very excited for the season to get started and get to work with the players overall. As a team, they also hope to “improve our efficiency on the offensive end of the floor this season.”

 Player Grant Petty said some possible areas of improvement he thinks the team should work on are “little things, such as communication, team chemistry, and hustling.” 

Coach Franken says a typical day for an Atlantic Trojan Boys basketball practice begins with “some sort of full court drill to get the guys running the floor and communicating with each other.  This serves as our ‘warm-up’ as well. After that, we do position breakdowns and skill work. Typically, we split up our interior and perimeter players and do some work on fundamentals. After that, we do transition defense or transition offense.” Also, at practices, they keep score in pretty much everything they do. Players use this to be competitive and see how they are doing; where Franken uses this so he “can keep track of the guys who are consistently winning or losing.”

Overall, the Trojans basketball team is good-sized and has strong team dynamics. The team culture, as coach Franken says, “is set by the standards/expectations that are emphasized and enforced daily.” This season, the team should be successful and have a fun year. Petty says that the Trojan fans should just “show up and have fun!”