Teams change every year. That’s expected.
What’s not expected is the way Highland Park’s boys team changed ahead of the 2025-26 season.
The Scots will play without two of their best players from last season, Henry Beckett and Kellen Cantrell, who both had eligibility remaining at Highland Park but will play elsewhere. Beckett moved with his family to New York and will play his senior year at Long Island Lutheran, and Cantrell transferred to a prep school in Maitland, Fla., for his junior season.
Between them, they took a large percentage of the offense – Beckett averaged almost 20 points and 10 rebounds – to their new homes.
Still, the show must go on.
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“Other guys step up,” said coach David Piehler, who will start his 20th season at the helm of the Scots with the Nov. 14 opener against Wylie. “It’s going to happen, I just don’t know who it’s going to be. Scots find a way. We will. We’ll find a way.”
The chances are high of that.
The Scots are good passers who run the floor well and find open shots.
“That’s been a staple for us,” Piehler said. “A majority of our baskets come from assists. When you look up and we have 28 baskets and 21 assists, that tells me we’re moving the ball, getting it to the open man to score.”
So while it may be a new-look group of Scots, it will still be the same set of expectations – competitive, tough, team-first.
“As a team, I think it’s going to raise our game up,” Piehler said of the unexpected personnel changes. “The biggest thing I’m working on is figuring out the best way for us to play on both ends of the floor. I feel like a mad scientist trying to figure it out. But these guys have adjusted.”
For the Highland Park girls, few introductions will be necessary.
Eight players return from the team that reached the final eight, matching the farthest an HP girls squad has gone, a feat last achieved in 2012.
“We’re excited about the opportunity, but we lost some talented kids,” coach Todd Monsey said. “I think that’s an honest assessment. We feel good where we are, but we’re going to have to grow up and develop from last season’s success.”
Senior forwards Kate Danner, an all-state performer, and Cate Young, and junior guard Ellington Heis are at the forefront of the returners. Each earned all-district recognition a year earlier during the Scots’ 24-13 season.
“This is my third year at Highland Park. Each year, I feel like we’ve grown as a program,” said Monsey, a former head coach at Frisco Lone Star and Waco Midway. “The things that we were teaching last year during the first week of October, we already know. Because of that experience and because we have so many kids coming back, we’re hopeful. But we’re also trying to define who this group is and how this group is going to want to play.”
Interest in HP girls basketball is growing. Monsey said in his first year leading the Scots, they had 21 girls in the high school program. Now it’s 35.
“The talent in girls basketball is just getting better every single year all over the state and all over the country,” he said. “The program that we’re building, in addition to the growth of the women’s game, it’s an exciting time for women’s basketball.”
