State champ as player, now state champ as coach

Harry Sonie directs Breck to Class 2A boys basketball title

Breck’s victory in the state Class 2A boys basketball championship game March 23 was a first for the school, but not for some of the Mustangs’ coaches.

Head coach Harry Sonie had been there before, just not as a coach. When Breck defeated Lake City 76-72 in the title game, Sonie said it seemed as if the circle was complete. Eleven years earlier he was a senior guard for Apple Valley, celebrating on the Target Center floor as the Eagles won the first of what would be three state Class 4A championships in five years.

On the floor with Sonie was Brock Bertram, then an Eagles’ freshman center, now one of the Mustangs’ assistant coaches.

“It’s kind of surreal that we both had the same record, 31-1,” Sonie said this week. “Our team at Apple Valley did a great job of bringing guys together for one purpose, and we’ve tried to do the same thing at Breck.

“Both teams talked about one game at a time, not looking too far ahead, trying to get better day by day – all the cliches you’ve heard before. But young players need to be reminded of those things.”

By the time the 2023-24 season was over, Breck not only was the best team in Class 2A but one of the best in Minnesota in any class. The Mustangs were 5-1 against Class 4A schools, including victories over Apple Valley and Eastview. They also defeated Alexandria, which finished fourth in the Class 3A state tournament. Breck had five victories total against traditional Class 2A powers Minnehaha Academy and Minneapolis North. The only loss was to Minneapolis Washburn, a Class 4A program.

The Mustangs had plenty of star power, most notably senior guard Daniel Freitag, a University of Wisconsin commit who averaged almost 25 points a game and scored 33 in the state final. But Sonie said he was particularly proud that the team carved an identity on the defensive end.

“If you went to one of our games and saw somebody diving on the floor for the ball, it was probably one of our guys,” he said. “We took a lot of pride in getting stops, and that’s the kind of thing that filters through a team.”

After Apple Valley, Sonie played at Augsburg University. As a senior, he was the point guard for an Augsburg team that reached the NCAA Division III national tournament. After graduation, he stayed with the program for a couple of years, working as an assistant coach under head coach Aaron Griess, who Sonie considers his biggest coaching mentor.

It was Griess who encouraged Sonie to try coaching. Before the summer of his senior year he took over a team of fifth-graders in an AAU program founded by Washington Wizards guard Tyus Jones, who was Sonie’s teammate at Apple Valley and remains a close friend.

That team wasn’t an ordinary collection of youth players. Several became some of Minnesota’s top recruits in the class of 2024, including Mr. Basketball Award winner Jackson McAndrew of Wayzata, Lakeville North star Jack Robison and Andy Stefonowicz of Class 4A state champion Minnetonka. Sonie coached the group through the 17U age level.

While coaching at Augsburg, Sonie worked in academic support in District 196, including two years as a student support specialist at Eagan High School. But an opening posted at the Breck School in the summer of 2022 intrigued him. Breck was looking to hire someone in student support – and needed a head boys basketball coach.

“I wasn’t necessarily looking to leave Augsburg,” Sonie said. “I loved everything about being part of a college program. But it was a full-time position at the school, and I’d get to be a high school head coach for the first time. It felt right.”

He has a variety of duties at Breck, including helping students with study habits and time management. Breck is a college prep school, and Sonie said he believed it was important to bring that approach to the basketball team.

“We have six coaches (Sonie, Bertram, Ty Moore, Devonte Brewer, Jeff James and Tyler Krantz), and all of us played college basketball,” Sonie said. Bertram, who was part of two state championship teams at Apple Valley, went on to play Division I basketball at the University of Buffalo. Like Sonie, Bertram is now working in education in addition to coaching.

Sonie’s first Breck team won 19 games in the 2022-23 season. “I felt we were a 20-win team but we let a couple of games get away from us,” he said. It was a young roster, leading to speculation about a state tournament run the following season.

That was before Freitag’s arrival, which elevated the Mustangs to Class 2A favorites. Freitag previously played at Bloomington Jefferson and announced his intention to attend a school in California his senior year. Last summer, he changed his mind and enrolled at Breck.

Freitag joining Breck was one of the reasons the transfer debate reignited. All four boys state championship teams – Breck, Minnetonka, Totino-Grace (3A) and Cherry (1A) – had transfers tjhat became impact players. A story in the Rochester Post-Bulletin newspaper, which covers Lake City, carried the headline “Did a transfer ‘steal’ a state title from the Lake City boys basketball team?” The Lake City team had no transfers.

In the story, Lake City coach Greg Berge emphasized he has no control over who transfers into or out of other schools, and said his players embraced the challenge when they learned a Big Ten-bound player was moving into their enrollment class.

Sonie said Freitag was an ideal teammate and added that integrating a talented addition into an existing lineup isn’t as easy as some might think.

“We had a good group coming back,” he said. “When Daniel came over, it took some time. Roles change. The chemistry is different.”

Freitag and Hanif Muhammad, the Mustangs’ second-leading scorer, are part of a group of five seniors. Breck, however, returns a solid core next season, including two players who had double-digit scoring averages.

Sonie said he spent a lot of time last week over Breck’s spring break processing what happened at the state tournament. One thing that became clear was that expectations for next season have changed.

“This team set a standard that’s going to be tough to reach,” he said. “But we have a lot of juniors and sophomores who got to play, and we think we have a chance to compete for the championship next year, too.”