It took Medford senior Peyton Kuhn just two games into his final year as a Raider to reach the 1,000-point milestone.
With 11:49 left in the first half, Kuhn splashed his fourth 3-pointer of the game to cement his place in Medford Raider history as the school’s seventh 1,000-point scorer.
Kuhn’s 33-point night helped the Raiders blow out the Antigo Red Robins on Friday night by a final score of 85-51.
Kuhn joins Steve Russ, Paul Henrichs, Mark Miller, John Keefe, Kirby Kulas, Jimmy Rindt and Cam Wenzel as Raiders to reach the 1,000-point mark.
Russ leads the all-time scoring mark for the school with 1,341 points, a mark that will be reachable for Kuhn (1,018 points currently) if the team is able to play a full season.
With 22 games left to play in the regular season, Kuhn would have to average 14.7 points per game to pass Russ’s mark. For reference, last season Kuhn averaged 18.4 points per contest.
Kuhn attributed his success on the court to hard work and constant training in the gym.
“I worked hard in the gym,” Kuhn said. “My teammates—ever since I was a freshman, I had seniors I looked up to that brought me into the gym and got me to be better and better. I just worked for it.”
Head coach Ryan Brown said Kuhn is more than just a gifted scorer, he’s a leader for the Raiders as well.
“I’ve been fortunate to have been around Peyton for four years,” Brown said. “I’ve gotten to see him grow as an individual and this year he’s taken a leadership role as a captain. We knew we wanted to get him his 1,000th point and celebrate that and he came out hot so we got it done real quick.”
The game got out of hand early with Medford opening up a 24-4 advantage over the first eight minutes of the contest.
Sophomore Logan Baumgartner helped stretch the Medford lead in the first half, with 14 of his 20 points coming in the first half.
Senior Brady Hupf contributed 15 and fellow senior Ty Baker scored seven points to round out Medford’s leading scorers.
Brown said the Raider’s strength will be on the offensive end but they would like to make their defense a strength as well.
“Our scoring isn’t our worry,” Brown said. “We feel like we’ve got a lot of different weapons, if one guy isn’t shooting well one night, someone else will step up so that we feel confident in. We just need to continue to get better on the defensive end and lock teams up. When we get to bigger and better teams, we need to be ready to shut them down.”
Kuhn said he knows if he has a bad shooting night, there are plenty of guys that can carry the offensive load.
“It’s good news for us,” Kuhn said. “If one of us is down, the other will come out and do what they need to do to win us the game.”
Antigo was led by Cole Musolff with 14 points.
The Raiders are looking to repeat as conference champions with a slew of experienced starters. Beating the Red Robins was the first step towards achieving that goal as they moved to 1-0 in conference play.
The next scheduled game for the Raiders will be a non conference matchup against Auburndale on Tuesday, Dec. 8 at Medford High School.
Author: News Desk
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