JEROMESVILLE – Everything is accelerated for Ben Ferguson right now.
When the Hillsdale boys basketball coach began his first season leading the varsity last year, he and the Falcons had more than four weeks of practice and five scrimmages before the regular season arrived.
“By the time they threw the first jump-ball up, we were a well-oiled machine,” Ferguson said Wednesday. “This year, we’re only going to have six days of practice (before the opener).”
Hillsdale tips off the season Tuesday at home against Loudonville. It will be just 11 days since more than half of the varsity basketball roster competed for a Division VII state championship in football.
No month of practice this time. No easing into things.
If the meticulous buildup to last year’s opening tip was like slowly baking dinner in an oven, this year’s rush to get ready is like throwing something in the microwave for 5 minutes and hoping for the best.
“The biggest difference now is we have practice thoughtfully scheduled, literally down to the minute,” Ferguson said. “It’s a fine, delicate line of doing conditioning and getting into basketball shape.
“At the same time, there’s an equal amount of positives. There is nothing better than the taste of winning, and these boys definitely have that.”
As it will forever be remembered locally, the Falcons closed the best football season in their history Dec. 6. The storybook, 14-2 campaign didn’t end until a title-game loss to powerhouse Marion Local and the most successful senior class ever in Ohio football (64-0, four state titles).
Three days after that, Hillsdale had its first basketball practice as a full squad. Seven of the 10 varsity players were on the football team.
Senior Bradey Krichbaum, a two-way lineman and first-team All-Ohioan in football who is the top returning basketball player for the Falcons, said it has definitely been a whirlwind of a transition.
“Surprisingly enough, our energy is actually really high compared to what I thought it was gonna be,” said the 6-foot-6, 215-pound post. “Nobody’s really burnt out right now – I think we’re all in here to get better.
“Before the first practice I was kind of feeling it, thinking, ‘I don’t really want to go to practice.’ But then we got here and everything was fine.”
Krichbaum is one of three seniors for the Falcons this winter alongside Holland Young and Dylan Fickes. He set Hillsdale’s single-season rebounding record last year (297) while averaging 15 points and 12 rebounds per game as an All-WCAL first-teamer.
It was a big reason the Falcons and Ferguson put together the program’s best season on the hardwood in nearly a decade, finishing 18-7 overall (8-6 WCAL) and capturing their first sectional crown since 2016.
Regardless of the late start, Hillsdale and Krichbaum won’t be sneaking up on anyone this winter.
As Ferguson told his team during Wednesday’s workout, “Everybody knows about (Krichbaum). He’s not a secret anymore.”
The athletic talent walking the HHS hallways is no longer a secret, either.
Alongside Krichbaum, additional basketball players Young, juniors Hayden McFadden and A.J. Brown, and sophomore Kael Lewis all set school records on the football field this season. Junior Gage Barker and sophomore Knox Lewis also were part of the team’s run to the state championship game.
That season came on the heels of the Hillsdale baseball team’s run to the Final Four in the spring, which followed last year’s turnaround, 18-win effort by the basketball team.
To this group, losing any game – no matter the sport – seems like it feels personal.
“With where the basketball program was, nobody believed at the beginning of last season (that the team would do what it did),” Ferguson said. “One of the goals was just to go over .500. These kids hadn’t seen over .500 since they were in fourth grade.
“To get them to believe that we could do it, that was a high hill to climb.”
This year, the hill comes in the form of the immensely late start.
While the majority of teams around this area already will have played roughly one-quarter of their regular season by Tuesday night, Hillsdale will be entering numbers into the scorebook for the first time.
The Falcons’ first three games come in a five-day span. They will have a stretch in mid-January during which they will play five games in nine days.
“The benefit of a quick turnaround is, OK, you just played in a state championship game and less than two weeks later, you’re competing again,” said Falcons varsity assistant coach Eric Pickering, who was the offensive line coach in football. “You don’t really lose that (edge).”
It’s not an unprecedented situation for teams in the WCAL.
Just last year, Dalton was a state runner-up in football (also to Marion Local) before putting together a 16-10 season (10-4 WCAL). The Bulldogs opened their year 2-5, then went on a 9-1 run and closed out their campaign with three tournament wins before a regional semifinal loss to the same Warren JFK team that ended Hillsdale’s year.
In 2011, Norwayne captured the WCAL’s lone state football title, then amazingly opened the ensuing basketball season by winning its first 10 games.
“I talked to several other coaches who have been there before – talked to them regularly,” Ferguson said. “They were a big help.”
Pickering, a 2016 Hillsdale graduate and the basketball program’s all-time leading scorer (1,087 points), said he never had any expedited transitions from football to basketball during his time as a Falcon.
The football team lost in first-round playoff games in his freshman and junior seasons and didn’t play past Week 10 in his other two years.
He said that as a coach this year, he essentially had no time mentally to go from the football season to locking in on basketball.
Pickering recalled freshman point guard Lowen Ferguson, coach Ferguson’s son, asking him the day before the state championship game if he was ready for basketball.
“I said, ‘Lowen, talk to me Saturday or Sunday and I’ll be ready to flip that script (to basketball),’ ” Pickering said with a laugh. “Actually now being here everyday and being involved with practices, you just jump right back in.”
Ferguson certainly looked ready to run the Hillsdale offense from the get-go during Wednesday’s practice. During pauses to listen to coaching instructions, the freshman was either constantly dribbling the ball between his legs or casually spinning it on his right pointer finger.
He will be one of the rare freshman to be an everyday starter at point guard for any varsity team. He also joins Fickes and junior guard Troy Bennett (13 ppg, 52 3-pointers last season) as the only three non-football players on the varsity roster.
All of them will have some key shoes to fill.
Graduated point guard Jack Fickes had some of the best assist numbers in Ohio last year (7.0 assists, 5.2 rebounds per game). His classmate, Braylen Jarvis, set the program’s single-season scoring record (507 points) and finished his career second only to Pickering in points (1,060).
But all of the members of this year’s team were part of a massive winning movement on the hardwood last year. When combined, the seventh-grade, eighth-grade, junior varsity and varsity basketball teams went 70-15 overall for Hillsdale in 2023-24.
Coach Ferguson said that between that type of success and this past summer’s loaded game schedule, he believes the Falcons won’t take long to get rolling.
He took his allotted coaching days in the summer and scheduled as many games as humanly possible.
“We had a phenomenal summer, which is absolutely going to carry us this year; we played 66 games in June,” Ferguson said.
“That’s what we are going to lean on is some of the work we put in in the summer. It would be very difficult for me to believe any other high school program played more games. I just don’t know how mathematically you could do it.”
Krichbaum agreed, adding that this group is more success-driven as a unit than any he’s been around during his time as an athlete.
“I feel like it’s honestly better (this year) because we did a lot of stuff in the summer with all of the guys and that’s kind of carrying over, even though we had a long football season,” the senior said.
“The chemistry’s already there and all that good stuff. … There are a lot more guys now that have that mentality of making other people better instead of just themselves.”
Pickering, who was sporting a white Hillsdale football Final Four T-shirt during practice Wednesday, said the work ethic of this group is special.
Coach Ferguson, who admitted that the team will have to “lean on athletes being athletes for a little while,” said defending WCAL champion Norwayne will be the powerhouse at the top of the league.
But he is chomping at the bit to see what this year’s version of Hillsdale hoops can do.
“I truly believe the sky’s the limit for us,” he said. “We have a lot of athletes who have the taste of winning, the will to win, they’re tough kids. And some of the guys who didn’t play football are some of the better shooters in the area. They’re coming in fresh.
“I really, really, really like our team.”