CARNEY/HARRIS — A common basketball coaching credo is that players get better in the offseason and teams get better during the season.

While this statement has merit, there has always been a tendency to take it too simplistically.

To be precise, the adage is a call from coaches to their players — don’t expect to get better if you put the ball down in March and pick it up again in November.

Still, certainly there is individual player development during the winter months while games are being contested and there are team improvement possibilities during the summer months.

Summer team camps are just one such team-building activity. All around the country, players head off for a few days or a week to a camp designed for their teams to play games against other clubs in a competitive but more casual atmosphere than exists during the regular season.

One such camp held locally for several years is the Carney girls basketball team camp, which this year was held from Monday, June 19 to Wednesday, June 21 at both Carney-Nadeau High School and Bark River-Harris High School. Regional U.P. girls teams and two Northern Wisconsin teams congregated for games against a field of 15 schools. On Monday and Tuesday in the opening rounds, the teams were slated against each other at random, while Wednesday was comprised of a two-division tournament, with a higher and lower bracket.

This year, the teams participating included (according to the schedule handed to coaches on the first day): Carney-Nadeau, Bark River-Harris, Marinette (Wis), Ewen-Trout Creek, Kingsford (both varsity and junior varsity), Manistique, Ishpeming, Ontonagon, Brimley, Niagara (Wis.), Lake Linden, Iron Mountain (both varsity and junior varsity), West Iron County, Escanaba (junior varsity) and Menominee.

The games were comprised of 16-minute halves (running clock until the last minute of each half) with a one-minute first overtime if needed. A second overtime was sudden death.

The coaches and the players were given camp T-shirts, courtesy of the organizers led by long-time C-N coach and athletic director Paul Polfus. Teams pay to play in the camp, with funds going toward such things as T-shirts, referees and for costs involved in organizing and running the camp. Most of the teams at the 2023 camp have been coming every summer for years. Kingsford coach Jon Lorenzoni estimated that between his years at North Central High School and Kingsford, this was somewhere between his 15th and 20th time at the camp.

Lorenzoni said the Carney camp has much to recommend.

“One thing is they do a good job of getting a variety of teams here,” the KHS coach said on the second day. “You see teams here that you wouldn’t normally see during the regular season.

“It’s well run, and they never fall behind on the schedule. You’re guaranteed eight games, which is nice. And we don’t have to stay the night here, we can drive back and forth.”

West Iron’s Eric Shamion has similar regard for the camp. Shamion has brought his varsity team to the event every year of his seven-year career at WIC except for the summer of 2021 when the camp wasn’t held because of COVID-19.

“What we like about Carney is it’s a laid-back atmosphere,” Shamion began. “The kids come down, they have some fun, they learn some basketball. It’s just an easier camp for us to get to and it’s always in June and it’s a nice time of the (summer) before things get real busy in July.”

The whole point in participating in such a camp is for teams and players to improve before the players move on to their fall sports like volleyball, tennis and cross-country.

Other than those higher-level players like Kingsford’s Alaina Kowalski and West Iron County’s Danica Shamion, both of whom play AAU ball for the Great Northern Elite out of Gladstone, the remaining players get an opportunity to back on the court with their teammates (some of whom are new) in organized competition.

Kowalski and Shamion, both in their third summers at the camp, said one key aspect of the event is to give the players and the coaches a chance to acclimate new varsity players into the mix.

“I love doing these team camps,” said Kowalski, who played two years with her Kingsford teammates and one year with Gladstone’s team. “It helps build up team chemistry because we have all these new players coming in, a bunch of freshmen coming up, so it just helps us to get prepared for the season.”

“It helps make everyone aware of what you do and what they do, and you grow together as a team,” Danica Shamion added.

As coaches, Lorenzoni and Eric Shamion had to balance their expectations for their teams — between the competitive side of teaching their teams how to win games and the more relaxed side of just letting their kids play against players from other schools instead of just seeing the same players from their schools at open gyms during the summer months.

“We talk about three things,” Coach Shamion began. “We want them to play hard, to play with confidence and the third thing is we want them to have some fun because it’s summer and they’re kids.

“The camp can’t be just about work, work, work all the time. If they make a mistake, guess what, it’s no big deal. If you lose a game in team camp, it’s not the end of the world. Just try to become better players.”

Lorenzoni said the continual change of a prep coach’s roster from year to year makes team camps much more valuable. For the younger players, it’s an early introduction to varsity basketball.

“You always come down here with a mixed bag of underclassmen and upperclassmen,” he said. “It’s good for the younger kids to see the speed of the game at the varsity level and it’s good for the older kids to step up and be leaders for the younger kids.”

Danica Shamion remembers being one of those younger kids trying to adjust to the speed and physicality of the varsity game.

“I feel like I was a little more timid when I first started, but now I’m used to playing on varsity so that it just got easier,” she said. “When I was a freshman, my sister (Jordan) took over the team and now it’s my turn.”

For Kowalski, the three-day team camp was just another way of spending more time in the gym.

“I play all year. Recently I did a couple of lessons with the Bay College coach, and I do a lot of summer camps. I went to the (Point Guard College camp in the Lower Peninsula), which is a really good camp. I go to open gyms every time.

“I just love being in the gym. It gives me an outlet to do stuff and I just like playing on a team with other people being involved.”