Capable leader

Braden Jensen needed to shift gears.

A role player on last year’s Central Valley high school boys basketball team, the senior figured to do the same: play defense and get the ball to the team’s scorer.

And then the scorer decided to not play.

“Last year I didn’t have to score that much because we had Kris Henderson, who was a big part of our team,” Jensen said. “But he decided he didn’t want to play basketball this season because he wasn’t having any fun. It was a shock, to me. I’d played on teams with Kris since I was in the fourth grade.

“To me, personally, it was a shock and I had one-on-one conversations with him about. I respect him for his decision. Being a senior leader out there, I had to step up and kind of take on that role with the team.”

Who do you go to when your go-to guy, well, goes?

As a senior leader on a young squad, Jensen figured this was one pass he shouldn’t make.

“I think it brought my game up,” he said. “When (Kris) was playing, I would work to get the ball to him, and I knew that most of the time it was going in. It forced me to shoot a lot more, to take my shots instead of passing them up and passing to him. It got me involved more, and it got the team involved more.”

It wasn’t that the Bears were bereft of scorers.

“We have so many scorers,” Jensen said. “Anybody on any given night can step up and score 20 points in a game. We knew we had the potential for anybody on the team to fill that role. I’ve just had more opportunities than some of the others.”

But there’s a difference between being capable of scoring in double digits and doing it game-in and game-out.

Through the first 13 games, Jensen has averaged 11.5 points per outing. He’s scored more than 20 points in three games, including a season-high 23 points against Cheney.

For Jensen, the seeds of this year were planted during his sophomore season.

“I think it all started two years ago,” he explained. “We had a big senior class that year, too. I suited up for varsity that year, and I think I got into six games for a total of about 10 minutes. But that was an experience to remember. That’s where everything started to come together.

“That class set the tone for my class – how things are done at CV, how we do it, how practices should be, how hard you should play in games, how good the program is.”

That foundation, Jensen said, gave him the ability to fill a leadership role.

And it paid off.

The team’s chemistry solidified quickly – upsetting rival University in the season opener and helping the Bears win eight of their first nine games.

“I was surprised at that,” Jensen said. “We lost four or five seniors from last year’s team, then we lost Kris. Coming in, we’re a really young team.

“One of the things we started doing this year is to have team dinners every Wednesday. It brings us close together and helps us get to know one another personally. That helps.”

It was at one of those dinners that the team bonded.

“After our third game (a loss to Seattle’s Franklin), we got together and just said, ‘Hey, we’re a good enough team – we can do this,’ ” Jensen said. “That’s where it all came together.”

The dinner table also helped the team recover from a recent stumble. Before beating East Valley in a showdown Thursday, the Bears had dropped three straight games, including a one-point loss at Mead.

“We took about five days straight off over the Christmas break, and I think we lost some of our legs and some of our momentum,” Jensen said. “We just started making little, stupid mistakes that would cost us.

“It was really important for us to go out and win that game at East Valley to get some of that momentum back, and we need to go out there this week and build on that again and get back to the way we were playing before that.”