By DIANE GASPER-O’BRIEN
Special to Hays Post
Every good sports story has a beginning and an ending.
This year’s Hays High School girls’ basketball team is currently in the middle of its story.
At 20-0, the Indians are the top seed in the Class 5A West Sub-State heading into tonight’s postseason action.
The Indians host Great Bend in first-round action at 6:00 for the chance to play in Friday night’s sub-state championship.
Two victories on their home floor this week will thrust the Indians them into the pinnacle of Kansas high school basketball – the state tournament.
That’s an ending for which Coach Len Melvin and his team are aiming.
But how did the Indians get here – at the high point of a high school athlete’s career?
The real beginning of this story was more than 20 years ago across town on the hardwood of Hays Middle School, then known as Felten Middle School, where Melvin coached the boys’ eighth-grade basketball team.
But for now, let’s look at the beginning of the Indians’ current successful run.
Melvin is the father of three daughters, and his oldest, Aspen, was a sophomore when he took over the head job of the HHS girls’ program five years ago.
He was the Indians’ third coach in four years, and they had gone 6-15 the year before he started.
He came in knowing the first year or two could be tough. But he knew he had to start somewhere to establish some consistency.
The Indians went 6-15 again in Melvin’s first year, then welcomed freshman standout Molly Martin to the program the next year when they went 13-9.
Martin made the starting five her freshman year and had four fellow classmates join her on varsity over the next three years and enjoyed winning seasons every year.
This is a special group that had been playing basketball together since they were in second grade.
Under Melvin’s guidance, that quintet helped the Indians win the Western Athletic Conference last year and finished 16-6 overall while advancing to their third consecutive sub-state championship game.
This season, another freshman phenom joined the team. Jenna Schmeidler, a 5-6 point guard, leads the team in scoring with an average of 16 points a game.
Led by those five seniors, and a solid core in the other three classes, the Indians have given fans plenty to cheer about this season.
A magical season
Hays High opened the season on a high note by winning the Hays City Shoot-Out.
Then there was the thrilling, 74-72 overtime victory over Wellington in the semifinals of the Orange and Black Shootout in Colby, their coach’s hometown. Both state-ranked teams entered the game with perfect 10-0 records, and the win made believers out of a lot of people, including Melvin’s players.
“That’s when the girls really started thinking maybe we are pretty decent,” Melvin said.
Indeed.
They continued rolling through their conference undefeated.
As the victories piled up for Hays High, so too did attendance at home games.
Fans packed the gym on Feb. 21 to witness Martin score her 1,000th career point – the first player to do so under Melvin and only the third one in the history of the HHS girls’ program. She said she feels prepared for college after playing under Melvin for four years.
“He just really cares about us not only as players but as people and wants us to do the best we are capable of,” said Martin, who has signed to play for Ottawa University next year.
Buoyed by a loud student section last Friday, the Indians celebrated their undefeated regular season in style with a convincing 67-23 victory over rival Great Bend.
It was the final regular-season game in that gym for the Indians, who will play their 2025-26 season next door at the new Hays High building, and it was standing-room only.
“That was amazing,” Melvin said of the crowd. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many fans in there.”
Well, he has helped bring them there, according to Mark Watts, one of his assistant coaches.
To help spark interest in the girls’ program, Melvin started an activity where the Indians host a youth girls’ team before home games.
“We bring them in for pizza, and they get to watch us warm up and sit behind our bench,” Melvin said. “I think it’s gone over well.”
Watts, the grandfather of the Hays High staff who has coached basketball and golf (boys and girls) for more than four decades at his alma mater, agreed.
“The interest in girls’ basketball at Hays High has grown tremendously,” Watts said. “Coach Melvin has done it right.”
Watts and another long-time coach, Matt Brooks, are Melvin’s top assistants on varsity. Brandon Maska, one of Melvin’s assistants on that 2003 undefeated Felten Middle School team, coaches the B-team. Haley Wolf, a former college player at Fort Hays State, gets them started as the C-team coach.
“It was important for me to go find a great coaching staff,” Melvin said. “I don’t know if the girls understand what a great staff we have. We are super blessed.”
The Indians’ B- and C-team each only lost one game this season, finishing with a combined 26-2 record.
