The Highland girls basketball coaching job wasn’t exactly an ideal position to jump at last summer.

Chris Huppenthal had developed a pretty successful program by taking the Trojans to the semistate three of the previous four years.

He was gone, as was every star the team had known for the last couple years. Tara Traczyk and Lyndee Arnold had graduated. Julie DeMuth had transferred to Merrillville.

That was more than 80 percent of the team’s points and rebounds.

So who would get the unenviable task of taking over a program whose top returning scorer and rebounder from last year averaged around 2.0 in both of those categories?

Mike Urban has been associated with Highland High School for 29 years in some capacity. The assistant principal had coached the boys basketball team in the past, but had never coached girls.

He took the job and led the Trojans to a 17-6 record, another Lake Athletic Conference Black title and an LAC Tournament title, to earn Post-Tribune Coach of the Year honors.

But he didn’t exactly get a rousing endorsement from the man he asked to be his assistant coach.

“I’ll never forget the day I told my assistant, Jerry Mazur, I was considering taking the job,” Urban said. “He told me I must be crazy.

“But I missed coaching and wanted to get back into it. I knew what I was getting into.”

What he jumped into was a squad of role players whom he needed to mold into starters who could believe they could shoot the basketball and score.

Sounds more like the job of a psychiatrist. But the players bought into Urban’s philosophy, though they didn’t get off to a promising start.

Before the regular-season opener, which happened to be against Merrillville, the Trojans scrimmaged against an even tougher squad in Valparaiso. Neither contest was a pretty sight.

“I still knew there was a good nucleus of girls who could compete,” Urban said. “Once they gained confidence in me and the (coaching) staff, things began to click.”

That turned out to be quicker than even he hoped for as the Trojans followed the Merrillville loss with a 35-34 victory at South Bend Riley, a team that won the regional last season.

“We all listened at the beginning of the year when nobody counted on us to do anything and we used that as a motivation device throughout the season,” he said.

Even with the players buying into Urban’s philosophy, the stat sheet wasn’t exactly mind-blowing.

The highest scoring average was 8.5 from Jody Shimanek with five other players between 5.4 and 6.8. The top rebounder was also Shimanek with 6.0, though two other players were within 0.4 of her total.

How did Urban get the kids to believe in his philosophy?

“It was all mental,” he said. “Me telling them, 'Come on girls, you can shoot the basketball. You can do the things we need to win basketball games.’ We played as a unit. They really did buy into what we were doing.”

Urban almost sounded surprised in a sense that it worked out and resulted in 17 victories.

“Who would’ve thought we would have been this good?” he said. “But you can’t measure the heart in people and these girls wanted to prove something for themselves.”