Chris Kellett noticed he was missing a player during the Wisconsin Playground Warriors Amateur Athletic Union boys basketball team practice May 22 at Shawano Community High School.
It turned out Brevin Pritzl, a 6-foot-3 shooting guard from De Pere, had a very good excuse for being late.
The De Pere junior had just committed to play for the University of Wisconsin.
“He walked in about five minutes late because he was talking to coach (Greg) Gard after he committed,” said Kellett, who is in his second year coaching the AAU team. “He walked in with a big grin on his face. He told us right away, we congratulated him, and he got right to practice like it was another day.”
Pritzl, who had offers from several NCAA Division I schools, called Gard after deciding to verbally commit to Wisconsin while driving with his brother Brandon to Shawano for practice.
Pritzl’s stand-out performances with the Warriors this spring helped attract recruiters’ attention, according to several media outlets.
Kellett, who also coaches the SCHS boys varsity basketball team, said Pritzl’s play has been impressive.
“He’s a tremendous kid,” Kellett said. “He has a great passion for the game of basketball. He doesn’t want to be good, he wants to be great. He’s in the gym early, stays after. Very skilled kid.
“When he has it going, not many people are better than he is.”
In a game against an Illinois team earlier this month at a tournament in Indiana, Pritzl had to sit out most of the first half after getting two fouls in the first 30 seconds of the game.
“He came in the second half and he had 37 points, and he scored in a variety of different ways,” Kellett said. “That kind of started the buzz.”
Pritzl followed that game with a 40-plus point game against a team from Washington.
“They doubled him, they tripled him,” Kellett said. “Literally everything he threw up went in. He had some treys, a couple dunks, scored off the bounce, and he also did it in an unselfish way, and he found his teammates.
“Those two games back to back kind of cemented the fact that he was for real. Following that he got all those big offers.”
Pritzl has played AAU basketball for the last five years, the last two for Kellett.
“He’s matured, both physically and mentally,” Kellett said. “Our team relies on him scoring quite a bit. I run a lot of things through him. He does a good job of manipulating the defense and creating his own off of that.
“Our team does a good job of playing together, which is always key in the game of basketball. When he has it going, we find a way to get him the ball.”
The Warriors, who usually practice in the Fox Valley, have been practicing in Shawano this spring because the weather made it more difficult to find open gyms. Shawano is also more centrally located for the players from areas such as Wausau and Eau Claire.
Pritzl isn’t the only standout on Kellett’s team.
“It’s a team full of scholarship-type players,” he said. “I have one kid from Stoughton who has gotten multiple offers, named Nick McGlynn, a bunch of guys who are getting D2, mid-major-type looks. It’s a talented team.”
The team has had 180 scholarship players since it began, including players such as Wisconsin’s Sam Dekker, of Sheboygan, and North Carolina’s J.P. Tokoto, of Menomonee Falls.
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