Along the way, Melvin got to coach daughter Aspen for three years. His middle daughter, Willow, didn’t play basketball, but his youngest, Lynden, is a basketball player. She is an eighth-grader who will don the Indian uniform next year.
In the beginning
Now, back to where this all began, when a young Coach Melvin was just beginning his third year as head coach for the Felten Middle School boys’ program.
Back then, Felten only offered interscholastic basketball to students for one year, so many athletes played on travel teams until they reached their eighth-grade year.
Believing that every kid should get a chance at trying school ball, Melvin didn’t make cuts, and 45 players showed up for practice that fall.
So he formed an A- and B-team along with two C-teams, with the C-teams alternating each game on their schedule. And every player got to suit up and represent his school.
All four teams went undefeated and finished the season with an impressive cumulative record of 45-0.
Players from that team and even some parents of some of those players still keep in touch with Melvin today.
“He related to the players as individuals and took a group of individuals and formed a good team,” said Jason Ball, one of the A-team starters during that special season for Felten.
“He instilled a work ethic in practice that carried through to games,” Ball continued. “We never thought about going 45-0. We just took one game at a time, and when we strung it all together, that’s what we got.”
Melvin, a popular teacher and coach at Felten, got out of teaching not long after that season. He is now marketing director for the nationally acclaimed Hays Academy of Hair Design, where his wife, Summer, is co-owner.
He coached a variety of sports off and on at Hays High over the years before coming back full time in 2020, when this year’s seniors were eighth-graders.
“Our girls could go watch games as eighth-graders and knew what to expect the next year when they got to high school,” said Jamie Dreher, mother of senior Riley Dreher. “Hats off to Coach Melvin. He took over at a difficult time in the program. With all the coaching changes, this year probably wouldn’t have looked like this if he hadn’t come on board.”
And Dreher should know. She came to Hays to play basketball for the Fort Hays State University women’s team, fresh off a standout multi-sport career at tradition-rich Baileyville-B&B High School in northeast Kansas. After finishing second at the Class 1A state basketball tourney her junior year, Baileyville won it all her senior year.
A sign of things to come
Dreher met her future husband, local Tiger baseball standout Dustin Dreher, while at FHSU. They married and stayed in Hays to raise their family of four athletes.
Dad coached their three boys, and Mom got the privilege of coaching their only daughter – at a young age. And she knew exactly what kind of players she was looking for.
“I’m really competitive, and I’d sit in the stands and scope out players,” Jamie Dreher said with a laugh. “I had Molly on a (Hays Recreation) softball team. I saw that she was an aggressive kid, and I thought that would translate to basketball. Then in third grade, Kenlee (Winter) showed up to one of our tryouts in a boot because she had hurt her foot. She did the drills in a boot. I was impressed.”
She also recruited current seniors Katie Linenberger and Jaysa Roa as youngsters, and those five have been together ever since.
Dreher coached that team through sixth grade before handing them over to their coach at Hays Middle School, who coincidentally by then was her husband.
Dreher said that besides athletic ability, this class possesses something maybe even more valuable.
“You always hope as an athlete you can put aside any differences you might have with teammates and form a solid team,” she said. “But these girls don’t have any differences. They genuinely enjoy being around each other and care about each other.”
That type of team unity can go a long way – oftentimes deep into March.
“We accomplished our goals so far, to win the regular-season tournaments,” Melvin said. “Now we’re all 0-0. After this week, we want to be 2-0, and you’re playing with house money at state.”
The last time the HHS girls’ program advanced to state was in 1996, the year right after the Indians’ best-ever finish at state (second) and the year Melvin was a senior in high school at Colby.
Ball, for one, will tell this group of youngsters that they will remember this special season for the rest of their lives – for many reasons.
Maybe they will look back 20-some years down the road and remember what their high school coach’s influence has had on their lives.
Ball said he has called on some of the lessons he learned from Melvin, ones that stretch way beyond the basketball gym.
He went on to start for three years for Hays High basketball, then played for the FHSU Tigers while earning a bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s in business administration. He is now chief financial officer for the FHSU Foundation.
“Coach Melvin is a great mentor for our young players and prepares them for life outside of basketball,” Ball said.
And how could one ask for a better ending to a good sports story than that?