Awards shows are boring — because the awards themselves are boring.

Here are a few different kind of awards I want to hand out to a few deserving winter sports teams and stars:

Best performance in a boys basketball game.

And the nominees are: Alex Gruber, Mars; Josh Beale, Freeport; Jake Whitmer, Slippery Rock; Justice Lewandowski, Butler; David Olszak, Karns City; Cole Morris, Union.

And the winner is: Whitmer.

There are certain things a player does to help his team win that are subtle.

Whitmer cornered the market this season on those subtle things.

Against Knoch, Whitmer turned in perhaps the best all-around game of basketball I have seen from a high school athlete. He didn’t score a bunch of points, hand out a bunch of assists, pull down a bunch of rebounds, but he did everything at an extremely high level in that game.

Best performance in a girls basketball game.

And the nominees are: Erin Danik, Seneca Valley; Zoe Soilis, Freeport; Sara Getsy, Mars; Julia Baxter, Butler; Shanel Preston, Karns City; Sam Breen, CWNC

And the winner is: Preston.

In the second game against Moniteau, the Warriors were determined to put a 52-4 loss behind them with a fast start.

Preston torpedoed that thought in the first two minutes, scoring seven points to give the Gremlins a 10-0 lead early.

Best name.

And the nominees are: Stone Haberstroh, Freeport hockey; Lauren Wasylson, Mars girls basketball; Timon Gribbin, CWNC boys basketball.

And the winner is: Haberstroh. Come on? Could there be another winner?

Best varsity team that didn’t have a player old enough to drive:

And the nominees are: The Slippery Rock girls basketball team.

And the winner is: The younger than young Rockets.

Four sophomores and a freshman started. The freshman could be seen doing cartwheels in practice before making a jumper in a shooting drill.

They didn’t know they were supposed to struggle. They won instead.

Best player with a surgical plate and screws implanted in a broken finger.

And the nominees are: LeeAnn Gibson, Karns City.

And the winner is: Gibson.

A couple of days after she broke her finger against Clarion-Limestone, Gibson showed me the X-ray of her hand. It looked gruesome.

My first thought was, “There is no way she is playing again this season.”

Then I realized who I was talking about and thought, “There is no way she isn’t playing again this season.”

Not only did she come back a few weeks later with enough metal in her finger to set off the detector at Karns City High School, but she scored 22 points and was 7-of-7 from the free throw line.

Mike Kilroy is a staff writer for the Butler Eagle.