Waterloo girls basketball head coach Nicole Lewis stands with members of her team, including (left to right) Sophia Steiner, Alexis Huffman, Alexis Henry, Alysen Miller, Julia Boyle, Willow King, Mackenzie Marsh and Johanna King.
Tom Nader/Portage Sports

By Tom Nader

Publisher and Editor

It was a Wednesday morning in July, but the gymnasium at Waterloo High School was filled with life.

The collection of undeniable basketball sounds were there.

The echo of balls bouncing off the hardwood floor.

The squeak from sneakers as players quickly changed direction.

The swish of the net as shots rolled purely through the hoop.

The laughter amongst friends enjoying the sport and each other.

The voice of a coach offering directives to her players.

This is what basketball sounds like and girls basketball is back at Waterloo.

The Vikings, led by the guidance of new head coach Nicole Lewis, have been rebuilt following the painful decision to suspend the varsity program for the last two years.

Waterloo, which is the winningest team in Portage County history, will celebrate a varsity season in 2025-26 and the story of how Lewis and her Vikings will get there, make all of those simple s summer basketball sounds seem that much more special.

RESTARTING THE YOUTH

Before Waterloo’s high-school varsity program hit the pause button, it was the youth program that fell off first.

Waterloo girls basketball head coach Nicole Lewis has worked to rebuild the Vikings’ proud program, which will play its first varsity game in three years on Nov. 21, 2025.
Tom Nader/Portage Sports

What once was a healthy organization, lost its support, coordination and participation numbers.

So by the time Lewis’ daughter, Raegan, became interested in playing basketball, there was nothing there for her.

That is what initially sparked Lewis into action in 2020.

Not just for her daughter, but for any other girl at Waterloo who could have possibly been interested in basketball, but was left without an opportunity.

Lewis, who has taught first grade at Waterloo for 11 years, soon discovered that there were many.

As the Vikings, and the rest of the world emerged from the pandemic, 22 girls in third through sixth grade signed up for youth basketball at Waterloo.

Since that time, numbers have grown steadily, as has interest in lower grades. Now, Waterloo’s youth program is offered for girls in first through sixth grade and participation numbers have increased to more than 40.

‘HARDEST DECISION I HAD TO MAKE’

Mike Devies retired as an educator at the end of the 2024-25 school year, but served as the athletic director at Waterloo for 11 years and was one of the lead voices in the decision to suspend Waterloo’s varsity girls basketball program back in 2023.

Admittedly, he hated the idea.

But he also knew in his heart that it was the right decision no matter how hard it was.

“This was by far the hardest decision I had to make as an athletic director,” Devies said. “Our job is to promote sports and here I was taking a sport away. It was gut wrenching. In the end, though, I had to do what I thought was best for kids.

“As someone who has coached forever, there is just no way that I am going to throw five or six freshmen into a varsity schedule and watch them get beat by 40 points every night,” Devies said at the time of his decision. “Our league is a pretty good basketball league and that would simply demoralize them and probably lead to even more attrition in our numbers for years to come. My  goal is to put a quality freshman team together, let them continue to learn and improve their fundamentals and let them grow together.”

The program’s hiatus had multiple layers, but the two most prominent were, first, the absent youth program for multiple years finally caught up to numbers at the high school. Second, the COVID-interrupted 2020-21 season had an impact on numbers across the region, not just Waterloo, but the Vikings felt the weight even more because of an already smaller roster. 

“Taking away the chance for those girls to play a varsity schedule was definitely not an easy decision to make,” Devies said. “There were a lot of nights where I laid in bed and wondered if I made the right decision or not. In the end, though, I was not willing to put our girls in a place where they were not given an opportunity to compete on a level playing field.”

Amidst the decision, Waterloo suddenly found itself without a head coach.

Kevin Longanecker, who led the program for nine years, resigned after the 2022-23 season.

Veteran Tracy Miller was hired as his replacement in May 2023, but off-season open gyms quickly pointed toward the same low numbers that eventually forced Devies into his difficult decision, so Miller also resigned.

