Flathead Valley sixth-grade boys win two basketball tournaments

Just like a real fire, the Bigfork Blaze brought the heat to the court and won two 3-on-3 basketball tournaments in the boys fifth- and sixth-grade divisions this summer.

“We just played our hearts out,” Andrew Siderius of Fair Mont Egan School said. “We pretty much played good as a team.”

Cooper Stein of Kalispell Middle School, Danny Anderson, Jake Smith of Kalispell Middle School, and Andrew Siderius made the team’s first victory of the summer happen at the Battle in the Bay 3-on-3 tournament in Bigfork on July 7. Then on July 27-29, Stein, Smith, Siderius, and Anders Epperly of Bigfork Middle School beat out 18 teams in the 20th annual Flathead Lake 3-on-3 basketball tournament in Polson.

In Bigfork they went 4-0 and in Polson they were 6-1, nearly an undefeated run.

“I was shocked and I was excited, I didn’t think we would win the Polson one because it was pretty hard,” Stein said. “It’s the second biggest tournament in the northwest and I didn’t think we would win it because there were so many teams.”

The only game the team lost was to the Missoula Heat in Polson. The Bigfork Blaze had to beat them twice in order to win the tournament. Their first championship game ended in a tie that came down to a free-throw contest with the players on the court.

“Anders canned the first one and everyone else missed, so we ended up winning that game,” Stein’s father, Paul Stein, said. “The next game we smoked them 9-4 and made them cry.”

The boys have been playing together since fourth-grade on the 5-on-5 traveling team, the Flathead Blaze. Prior to that, most of them played together on school teams at Bigfork, Kalispell, and Fair Mont Egan schools or on the Kalispell Rotary youth basketball team.

“I was proud of them, the more they play together the better they get,” Siderius’ father, Dan Siderius, said. “I think that made a big difference, that they had played together so much.”

Most of the boys plan to continue playing basketball with aspirations for high school teams in the future. In the meantime, Andrew Siderius said he plans to work on improving his skills and not traveling with the ball and Cooper Stein plans to improve his shooting and passing for next summer’s tournaments.