The southeastern Iowa deer population can rest a little easier this winter.

Logan Bonebrake is back on the basketball floor.

After taking a year off from basketball to pursue his passion for deer hunting, the Highland senior elected to take advantage of his final opportunity to represent the Huskies on the hardwood.

“Last year, I chose to hunt more than play sports,” Bonebrake said after Highland lost at Wapello, 57-35, in a Southeast Iowa Super Conference game Friday night at Wapello High School. “This year, I thought, it was my senior year so I might as well go out.”

Bonebrake developed his love of hunting from his father, Josh, and once he turned 16 years of age, he was legally able to hunt on his own. But the winter hunting season just did not mesh with a full basketball schedule.

“On the weekdays, instead of having basketball practice I would just go home and hunt,” Bonebrake said. “On the weekends, we would have practices and I just couldn’t get out (to hunt) in the mornings or the nights, depending on when the practice was.”

After dedicating nearly every day to his hunting pursuit, his efforts ended successfully when he bagged a white-tailed deer.

“I got one, but it was pretty late,” Bonebrake said.

Bonebrake’s return to basketball has been a bright spot for a Huskies team that has yet to win a game through six contests and can use any amount of available experience. Of the dozen players on the Highland roster, only four are seniors and most have little varsity-level exposure.

“That is one thing with this young team is, we are not used to the speed of the varsity level,” Highland Coach Bill Zywiec said. “We have got a lot of young kids that have never touched this sport before at this level, and it is an adjustment period. We’ll take our lumps early and we hope to keep positive and continue to move forward, which I think they will. They have been great to work with.”

A 6-foot-3 forward, Bonebrake entered the Wapello game leading the Huskies in both points (6.8 per game) and rebounds (4.3). While he does not consider himself a “leader,” Zywiec maintains that the example being set is more valuable than any words could provide.

“He is not going to be that kid who is going to be screaming and yelling in anyone’s face,” Zywiec said. “But he is going to come to practice every day, he is going to work as hard as anybody in practice and the younger kids see that. There are different types of leaders. You have vocal leaders and you have got leaders who just come on the court and they work as hard as they can every single day. And that is what he does.

"That is what we need and those young kids need to see that, because it is going to benefit them down the road. He may not get the wins that he would like as a senior, but it may help those freshmen and sophomores a year from now, two years from now for what he is doing for them this year.”

In addition to Bonebrake, Highland is receiving great efforts from aggressive, hard-charging sophomore guard Logan McFarland and junior big man Nicolas Oriano. Freshman Bryce Hazelett has impressed while still learning his role, while guard Ethan Paisley is, like Bonebrake, a senior adjusting on the fly to just his second year of varsity-level competition.

“The most work we need is our defense,” Bonebrake said. “We just started playing man-to-man. We were playing zone before, but I think man is starting to work a little better.”

Highland hosts Winfield-Mount Union on Tuesday, then is off until Jan. 5 for winter break. Zywiec hopes to have a full complement players available as the Huskies continue to work on their defensive drills and prepare for the second half of the season.

“We haven’t had a lot of time with five starters all playing together all on the same page,” Zywiec said. “We’re hoping we can get to the break with no sickness, with no more injuries and we can actually have a week, week and a half of solid practice where we can kind of fix some of those things that we know we need to work on.”