GILMAN GIRLS BASKETBALL - Former Blackhawk settling in as new head coach of the Pirates
A standout student-athlete while wearing black and red just down the road at Owen-Withee more than a decade ago, Bailey Rosemeyer has changed those colors to purple and gold as the new girls head basketball coach at Gilman High School.
Officially approved for hire by the school board on May 19, Rosemeyer has hit the new-look floor in Gilman’s gym running, getting to know her new team largely through Wednesday night summer league action and open gyms in the past month.
“I’m very excited,” Rosemeyer said on July 10. “It’s a really cool opportunity that I’m excited to take advantage of. Obviously I’m not from the town but it’s a really good community that I live in and I’m excited to be a part of it. Hopefully I can grow the program even more.”
It is the first head coaching gig for the 2014 Owen-Withee graduate, Bailey Karaba in those days. She was a three-time All-Eastern Cloverbelt Conference firstteam basketball player, a first-team All-ECC choice in volleyball as a senior and two-time second-team pick as well as a two-time second-team choice in softball. She is married to Cody Rosemeyer, a 2011 Gilman graduate and standout athlete in his own right back then.
The Rosemeyers have two young boys who keep Bailey busy along with the couple’s small hobby farm.
The position opened after Gilman’s school board moved in a closed session on April 10 to “go in a different direction” with the position following a fairly successful seven-year run under Tammy Weir, whose teams went 94-75 in that time with a 52-49 mark in the conference, one WIAA Division 5 regional title and three more regional final appearances, including one this past season.
“I wasn’t really expecting it,” Rosemeyer said about deciding to pursue the opening. “I had coached awhile ago. I had helped out at Owen not long after I graduated high school. Then I took a break from it. The opportunity kind of came up. Then I was discussing it with my husband. It’s something I’ve always had a passion for. I decided to take the opportunity. I knew some of the girls and I knew it was a great group of girls, so it was kind of an easy choice to make once I walked through it in my head and realized how good it could be for me for my first year.
“It’s a pretty great group of girls to come into for my first year. I got pretty lucky.”
Rosemeyer inherits a roster that is on the young side with sophomores and juniors filling most spots. At the varsity level, the Pirates put an emphasis on trying to push the pace last season and Rosemeyer plans to continue that emphasis, while introducing her own tweaks.
“This group of girls works incredibly hard and they are a really fast group of girls,” Rosemeyer said. “We don’t have a lot of height, but I didn’t have a lot of height when I was in high school either. We were more of a run-and-gun kind of team, so it’s something very familiar. They want to push the ball and they want to run. So we’re going to take advantage of that as much as we can. We want to play to our strengths. Obviously if height is not one of our strengths we have to use whatever else we have in our arsenal and speed is going to be one of them.”
Summer league play has consisted of weekly round-robin matchups at rotating sites with neighboring Thorp and Cornell.
“We’re just working on control and slowing it down a little,” Rosemeyer said. “We want speed but I don’t want to see it out of control. That’s the fine line we have to toe right now. This summer that’s what we’ve been working on. Yes, I want you to push the ball, but when we get into the offensive end of the court I don’t want to see us going crazy and the ball’s flying all over the place.”
After high school, Rosemeyer played one year of college basketball at St. Thomas University in St. Paul. She was on a team that went 30-1 and reached the NCAA Division III Sweet 16.
“It was a really cool team,” she said. “The upperclassmen were great. It was a very strong program. It just introduced me to a whole new level of basketball after high school. I had to dig deep into my mind to bring some of that back and introduce some of those ideas back into high school.”
Just maybe, that year of wearing purple for the Tommies foreshadowed this move to the Pirates, a team the Owen-Withee Blackhawks dominated at the time she played for them from 2010-14.
“Initially it was weird,” Rosemeyer said. “I’m settling into it more now after a couple of weeks. I’m sure when the season comes around when we play Owen that first time, it’s definitely going to be strange knowing more of the crowd from my hometown than from the town that I coach for. But I know that this community is a great community and obviously my husband’s family is from here. I know a good amount of people. They’ve welcomed me in with open arms. It’s been a great experience so far. Obviously the season hasn’t started and we have a couple months break yet. But I’m excited to see how it goes.”
