Your future, our focus
Two Former Panthers Suit Up For Trapper Basketball
Trapper basketball head man Brian Erickson is on the road in the annual recruiting rite of spring.
The fourth-year Northwest College coach was on a swing through western states this week, watching tournaments and talking to players and coaches as he goes about assembling the makings of his 2016-17 Trapper team. Erickson called the 2015-16 season “a year of growth,” one in which the predominantly freshman Northwest men’s team compiled a 17-14 record and dropped a 77 75 heartbreaker to Miles City (Montana) College in the first round of the Region IX tournament.
A year ago, NWC won the Region IX championship and advanced to the quarter-finals of the national junior college tournament.
Erickson said the Trappers will return a good group of five to seven players next season, but there are a couple of areas of need that must be addressed.
“We really need a big and another point guard,” he said.
And then there is the perennial wish of every coach on the recruiting trail. “We’d really like to find a pure shooter — that kid who can just really shoot it.”
Erickson said he has his sights on some players to fill those needs, including a 7-1 transfer. He is also in contact with coaches who want to place international players. The Trappers have had particular success with Canadian players in recent years.
While Erickson combs the West, he already has a couple of players in place who are ready to contribute to the Northwest program coming off a redshirt year. They happen to be homegrown Powell players, Marshall MacArthur and Carter Baxter.
Both have spent the last season practicing with the Trappers and gaining exposure to the collegiate game.
MacArthur, a 2013 graduate of Powell High School, spent two years on an LDS mission after leading the Panthers to a regional championship and a state runner-up finish in 2013. Erickson calls him “a pretty versatile 6-4 kid,” who plays on the wing or as a stretch 4, but can play some point guard.
He returned from his mission just in time to enroll at NWC in the fall and spent the entire season with Trapper basketball.
“He’s such a hard worker, a great kid, and everybody on the team loved him,” Erickson said. “He needed some time to get back in shape and sometime in the weight room. We’ve redshirted other Wyoming kids to get them a bit quicker and a bit stronger with time in the weight room.”
Baxter, a 2015 graduate of PHS, scored 13 points a game and led his team in rebounding his senior year as the Panthers finished as runners-up in the 2015 regional tournament. He was recruited by Erickson coming out of high school.
But Baxter enrolled at the University of Wyoming in the fall, then transferred to NWC after the end of the first semester. He was with the Trappers as a redshirt for the last half of the season.
“He (Baxter) talked to me in November and said he missed it (basketball) and wanted to give it a try,” Erickson related. “He’s a tough, hard-working kid, the kind of kid we’ve missed who does the tough stuff and plays hard.”
Both MacArthur and Baxter will have two years of eligibility.