Young Sikeston guard getting defensive with his summer training

For over a decade leading up to the 2018-19 varsity boy’s basketball season, veteran coach Gregg Holifield’s teams at Sikeston High School were known for, well, first of all, winning, but how the Bulldogs won was with an explosive offense, and just as important, stifling defense.

During that stretch of success, which included four trips to the MSHSAA Final Four, including a Class 4 state championship, Sikeston opponents didn’t average 60 points per game in a single season. However, during the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons, that number exceeded 61 points per game, and the number of wins didn’t maintain the level that Bulldog fans had become accustomed to.

That wasn’t the case this past season, and the young Bulldogs are spending their summer working to ensure the program is back on track defensively.

“We are trying to play a lot this summer,” Holifield said, “to keep people fresh and interested. Our attendance has been fantastic.”

There was no shortage of Bulldog student-athletes at the Sikeston Junior High School gym on Thursday running the floor and drenched in sweat, and that bunch included junior guard Tristan Wiggins, who will play a seismic role in how good the Bulldogs are defensively this coming season.

“Tristan is a terrific defender,” Holifield said. “As good as he is, he can get better.”

Wiggins, who is a thick, strong, 6-foot athlete, will be a junior in 2023-24 and was a key to the program’s – somewhat surprising – success this past season.

Sikeston had won just 29 combined games over the previous two seasons but burst onto the Missouri prep scene with 22 wins this past season, including an upset of top-seed Cape Central in the Class 5 District 1 final.

In that game, the Bulldogs held the Tigers, who had averaged nearly 75 points per game, to just 48 points in the 50-48 win.

As solid as Wiggins is at containing perimeter threats, he is also a nuisance at the other end of the court, and Holifield is looking for growth this summer from Wiggins offensively.

“He’s got to get better at ball movement,” Holifield explained. “He handles the ball well. He shoots the ball well. He has an understanding of the complete team concept, which he improved tremendously last year during the course of the season.”

Holifield had several of his athletes attend the recent L.E.A.D. leadership seminar in Sikeston, which was put on by the Southeast Missouri State football program, and Wiggins said he gained a lot of insight from that day, which he’ll put into practice this coming year.

“I love how (Redhawk coach Tom Matukewicz) taught us a lot about the different ways to be a leader,” Wiggins said. “I would say at times I have been a good leader, but sometimes, I am not. I’m just keeping it real. But there are a lot of things that I learned that I can work on, like how we can communicate with others.”

“Tristan has gotten so much better,” Holifield said. “But our points of emphasis (this summer) is to improve his ball handling, improve his ball movement, and continue to get better defensively.”