Sean C. Morgan
The Sweet Home High School girls basketball team will fall under the direction of Kerstin Brosterhous, a veteran of high-level basketball competition.
Brosterhous is in her second year teaching business at SHHS. She was the junior varsity girls basketball coach last year.
Brosterhous played two years at Oregon State University and then two years at Portland State University.
She grew up in Medford and played basketball for four years at North Medford High School, graduating in 2003.
Her team didn’t do well through much of her high school career, winning just two games and finishing in last place her junior year. But during her senior year, North Medford turned that around, losing only two games and making the first round of playoffs.
Brosterhous went to college to study business marketing, she said. She wanted to be a sports marketer. After graduation in 2007, she got a job at a high school as a teaching assistant and changed her mind.
She returned to school to earn a master’s degree at Western Oregon University in 2010. The Salem resident substituted until SHHS hired her last year.
Before Sweet Home, Brosterhous coached JV at McMinnville High School and was an assistant coach at Linfield College in McMinnville.
“I love the school, and I love teaching here,” Brosterhous said. “The kids are great. The teachers are great.”
She likes the differences from her hometown where there were two high schools and a divided community when it came to sports.
Brosterhous had no chance when it came to basketball. It has always been a part of her life. She started playing young, she said. Her dad played professionally in France. Her older sister played at OSU. Her cousins, aunts and uncles played college ball.
“It was just kind of in the family,” Brosterhous said.
“I learned a lot of life lessons, more than I learned about basketball,” she said, and those lessons are an important part of coaching her team too.
Division I taught her a lot too, she said. It was highly politicized and more like a job that took the fun out of the game, but she made a lot of friends there and still learned from it.
“It was hard, good hard,” Brosterhous said. “You learn further limits than you think you have.”
She loves coaching, Brosterhous said. “I love seeing people, girls get to do what I love and seeing them succeed at such an awesome game. I just think basketball’s an awesome sport.”
And she enjoys seeing girls doing right along with the guys.
She also loves teaching the athletes what she has learned off the court, being part of a team and facing adversity together.
She said her team is doing a great job getting started.
“The thing they have that is not teachable or coachable is that they love to be out there playing the game,” Brosterhous said. She ran them hard the first three days of practice, and they keep coming back.
“I think they enjoy the game,” Brosterhous said. “They can work hard. I don’t feel like they’ve ever been pushed to their limits. I want them to see that they can go one step further.”
Brosterhous likes a fast-paced game with a defense that also serves as the offense, she said. She doesn’t like zone defenses at all, preferring a man-to-man defense that pressures the opponent and generates offense.
A strong man defense is going to be her focus this year, she said, a defense where “no one wants to play offense against us.”