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Home | Sports | Prep Sports
Voices inside your head can offer good advice
For Henry Sibley junior Mike Bruesewitz, talking to yourself isn't dysfunctional at all. He's reminding himself how to play and how to win.
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Mike Bruesewitz didn't have the best line during Wednesday's Class 4A boys' basketball quarterfinals, but he had some of the best lines. They came when the 6-7, 215-pound, redheaded, happy-faced junior forward from Henry Sibley was talking about talking to himself.
A few weeks ago, Bruesewitz announced he would play for the Wisconsin Badgers. This made him the big-name player on his team, but Henry Sibley has plenty of names to go around.
The Warriors' five starters scored all the points in their 68-58 victory over Rochester Mayo at Target Center. All five played between 27 and 33 minutes and scored between 10 and 19 points.
The game was forecast as a battle of big men. Bruesewitz and 6-8 classmate Chris Halvorsen combine to average 26 points and 21 rebounds. Mayo countered with two Division I-bound seniors, 6-6 Jordan Hicks (Loyola of Chicago) and 6-8 Lucas Kuipers (Rice). They average 38 points and 18 rebounds per game.
But Bruesewitz knew how to beat Mayo (this is when he begins talking about what he said inside his head).
"Hicks and Kuipers are great players. I felt like we had an advantage at our guard spots. I was like, 'You know what? We'll neutralize them and we'll let our guards win the game.' And that's what they did."
Indeed, Henry Sibley guards Peter Leslie and Noah Kaiser were the scoring leaders, combining to make nine of 12 three-point shots. Bruesewitz, meanwhile, had 13 points on 5-for-11 shooting and a team-high nine rebounds. His first-half total was a measly two points, so he knew what he needed to tell himself to do.
"In the first half I was forcing it a little bit, trying to do too much, not letting the game come to me and not letting my teammates help me out and get easy buckets. In the second half, I was kind of talking to myself, saying, 'You've gotta slow down. You don't have to do it all. You've got great teammates, guys who can make plays. If you make a play here and there, that's good.'"
He scored the first basket of the second half, and away he and his teammates went. The second-seeded Warriors will face No. 3 seed Cooper, a 54-52 winner over Burnsville, in today's semifinals.
Bruesewitz's college list included the Gophers (even though they didn't offer him a scholarship), Valparaiso, Iowa and Washington State. He confirmed that recruiting was getting to him, and announcing his plans to become another in a line of big, beefy Badgers was a good thing.
"It was just a lot of pressure off of me," he said. "I felt like it was kind of wearing me down. It didn't get real heavy, but you could kind of see it on my face. I was kind of like, 'All right, I have to talk to a coach and I have to put my happy face on.' It got a little hectic.
"I wanted to make the commitment before this run, because I knew we would make a run. I wanted to be playing at my best, and I felt I wouldn't be playing as well if I had a big decision, such as committing to a college, to make before sections. I just felt like, 'I need to do this for these guys, these seniors.'"
That's when I said (inside my head), "Well said."
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