Oskaloosa’s Henry Out With Injury
Cole Henry (file photo)
by Jamie Brockman
The Oskaloosa Boys basketball team suffered a big blow on Thursday when leading scorer Cole Henry suffered a broken hand in practice, possibly ending his Senior season. I spoke with Henry just hours after he suffered the injury and he said “We were working on offensive plays in practice. I was coming off a back screen for a lob, I caught the lob and went to dunk the ball hard. My left hand was in front of the ball, and I slammed my hand against the rim. Immediately I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t necessarily think it was broken, so I continued to play for a few minutes. As I looked at my hand, it was clear the injury was worse than I originally thought so I left practice, went to the ER and found out it was broken”. No surgery will be needed, but Henry will be wearing a hard splint for three weeks forcing him out of competition. He says he has a follow-up visit in three weeks and if all goes well, even though he wouldn’t be 100 percent, he’s hoping to be back in time for Oskaloosa’s substate final game to help the Indians get back to state should the Indians advance to that round.
Oskaloosa News spoke with Oskaloosa Head Coach Ryan Parker, who said “Anytime you lose a player like Cole for an extended period of time it hurts, but we can not dwell on it too long as we still have several games to play and our opponents certainly won’t take it easy on us as we are down one of our best players. We don’t have a lot of time for adjustments as we play Friday, Saturday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday, we just need a total team effort to pick up Cole and his production. If we expect one person to pick up the entire slack we will be in for a long couple of weeks. Our goal is to have Cole back for at least part of our postseason run.”
Henry added “This is emotional for me as I definitely want to be on the floor and helping this team bring a state championship to our city, but I’ll still be a big part of this team and basically another assistant coach from the bench cheering on my teammates and I plan to stay positive to help in my healing process and can’t wait to return to the floor”
Obviously, the loss of Henry will be felt, as he averages 23 points and 12 rebounds per game and demands a defense’s attention at all times, however, the Indians still have 7’0 Xavier Foster and the long-range shooting abilities of Rian Yates and Austin Hafner as well as Noah Van Veldhuizen, but it will take some time for everyone to adjust to Henry’s absence. Time, however, is not something the Indians have as they travel to Pella Friday night hoping to avenge a loss from earlier this season, then head to D-C-G Saturday, host Indianola Tuesday, travel to Pella Christian Thursday then host Norwalk on Saturday, February 9th.
