By Matt Gade

605 Sports

RAPID CITY — Graduating seven seniors from last year’s Class A third-place Rapid City Christian team, head coach Kyle Courtney knew that this year, experience was in short demand.

Following last year’s best performance ever for the Comets boys’ basketball team, Courtney anticipated leaning on those few players who had valuable game time experience heading into this season. 

One of those was Lars Kieffer, the Comets’ sixth man off the bench most of last season.

Before the basketball season even started, Kieffer suffered a severe ankle injury during the Comets' football game against Lead-Deadwood this past fall. 

An injury, Kieffer originally thought was his ankle broken, turned out to be a high-ankle sprain with torn ligament damage.

“Right at first, I thought I snapped my ankle, hurt it really bad,” Kieffer said. “Ended up being a really terrible sprain, but I was a little worried, sad because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish out football season, but I didn't know how much it was going to affect basketball and baseball.”

Given the option of surgery to repair the tendons or do physical therapy to try and strengthen his muscles and tendons, Kieffer chose physical therapy. 

Kieffer managed to make enough progress with his ankle, the senior Comet returned to the bench for the first time against Lead-Deadwood on Jan. 22. 

“It's huge, you know of Lars,” Courtney said of Kieffer’s return. “The thing about Lars is, Lars is just a winner. Whatever sport he's in, he's a winner. 

“He just does all the little things. Leadership-wise, he does the dirty work he sees out there. He's not taking a bunch of shots he could, but he's just willing to play whatever role we need him to. And, you know, he just plays with an edge, and we were missing that. So just really proud of him, but super excited. I think it's one of the pieces of the puzzle that helped this team kind of come together here.”

To start the season, the Comets went 5-6 before Kieffer’s return. Since his return, the Comets have gone 8-2 and are now sitting second in Region 8A behind No. 6-ranked St. Thomas More and just ahead of Hill City, with one more regular-season game remaining at Hot Springs on Friday.

“We have been struggling with leadership at the beginning of the year, and I took it as a mission to come in with that leadership and lead these guys who didn't play much varsity last year and lead the way,” Kieffer said.

Courtney said Kieffer’s strongest strength has been his work inside the post and on the defensive side of the ball. 

In his eight games, Kieffer is averaging more rebounds than points. With 4.6 rebounds per game, while scoring 4.3 points per game.

“Defensively, he's a pretty skilled player, and he's just a strong kid, too, and he can do a lot of little things,” Courtney said. “He plays bigger than he is. He can guard a lot of positions.”
“I take defense with pride and rebounding with pride,” Kieffer said. “That's really my role on the team. I didn't get to shoot much last year or really this year. So I know my role, and I try and play it the best as I can.”

While he still has some pain in his ankle, Kieffer said one of the big motivating factors for him to get back this year was to be able to play with his cousins on the team.

While Kieffer, a Post 22 Hardhat, has signed to play baseball at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, the Comet senior isn’t ready for basketball season to be done just yet.

“This is a big win for us, big momentum swing in our direction, after the tough loss to Spearfish earlier in the week,” Kieffer said following the Comets' 57-46 win over Rapid City Stevens on Saturday. “ I think it's gonna be really good and important for us down the stretch. We got Hot Springs, so we got to go take care of business there, and then it goes into regionals, and we just got to keep going on.”

Courtney said the team’s got things heading in the right direction come postseason.

“If you can come out of your region and get a spot in the SoDak. I feel like we're in a position where, if we can play really good basketball, we could be dangerous, but we got to control our controllables. That's the biggest thing.”