‘It’s all worth it in the end’

They wanted the smoke.

They got the smoke. They wanted the smoke no more.

There was a point in the middle of the second quarter last Friday night when Allen was shooting free throws on one end of the floor.

On the other end, two members of the Eagles’ lineup were standing near their bench, hunched over, hands at their knees, begging for normalcy to return to their lungs before the torture started up again.

The reprieve never came. There was a time the next evening when Caddo matched Okarche bucket for bucket - and them some - in the first period.

But then the second quarter started and the matching stopped.

The Warriors kept going. The Bruins could not. They wanted the smoke. They got the smoke. They wanted the smoke no more.

Okarche achieved history on Saturday night by dismantling No. 2 Caddo 8465 in the Class A boys basketball state championship game at OG&E Coliseum.

Just as the Warriors won the final two championships at State Fair Arena, they opened the new home of Oklahoma high school state tournaments with a three-peat performance for the ages.

En route to winning the gold ball, Okarche beat No. 12 Cheyenne by 40 points, No. 8 Allen by 32 and the Bruins by 19, an average of 30.3 points.

Watching the games in person, it’s breathtaking.

On paper, it was easy. But it wasn’t. “The old adage is true,” said coach Aaron West. “Nothing in life is worth having if it’s not tough and you didn’t earn it.

“If it was easy, everybody would do it…and not everybody’s doing it.”

•••

Okarche practices are tough by design.

“No,” said senior Easton Roby when asked if he’ll miss them.

“Not at all.” They are long, they’re intense and every single one of them ends the same way.

With running. “I mean, it’s definitely not the most fun you’ll ever have,” said another senior, Ethan Kirby.

There’s a madness, but there’s also a method, promises West.

“My dad used to say you want your practices to be harder than the games,” he recalled. “Our practices are tough and our conditioning is tough. And I don’t think a lot of kids like to be coached…but our kids are coachable and they’re competitors and they bought in.”

And Okarche took the intensity from those practices and enforced their will on teams for the last four years.

They run. They push the pace. They run. They press. They run. They shoot. They run. They shoot some more. They run. They turn you over. They run.

“It’s just a brand of basketball,” West said. “We want to be tougher than our opponent, whether that’s attacking offensively or defensively.”

And they don’t stop. “And then when you see your competition out there grabbing at their shorts,” said West. “Well, it’s just a mentality.”

When the Warriors see that hint of weakness, it’s like blood in the water for a school of sharks.

“We’ll see them grab their knees and everyone will point it out,” Kirby said. “And it’s like, ‘oh, we’ve got them now’ because they’re tired and they’re thinking about it.

“It’s harder to dribble and shoot when you’re thinking about being tired.”

Some teams tried to slow them down, but it was a fruitless effort.

Others tried to match the pace…to match the intensity.

But? “You can’t just wake up one day and have what we have,” said Brett Carnott. “It’s a process and we’ve been working at it a long time.”

And so there was very little concern when Allen looked the part of David to Okarche’s Goliath in the semifinal game that Friday night in Yukon.

The Mustangs scored first. And then again. And again. And again.

Meanwhile Okarche continued to miss and Allen was doing a great job of keeping the Warrior ball hawks off the boards.

Allen scored the game’s first 11 points and sent its fan base into a frenzy as West called a timeout.

“Our shots just weren’t going in,” West said. “I told them we needed to get the ball to the high post and touch the paint. I knew if we could hit a couple of shots and get some steals, that would break the cap off.”

Jett Mueggenborg scored Okarche’s first points at 4:49 of the quarter.

The Mustangs were up 15-4 with 2:52 remaining in the quarter.

By the time the buzzer sounded, it was 17-17.

“I was never panicked,” said Jett Mueggenborg, the program’s all-time leading scorer and a three-time state tournament MVP. “I remember at one point standing at the free throw line and thinking, ‘it’s go time now.’” Okarche went. Once the buckets started falling, the press took over.

The Warriors were up by 18 at halftime, a 29-point swing after giving up the game’s first 11 points.

“We watched film on them and we knew they couldn’t handle our pressure,” said senior Colin Hendrickson. “So we knew it was just a matter of time before we started hitting our shots and getting in our press.”

Okarche eventually won 85-53 and forced 43 turnovers.

Roby scored 27 and had 11 rebounds. Mueggenborg poured in 23 and had 7 assists and 6 steals.

Along the way, the Mustangs without a doubt got tired.

“It’s definitely a thing we pride ourselves on. In practice, we run all those sprints and nobody puts their hands on their knees,” Roby said. “Everyone has to stand straight up because I think it shows toughness.

“And if you have a team standing straight up and down and a team bent over, usually the team standing straight up and down is going to win.”

That set up the showdown with the Bruins for the title.

Caddo demolished Thomas 75-29 in the quarterfi nals and was equally impressive with its 80-53 dismantling of No. 3 Cyril in the semis.

