For two out of the three high school athletic seasons, Frontier Regional School’s Carsten Carey’s main focus is to outrun his opponents. During the winter, he has to outmuscle them.
It’s two very different goals that don’t exactly make for easy transition between seasons, but Carey has proven to make it look easy. After a successful cross country campaign that saw him finish as one of the best runners in the state, the 6-foot, 7-inch center was the Recorder-area boys’ basketball scoring champion with 16.1 points per game this season.
Carey’s play on both ends of the floor helped lead the Red Hawks to a 13-7 regular-season record and a Hampshire League North Division title. He then came up huge late in the game during Frontier’s 43-39 victory over Mahar Regional School in the WMass Division III first round, before the team was eliminated by top-seeded Monument Regional High School, 70-54, in the quarterfinals.
The junior entered the winter season off of an impressive fall cross country campaign in which he finished second at the WMass Division II meet before placing 29th at the MIAA Division II State meet. He then had to transition into the basketball season, where he became a known commodity as one of the top big men in the Hampshire League. The only way opposing teams could deal with Carey’s height advantage was to be physical with him, but Carey said he was unaffected, and that he got on a weight-lifting regime implemented by Frontier assistant coach Brennan McKenna. The distance runner said that he does not mind putting on some weight to help him deal with the grind of playing in the low post.
“I think that any weight I can put on is nice to have,” Carey began. “I don’t look at putting on weight as a negative thing. I see it as adding strength and power.
“Both of my basketball coaches really supported me with strength-training as well as maintaining my fitness for cross country and track and field,” he added.
Carey said that the hardest part of the transition is using the different muscles in basketball, as well as doing a different running routine.
Frontier entered the season having missed the postseason by one win a year ago and Carey was a big reason why the team had aspirations to punch its tournament ticket this winter. Not only did Carey grow physically, he also matured as a basketball player. One year after averaging 9.3 points per game, Carey’s output nearly doubled this winter.
“I knew I needed to step up a little more than the previous year,” he said.
Things did not go exactly to plan to start the season, as Frontier dropped its first four games. Four of those losses came by four points or less.
“We had a bumpy start,” Carey said. “The team had a little issue becoming a cohesive unit, and we lost some games we could have won.”
When Frontier finally got its first win of the season, things began to snowball and the club finished the regular season on a 13-3 run leading into the postseason. But Carey had not forgotten about those four early losses, and he admitted that those contributed to the Hawks only getting the No. 8 seed in the tournament.
“We had some good wins, but we also had some not so good losses,” he said. “It didn’t bode well for the seeding process. I definitely wish we had some of those losses back from the beginning of the season.”
The good news for Frontier is that Carey returns for another season and the team seems to be trending in the right direction. Carey said that he may play more basketball in the offseason than he has in the past, which could help the team get off to a better start next winter. It wasn’t as though Carey struggled, though, early on. He opened the year with back-to-back 20-point games, and wound up scoring in double figures in all but three of the Red Hawks’ games this season. His season-high was 27, which came against Belchertown High School on Jan. 29. He finished with a game-high 22 points in the season-ending tourney loss to Monument.
Carey still has time to grow a bit more before next season, which could only make him more of a load to deal with for opposing teams. That height could be beneficial for the team, even if it’s not necessarily conducive to Carey getting a good night sleep.
“You learn to lie down diagonally to leave as much room for yourself as possible,” he joked about fitting into a bed.
His play this season left plenty of approaching defensive foes to have sleepless nights.
As for the rest of the area, Franklin County Technical School’s Jared Bergmann put together a great season and finished with 13.2 points per game this winter, good enough for second in area scoring. Like Carey, Bergmann also saw his numbers increase this winter after scoring 8.8 per game last season. That helped the Eagles qualify for the postseason and score a first-round upset against Hampden Charter School. The Eagles played eventual WMass champion Pioneer Valley Regional School tough during the quarterfinals.
Mahar Regional School’s Sam Paul finished third in the area with 12.8 points per game, which helped the Senators qualify for the tournament. Turners Falls High School big man Anthony Peterson also put together a strong season with 12.5 points per game to place fourth in the area.
Pioneer guard Garrett Cote had a big postseason and finished the year with 12.2 points per game to place fifth in the area. Cote will be remembered for hitting the buzzer-beating 3-pointer in the WMass semifinals to beat Drury High School, 69-68. He finished that game with a season-high 32 points.