Unexpectedly, Waterloo found itself without a coach and without a team.

LEWIS SELECTED TO LEAD THREE-YEAR PLAN

Devies and the district always had a plan.

It was a three-year plan that served as the blueprint for a return.

   1. Compete as a freshman team in 2023-24

   2. Compete as a junior varsity team in 2024-25

   3. Compete as a varsity team 2025-26

First, though, they wanted to select a leader to oversee the direction to rebuild the program.

Considering the difficulty of the job and the roster’s frailty, it had to be the right person.

Devies knew it was time to reach out to Lewis and opened a discussion in the summer of 2023.

“Coach Lewis comes from a tremendous, sports-oriented family,” Devies said. “She is tough, compassionate, patient, organized and she is a competitor. These were all attributes that I knew would be essential in returning our program to the level of competition that we have become accustomed to over the years.”

Lewis was excited, but also wanted Devies to understand that if she were to step forward, her commitment to the program would be longterm.

“I knew that if I was going to take it on, I wasn’t going to just take it on for a year,” said Lewis, who is a 1998 graduate of Rootstown High School, where she was a multi-sport athlete and an All-Portage County League girls basketball player. “That would not be fair to the girls, and I wanted them to know that I was going to be there for them even during that tough time.”

And so the rebuild began.

In 2023-24, Lewis had seven total girls in the program, and they played a freshman-only schedule.

A year ago, in 2024-25, Waterloo’s roster grew to 12, but still were JV only.

In those two seasons, losses piled up higher than wins, and while Lewis pushed for her girls to compete in every matchup, she also placed a focused priority on growth and development, understanding that the wins will eventually come, but not by skipping steps in the process along the way.

The Waterloo Vikings girls basketball team, led by head coach Nicole Lewis, will open the 2025-26 season at home against Campbell Memorial on Nov. 21.
Tom Nader/Portage Sports

EMBRACING THE CHALLENGE

Any team that is pulled back to the beginning is going to face some challenges.

Roster size only becomes part of the test.

The ability to regularly compete, basic fundamentals, understanding the game, remaining patient, maintaining positivity through adversity.

Over the last two seasons, Lewis and her Vikings have lived through all of these, but have passed every test, with breakthroughs along the way that have not only boosted confidence, but strengthened the players’ love for the game while also continuing to push the program in the right direction.

“Probably the most challenging thing has been to keep our heads up. Myself included,” Lewis said. “We have had a lot of rough games over the last two years and staying positive after those has been a challenge for us, but we never ran from it. We wanted to play games, and we needed to play games, even if the teams we were playing were more talented than us.

“Our job was to teach the game and make it as fun as possible,” added Lewis, whose staff also includes Becky Goodyear and Abby Mazur. “We felt that if we did that, the girls would want to be with each other and play for each other no matter what.”

And that’s exactly what has happened.

This season’s roster will feature about 20 players, which not only has the program ready for a varsity season, but also in a position to build out a junior varsity schedule, too, despite 17 of those players being underclassmen.

“Coach Lewis has done a tremendous job of building the numbers and the girls’ confidence,” Devies said. “Just walking through her practices and watching the progress the girls have made allowed me to rest a little easier knowing that our three-year plan was the right decision. I am so excited to see where Coach Lewis takes the program over the next few years.”

Rising numbers are an easy correlation when a team is winning consistently, but Waterloo has continued to grow inside unique circumstances because of a culture centered on playing for each other and with a pointed vision guided by Lewis, who has approached her role with genuine care for the program and its players.

“No matter what, I always want to make sure that our girls are taken care of,” Lewis said. “We will teach, and we will be firm, but we will have fun, too, because we feel that’s important. Last year, we really stressed to the girls that we wanted them to believe. Believe in themselves, their teammates, the process. Believe to achieve was our thing, and the girls continue to make that happen.”

So mark your calendars for Friday, Nov. 21.

That’s the date that the Vikings will open the 2025-26 season against Campbell Memorial, and, fittingly, they will do it at home.

They believed and now it’s happening.