As far as Free State girls basketball coach Bryan Duncan is concerned, the credit for his coaching success in 2009-10 rests exclusively in the hands of his players.

“It sounds like a cliché, but it’s reality,” said Duncan, the Journal-World’s girls basketball coach of the year after leading the Firebirds to a 15-8 record and state tournament appearance. “Any time you get an opportunity to coach players and kids like that, the culmination is usually the coach of the year award, due to (those) great players.”

The Firebirds roster certainly featured a number of standouts this season, including Div.-I signees Chantay Caron (Kansas State) and Ashli Hill (UMKC). But to write off Duncan’s impact would be a severe oversight.

Praised by players and fellow coaches for his organization and positive demeanor, Duncan, who just completed his eighth season as the team’s head coach, has been instrumental in establishing the Firebirds program as a perennial area power.

Consider: The Firebirds have advanced to the state tournament in three of the past five seasons, the most recent coming this winter, when, following a successful and consistent run through the regular season, Free State beat Shawnee Mission West in the finals of the sub-state tournament to become one of just two area girls teams — along with Ottawa — to notch a state tournament berth.

Duncan earned the trust of players, meanwhile, by making them a part of the game-preparation process, occasionally seeking input from team members — sometimes in the middle of games — on which offensive or defensive sets they thought might work best against certain opponents.

“Most coaches wouldn’t (do) that,” said Caron. “They’d be like, ‘Do this because it’s going to work.'”

In the end, it was hard to argue with the results, and despite the loss of a handful of seniors from this year’s team, including Caron, Hill and Wren Wiebe, those around the program don’t anticipate any kind of major fall-off heading into the ’10-11 season.

“He knows what he’s doing, the kids like him (and) they respect him,” said Firebirds assistant coach Matt Frost. “And once you have that, the battle’s pretty much won. You just have to go see what happens.”