Winters joins hometown Bobcats

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/04/2023 (1052 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Max Winters has made life frustrating for the top AAA boys’ basketball scorers for two years. Now he hopes to do the same in Canada West.

The six-foot-seven Neelin Spartan has committed to the Brandon University Bobcats men’s basketball team for the 2023-24 season.

“It feels good,” Winters said. “I think it’s a testament to the work I’ve put in and obviously I’m proud of that. It’s cool to see that I’ve been able to take one of my passions and play at that level.

“I go to BU games all the time and being able to play with them, practise and get better with them all the time, it’s exciting.”

Crosstown rival coach Brett Nohr at Vincent Massey made it happen. Nohr, an assistant coach for Gil Cheung at BU, has watched Winters repeatedly pick apart his Vikings en route to a pair of city championships.

Winters and the Spartans followed the first crown with a AAA provincial gold medal in 2022. They followed up with a bronze in Thompson last month.

Winters only started playing competitively in Grade 9 and missed his sophomore year due to COVID-19. But the Spartans practised a ton that season, logging more than 200 training sessions from the shutdown to their provincial title win.

That’s a lot of valuable time to learn from an incredibly wise coach, Don Thomson.

“I owe so much of who I am today as a person and a basketball player to him,” Winters said. “I’ve spent so much time, he’s been there every step of the way helping me get better so I owe all of my development to him.”

Cheung says more development is necessary to impact U Sports games — the case for most high schoolers.

He wants to see Winters add muscle and speed in the weight room and stretch his game to the three-point line. Every Bobcat playing regular minutes shoots threes and handles the ball when necessary, which helped them go 12-8 and reach the Canada West quarterfinals last season as one of the top offences in the country at more than 90 points per game.

Cheung has watched enough of Winters to see key strengths as well.

“I thought he had really good timing, could protect the rim. Not many kids his size got that timing down where he can get across and change a lot of shots,” Cheung said.

“He had good hands, soft touch and rebounded the ball well too. Coach Thomson at Neelin has done a good job with him and hat’s off to coach Nohr. Coach Nohr has been doing this for a long time and he’s the one that did most of the recruiting on Max, being another high school coach who saw a ton of him.

“He’s developed and he’s a kid down the road that can help out a U Sports program.”

Winters, who was named a 2022 provincial all-star and 2023 Basketball Manitoba graduating all-star, is approaching the season the same way he’s always approached the game, open and eager to learn and hungry to improve every day.

FREE THROWS: Carberry product Carsen Unrau committed to the Lakehead University men’s basketball team in Thunder Bay, Ont., this week. Boissevain’s Danika Nell signed with Boston University for NCAA Division I softball. Read about both in Saturday’s Sun.

» tfriesen@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @thomasmfriesen