“One on One” interview with Penns Valley standout Zach Braucht

By Kenny Varner Jr.
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Updated: March 21, 2022

Editor’s note – Recently Hometown Sport’s editor caught up with the Centre County boys basketball leading scorer in Zach Braucht.

It was a very successful 2021-22 campaign for the Rams’ captain as his team reached the State Playoffs after a slow start to the season.

We spoke to him after his team’s big win over Bellefonte.

HS: From watching you play, not only do you shoot well but you are also a great distributor of the ball. What is more fun, dishing the ball off to a teammate and they hit a shot or scoring yourself?

ZB: I love making a strong dish. Especially when I get three men drawn to me and I dish it to a wide open teammate. I feel like I’m making more of an impact that way then trying to score myself. Especially when I can draw my defenders in and get easy shots for my teammates.

HS: You just recently hit the 1,000-point mark, what was the feeling when you reached that historical level?

ZB: It was a dream come true. I worked so hard for it. It was just a great feeling that the hard work paid off.

HS: What would you say has been your favorite basketball moment so far?

ZB: Beating Clearfield at home in overtime and getting 1,000 points. It was a good win and we beat a solid team. Also, Ive never beat Tyrone before but this year we beat Tyrone at home which was another good memory.

HS: Congratulations on your strong win over Bellefonte. You guys had quite a week so far, especially with your win over Bellefonte: Tell us a little about it.

ZB: We went into the game thinking we were very capable of beating them. They had a couple guys we needed to stop and we were able to.

We have just been playing together better over these last few games. We’ve been playing good defense. Our defense made the difference tonight.

HS: Talk a little about your defense and the impact it had tonight and some of the hard work the seniors put out tonight.

ZB: We had a couple of seniors step up and hit some threes. We try to stay away from that and work the ball in the paint. But we were able to hit the threes. Defensively, we had MacLaine (Welshans), Logan (Crater) and Aidan (Culver) up top getting steals and Kyle Niewinski and myself down to low to get the boards. Colin Jackson also was down low pulling down was pulling down the boards too. We’ve been really working hard on our defense in practice. We were really sure of what we were doing.