They’re young, with seven underclassmen compared to four seniors, and they have a new head coach, but the Bradley-Bourbonnais boys basketball team is anything but unfamiliar with one another.

In a road trip to another young team in Kankakee County on Saturday, the Boilermakers showed some experience beyond their years by taking a double-digit lead early on at Manteno and turning it into a 57-31 win on Saturday.

Less than 24 hours removed from a gut-punch of a 43-42 loss in their Southwest Suburban Conference opener at Sandburg on Friday, junior guard Tez Smith was proud of how the Boilers rebounded Saturday afternoon.

“It says a lot about us,” said Smith, who buried a trio of 3-pointers for nine points. “We just flushed it and take it one day at a time. Go to practice, work hard, try and show out and put on for our city.”

The Boilers (3-3) took a 15-6 lead after a quarter that turned into a 23-6 lead when Drew Kubal buried a 3-pointer two minutes into the second quarter for a quick 8-0 spurt that set the tone for the rest of the game.

First-year Boilers head coach Eric Long is anything short on head coaching experience, serving as a head coach at a handful of schools, and spent the last three years as a Boilers assistant. With the same staff of assistants that former head coach Ryan Kemp – now the freshman coach – had in place, Long said there’s been plenty of continuity and familiarity for a program in the first few weeks of a new regime, even if they’re also in the first season after the graduation of Nick Allen, the school’s all-time scoring leader.

“We were already speaking the same language,” Long said. “We’re doing a lot of things differently because we don’t have the unicorn this year. We don’t have Nick Allen, so we’ve got to play differently, but that doesn’t mean we won’t do a lot of the conceptual things that we want to do, and terminology and things like that.”

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Bradley-Bourbonnais' Tate Marcotte, left, grabs a rebound over Manteno's Colin Saathoff during a game at Manteno Saturday, Dec. 6, 2025. (Mason Schweizer)

Smith and fellow junior guard Kobe Lawrence (10 points) were a part of last season’s core with bigger roles this year, while sophomore guard Trey Lawrence’s 14 points led the team for the second straight game. Freshman guard DaJuan Brown chipped in six points as he continues the start of his high school career in the starting five.

Smith said learning from the seniors who were here last year has been key to the team’s development.

“Now we’ve got to pick it up and teach the younger kids because they look up to us. We played together back in the day, back in middle school, so we’ve got that chemistry with each other,” Smith said. “Everything is connecting and we’re going to progress as the year goes on.”

The Boilers especially showed that connection on the defensive end, where they held the Panthers to single-digit point totals in three quarters, the closest eight minutes coming when they outscored the hosts 13-10 in the third. Not only does Long hope their defense continues to travel well, but also that it can keep providing quick offensive opportunities, where their goal is to establish early touches inside for either an easy layup or an open look on a quick pass back outside.

“When we’re getting stops and we’re rebounding well, then we’re able to run the court well,” Long said. “I think our level of understanding on how to attack the paint in various ways is getting better. And so I think when we get our feet in the paint, then good things happen for us. And that’s what I thought we did well at times.”

A similarly young Manteno (3-2) team saw a quick two-game winning streak come to an end. Two of their three seniors, Braden Campbell and Eric Eldridge, led the scoring with eight and seven points, respectively.

The Panthers are also replacing their all-time scoring leader, Ray Lee, and are retooling after a program-best two-year stretch of 47 wins. Having a test like the Class 4A Boilermakers allowed head coach Zack Myers a great opportunity for his younger players to get their feet wet.

“That was our message in the locker room after the game, that this is why we schedule games like this,” Myers said. “If we can compete against them, everyone else on our schedule should fall into place.

“They’re by far the most athletic team we’ll see and they’re young like us, so they could make mistakes too, but you could see how they just battled through and kept playing,” he added. “It was a showcase to my kids to show them that this is where we need to be playing at to play with teams like this.”