Kingsford head basketball coach Ben Olsen, center, holds the trophy after the Flivvers’ 75-35 win over Ludington in the MHSAA Division 2 Region 9 final in Gaylord on March 6.

KINGSFORD — The first year of Ben Olsen’s stint as the head coach of the Kingsford boys basketball varsity team could hardly have gone better.

The Flivvers burst out of the gate with seven consecutive wins and after an upset loss to Norway in late January ran off 12 straight victories on their way to MHSAA Division 2 district and regional titles and a victory in the quarterfinals to earn their first appearance at the Breslin Center for the state semifinals.

Though the Flivvers fell to Romulus Summit Academy North 52-40 in that semifinal and finished with a record of 22-4, the season was memorable and historic. And for his team’s achievement, Olsen was named the Upper Peninsula Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association Division 1-3 coach of the year.

Olsen, a 2000 graduate of Iron Mountain High School and former Mountaineer player, recently sat down with The Daily News to reflect on his first Flivver team’s magical run to the Division 2 state final four.

Q: What was your reaction to being named the all-U.P. Division 1-3 coach of the year?

A: It’s a great award, a great accomplishment, but you’re only as good as the players you have, for one, so that award had a lot to do with the kids that I had to coach. And two, I have some of the best assistant coaches that you can ask for.

Note: Olsen’s staff consisted of his wife Shelle, who was the U.P. Class D player of the year in 2005 at Powers North Central and a former Lake Superior State University player) and Justin Beauchamp, a former player for Olsen at Gwinn. Junior varsity coach Mike Cross and freshman coach Frank Pietrantonio joined the staff for the tournament.

Q: What is it like having your wife as an assistant coach?

A: As you can imagine, we talk basketball in our household a lot. She is very involved. We joke that we share the same brain when it comes to basketball stuff.

Q: You took over for Daniel Olkkonen, who retired from the Breitung Township School District after last year. You knew the players as the Kingsford junior varsity coach, but how did the adjustment go to you as the varsity head coach?

A: The transition was pretty seamless in that I had all the kids in JV basketball at some point and I (coach) football too, so I knew all the kids inside out. They knew me, they knew my style.

Q: Did you make any adjustments from last year’s team, which went 21-5 and advanced to the D2 regional quarterfinal?

A: I was very fortunate when I came in. Coach “Olks” was very receptive in picking my brain on some stuff. I kind of prided myself on the defensive side and that’s kind of where Coach Olks maybe took some of the stuff was on the defensive side.

And then he really prided himself on the offensive side, so I kind of kept in place what he had been doing while continuing to work on what we were working on defensively.

Q: You had some excellent defenders on this year’s team …

A: We were fortunate that our best player, Gavin Grondin (a Lake Superior State University recruit) was our hardest worker, and he takes tremendous pride on the defensive side of the floor. And when you see him busting his tail on the defensive side, I think people just fall in line.

Q: So you didn’t have to convince your team to work hard defensively?

A: Not at all. I mean having Gavin Trevillian, Jack Kriegl, Gavin Grondin and Morgan Sleik, those are kids who love that blue-collar kind of stuff.

Q: The Norway loss (60-57 on Jan. 28) has been much talked about. What are your reflections on how that game changed your team?

A: I think that we had to lose that Norway game to get to where we got. Because anytime that our focus started to slip, all I would have to do was say “Norway” in practice and the kids immediately snapped back.

Q: Norway had a fine team, but was that defeat humbling to you and your team?

A: Our joke there for a while was we were 0-2 in Dickinson County. One of our goals was to go to the Breslin Center and we sat down and said, “We lost to Iron Mountain, we lost to Norway, we’re the third-best team in Dickinson County.”

Q: What did you think of the tournament performances before the semifinal at the Breslin Center?

A: We knew that Boyne City (66-45 win in the regional semis) wasn’t as good as us but they posed some problems, they had some big guards.

We thought that Ludington (a 75-35 regional final win) was going to give us more of an issue than they did. But I mean, we played so well in that game that I don’t know if who played would have mattered.

And then my big thing before the Freeland game (a 48-46 quarterfinal) was they were all juniors. So, we have their roster up and it said junior, junior, junior. And my thing to (the players) was that (Freeland) was there a year too early.

Q: What did you think of the semifinal loss to Romulus Summit Academy North?

A: We missed a bunch of free throws in the first quarter and got down 16-4 right away. And we ended up losing 52-40. They flipped the script on us. That’s what we had done to teams, jump on them early, keep them at arm’s length and that’s what they did to us.

Q: What did the coaching staff learn from the loss?

A: What we came up with is we’ve got to go find teams (to play in the regular season) that pressure defensively like that. But unfortunately for us, that means we either have go into Wisconsin or go over the bridge, which is money. But that’s one thing, we’re going to try to bridge that gap.

Q: How would you summarize the season?

A: I don’t think it’s hit me yet what we’ve done and what we’ve accomplished. And I don’t think it will until maybe when I’m done with this coaching thing. Like no Division 2 or Class B team has ever made it to the state finals, from what I was told. So we got as far as any Upper Peninsula Division 2 team has every gotten.

But the thing with the year ending is that you never get those core group of kids again and that what makes that loss that more gut wrenching.

Q: And what’s the task now?

A: How can we bottle it going forward? How can we get back there?