The scoring numbers may have been down for Koryn Greiwe this season, but her numbers in other key stats went up.
As a result, Columbus East was a more balanced team this winter, and that led to a big season. Greiwe, a junior who led the Olympians to the Hoosier Hills Conference title, is The Republic Girls Basketball Player of the Year for the third consecutive year.
“She gets everybody’s best shot, as she has for two years, and I thought she responded with her best year,” East coach Danny Brown said. “Just overall, the balance of her game has improved so much in her third year.”
After averaging 19.0 points as a freshman and 21.2 points as a sophomore, Greiwe’s scoring averaged dipped to 16.3 this season. But she improved to a team-leading 4.6 assists and 3.7 steals and added 4.9 rebounds.
“Coming into this year, I just wanted to improve every aspect of my game, and I was able to increase assists, rebounds and steals,” Greiwe said. “I was able to do that because of my teammates. My teammates were able to finish on the passes that I gave them, and I think they were able to step up in big situations and help us win games.”
One other number that went down for Greiwe was turnovers. With only 2.9 turnovers a game, she had nearly a 2:1 assist-to-turnover ratio.
“Her first two years, she had more turnovers than assists. This year, she was 2:1 assists to turnovers, and against our competition with her handling the ball as much as she does, that was a big part of what we did. She wanted to improve in her shooting, and her shooting was way up. Free throws are always right at 85 percent, and that was up a tick.”
Greiwe dished out a single-game school-record 13 assists in a December win against Orleans.
“I think it was her best year yet,” Brown said. “She got everybody involved. Her scoring was down, a little bit, but then she picked up everybody else. Saige (Stahl) and Leah (Bachmann) and Gabby (Dean) and Maleigh (Roberts) and Albany (Speer), all their scoring went up, and that’s because of her being a leader out there on the point.”
The highlight of the Olympians’ season was a 67-66 win against Class 4A then-No. 2 Bedford North Lawrence on Jan. 12.
“I think we showed how good of a team we could be in that game,” Greiwe said. “The second half of the regular season, we showed how good we could be.”
Buoyed by the win against Bedford, East went 7-0 in the HHC to win their first conference title since the 2007-08 season.
“As a team, winning conference was a huge highlight of the season,” Greiwe said. “Stepping on the floor, we knew what was on the line wasn’t going to be easy. So to win conference outright was a huge accomplishment, and that was one of our major goals this year.”
Greiwe currently is playing travel basketball with Indiana Elite Thunder. That’s a change after not having a spring travel season last year.
“In the spring, we were not really able to play, but fortunately in the summer, downtown Indy was opened up, and we played a lot of games in the convention center,” Greiwe said. “We were able to play pretty much every weekend in the summer and play in a lot of games. It was fun.”
Greiwe said she has been talking to a few college coaches and still hopes to play at the Division I level. She is looking forward to spring and summer ball in hopes of gaining more exposure.
The Olympians have the potential of returning everyone on its roster with no seniors on this year’s team.
“With everybody back, with Koryn leading the way, she’s going to get even better because no one works harder than Koryn Greiwe in practice every day,” Brown said. “She leads by that example, and I’m sure she’ll continue to do that. There’s some areas she’ll want to get better at, and I think we will get better in those areas, and I think we’ll see a big senior year out of her.”
Greiwe is hoping for big things, as well.
“I want to have a great season as a team, have a better record than we did this year, even though we had a really good record this year,” Greiwe said. “We want to win some games that we should have finished this year. We’re so talented as a team, we just have to put the pieces together, and I think next year, we’ll have a really good year.”
