MT. STERLING, Ill. — Two local teams coming off great seasons and with high expectations for the 2025-26 season were back in action this past Monday with the Brown County and Illini West boys basketball teams facing off in the Hornets shootout.<\/p>\n
Both teams went a combined 48-19 last season and have a good nucleus returning next season. The two teams faced each other on Monday with the Hornets pulling out a 42-37 win over the Chargers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had just got back from Chicago after playing tough competition, so I think our legs were a little weary,” said Hornets head coach Jeff Bottorff. “We weren\u2019t very sharp in the first half, we picked it up in the second half.”<\/p>\n
Illini West had an opportunity to tie with under a minute left in the game trailing 40-37 getting a great corner 3-point shot look at the basket, but missed and had to foul right after.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went on a bad spirt in the second half but we had chances to get back into it late we just didn\u2019t convert on a couple things, but it was fun,” said Chargers head coach Blaize Kimmell. “I enjoy facing those coaches two good basketball teams in this area.”<\/p>\n
Illini West was able to redeem themselves defeating Beardstown later on. The Chargers struggled early trailing 17-15 at halftime, but dominated the Tigers 28-9 in the second half to win 43-26.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeardstown, I wanted to get some of our younger guys in there that don\u2019t play much, we knew Brown County would be a tough one,\u201d said Kimmell. \u201cWe picked them up in the regular season so I\u2019m excited about that. We got to play two teams that are competitive. We go to the Dells next week, so I wanted to play some local teams to see where we\u2019re at.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bottorff on what his focus is in summer workouts and games.<\/p>\n
\u201cSummer is a great opportunity to play around with different things, we\u2019ll run some different things offensively, we\u2019ll put guys in different positions to really help prepare them for things they\u2019ll see during the season,\u201d Bottorff said. \u201cIllini West is always going to be tough, they\u2019re going to be physical, defend. Coach Kimmell always has them playing really tough defense, which is good for our guys to have to deal with some of that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The two teams met once last season ending in a competitive game that saw the Chargers get the win 48-39. They\u2019ll meet again next winter in what seems to be another great matchup between the two teams.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re very blessed, lot of returning pieces from last year,” said Bottorff. “We\u2019ve had a good summer, we\u2019ve played a lot of ball and we\u2019ve learned some things so I feel really good going into next year.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MT. STERLING, Ill. — Two local teams coming off great seasons and with high expectations for the 2025-26…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3724],"tags":[4244,7,13276,27424,13271,13274,13272,13275,13273,6718,1612],"class_list":{"0":"post-140852","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basketball","8":"tag-american-football","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-gridiron-football-variants","11":"tag-illinois-fighting-illini-football","12":"tag-national-football-league","13":"tag-national-football-league-seasons","14":"tag-national-football-league-teams","15":"tag-national-football-league-teams-seasons","16":"tag-seasons-in-american-football","17":"tag-seasons-in-american-sport","18":"tag-team-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114781783693535356","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}