The Bruins had lost just once all season, a two-point overtime setback to Rattan, which played in the B-I championship game earlier that evening.

“I don’t think people appreciate how good these teams were in Class A,” West said. “And they were the best of that bunch.”

And they played the part. The top two teams in Class A traded blows for a full 8 minutes.

For Caddo, it was a heavy dose of Beck Willingham and Corbin Stoner.

They combined for 19 points while Caddo nailed six 3-pointers and had another three-point play.

Okarche countered with Mueggenborg in the opening minutes as he scored the Warriors’ first 10 points.

Roby joined the fray with a trey at 4:45 of the quarter to bring Okarche within 14-13.

Dallas Williams countered with one of his own to push the Bruins back up by four before Mueggenborg and Hendrickson combined for a 6-0 Okarche run.

The Warriors were up 22-19 with two minutes still to go in the quarter before Caddo closed on a 10-3 run.

The Bruins led it 29-25. Mueggenborg already had 16 points for Okarche.

“I just had the mindset before the game that I’m not going to have any regrets,” he said. “I’m just laying it all out there, have fun, play my game and no matter what, I’m going to be able to say afterwards that I did all I could.”

The Warriors started the second quarter on a 12-2 spurt.

Roby scored a couple of buckets and Kirby knocked down a pair of open looks from 3-point range.

There was more of that to come.

The Warriors added another 10-2 run in the frame with all the points scored by Mueggenborg.

That included a pair of treys, which was followed by one from Hendrickson.

After making just one 3-pointer in the first quarter, the Warriors drained five in the second and entered the break leading 54-43.

The Bruins needed to make a charge early in the third if they had any hope.

That hope was dashed when Kirby made two more 3-pointers.

“I struggled the first two games of the state tournament. I didn’t really find a rhythm,” Kirby said. “But I came in the last game confident, wanting to leave with no regrets and I made some shots. I just tried to do everything I can to help the team win.”

His second trey at 4:10 put Okarche up 60-47.

Caddo cut its deficit to 11 late in the fourth quarter, but only after Okarche had iced the win.

The Bruins were led by Willingham’s 19 points.

Dallas Williams scored 15 and Kale Brister 12.

Hendrickson had 9 for Okarche and handed out 6 assists.

Kirby made four 3-pointers as part of his 16 points.

Roby scored 14 while Carnott had 4 points and 5 rebounds.

In his final game as a Warrior, Mueggenborg certainly did all he could.

He scored 35 points, grabbed 7 rebounds, doled out 5 assists and had 5 steals.

Everyone had their role. Carnott understood it as much as anyone.

“Hustle and energy,” he said about his own part in the team’s success. “In eighth grade, I was shooting 3’s all the time and it wasn’t working out too much for me.

“But in talking to the coaches, I saw a spot where I could find a role and it was rebounding, hustling, do the dirty work. I thought it would be fun to be out there, so I put in the work to do it.”

If he wasn’t hitting shots, Kirby saw his role as well.

“Just causing havoc on the press, rebounding and being a good teammate, always,” he said. “Just find ways to help the team win.”

And win, they did. During their four years, Okarche was 114-10, meaning the Warriors won 92 percent of their games.

The Warriors had an undefeated season (32-0 in 2025) and a 51-game win streak.

They haven’t lost to a Class A team since the quarterfi nals in 2023 (Rattan).

They lost just one Three Rivers Conference regular season game and one conference tournament game (and that was in the finals at the buzzer).

And then there’s the three titles.

“I thought that might be impossible,” said Roby of the three-peat. “They had only won it one time here in 1979 and you know how hard it is to get there and how hard the teams before you worked only to come up short.

“So just winning one was always the goal.”

Kirby wasn’t sure that one could happen.

“I remember our sophomore year just thinking there was no way we could out of all those schools - win it,” he said. “And then we did. And then to go backto- back I thought was crazy.

“And then three in a row? It was insane.”

Success is not foreign to this group outside of basketball. The Warriors - many of the same players - also have a baseball title on their resume. The success, said West, is only beginning. “I’ve told people this before, but they’re great kids, they’re great human beings. They take time with the older people in the community. They take time with the younger ones. They take time in the classroom. They volunteer. I mean, they just do a bunch of good things throughout the community and I’ll miss being around this group altogether,” West said. “But, you know 15, 20 years down the road, it’s going to be fun to have them back and see what they’re all accomplishing.

“This is just the start, the stepping stone, to other great things that they’re going to do in life.”

It won’t be easy, but nothing worth having in life is.

Just like all those practices.

“They were pretty tough, but it all worked out in the end,” said Carnott.

“It’s all worth it in the end,” said Kirby. “You see at the end of games that we are still energized and the other team is worn down. We know we have the upper hand.”

They wanted the smoke. They got the smoke. They wanted the smoke no more.

Or, as Hendrickson put it: “We put in the work so we could play the whole game like that. Other teams can’t do that,” he said. “They think they can, but they can’t.

“They can’t run with us.”