It is entirely possible that these Bingham boys have played the toughest preseason schedule in America. 

With all apologies to that Miners football team coached by Eric Jones that played No. 1 Mater Dei of Los Angeles and the eventual Utah state champs Skyridge and runners-up Lone Peak within weeks of each other, there is an argument to be had that this Bingham boys basketball team just ran the gauntlet. 

No other high school basketball team in Utah has played the current No. 16 team in all the land in Timpview to open the 2025-26 season—then played American Fork, Olympus—and then competed in a tournament against Rock Canyon of Colorado, followed by Lehi and Lone Peak. 

That was just Bingham’s first six games. Oh, and then the Miners played Davis. 

And yet this Bingham team still came out of all those early season scraps with a 4-3 record. 

With a healthy Luke West on the floor, some might say that was to be expected. 

But, it really wasn’t. Not after the Miners limped out of the state tournament a lot earlier than most had anticipated, in the spring of 2025, months after they won the Vegas Tarkanian Classic title but lost their star player West for most of that season to injury. 

Well, West is not only back—he’s got help. Parker Snedaker has emerged as the 1B to West’s 1A, another weapon with which the opposition must contend—or else. 

It seems like Luke West has been at Bingham for more than four years, honestly. This writer—who is writing his final dispatch for this team—first watched the kid when he was a freshman, and was getting up extra shots in the old Pit, two hours before school started. West’s hunger and drive to be great hasn’t diminished one iota; the only thing that is different, perhaps, is that the Bingham senior has realized time is undefeated, and injury will lessen that impact if you let it. 

West certainly hasn’t. Though the Miners currently sit at 8-7 overall—and split this year’s Tarkanian Classic defeating teams from Texas and Florida before winning those first four games in Region 2 play also—West is back, averaging 23 points per game. 

Snedaker isn’t far behind that production, either, scoring the basketball at 21 points per contest. 

The eye-opener about this Miners team under longtime head coach Kyle Straatman, who has shouldered the unenviable task of replacing one of Bingham’s most successful coaches in the storied program’s history, is how they share the basketball. 

Straatman not only achieved his 100th win at the school in early January in an impressive win at Copper Hills, he has a group that not only can score the basketball—they can share it, too. 

Nine guys average an assist or more per game, and no Miner is notching more than four. 

That means the basketball rarely sticks—another reason that come state tournament time, these Miners could be hard to beat, and it’s entirely possible Straatman might finally win the one trophy that has eluded him: a state title. 

This Miners squad may not have won the Tark Classic this year and may have had more trouble winning games than they’d hoped, but in many ways they’re miles ahead of the team that overachieved at the tournament they won a year ago and then underachieved at state. 

This unselfishness, a trait that has won Bingham several state titles in years past and pushed guys like Yoeli Childs and Branden Carlson to unforeseen heights as college standouts and pros, is hard to replicate and even harder to quantify. 

That said, you get the impression that the best is yet to come for this Bingham squad. For all 15 of them and this now-veteran coaching staff, the next two months will tell the whole story.