Some will argue that Moniteau's 57-40 loss to Keystone in the District 9 Class AA boys basketball championship game tarnished the Warriors' season.

Even if it did, the rest of their campaign was pure gold.

Moniteau won 22 of 26 games overall, took a 16-game winning streak into that title game and captured its first conference championship since 1976, when it won the old Clarion County League.

For all of that, Randy Armagost is an overwhelming choice as Butler County Boys Basketball Coach of the Year.

The sixth-year Warriors mentor is the first Moniteau coach to be so honored since Tom Morton in 1993.

"It's a great honor and it means a lot to me,"Armagost said. "The season we had actually started last year, when we started out 0-10."

Moniteau rallied to win 10 of its final 14 games, but a 10-14 overall record failed to get it into postseason play a year ago.

"We had a lot of injuries early and just couldn't get our team on the floor healthy and playing together," Armagost said. "I felt like we were as good as anybody at the end of the year, but we didn't have a chance to prove it.

"Our guys learned from that. Our off-season work was critical. We talked about it all summer. We couldn't afford another slow start."

Despite having eight players on the Moniteau football team, which advanced to the district championship game, the Warriors avoided that slow start.

"The football players on our team had only three days of basketball practice before we opened the season in the Ford City tournament,"Armagost said. "We still played two pretty good games."

Instead of 0-10, the Warriors started out with a 7-3 record – the seventh win marking the start of the team's aforementioned 16-game winning streak.

Armagost was happy to see the football team do so well.

"It definitely helped us,"He said. "Developing tradition and a winning attitude is the key to success in high school athletics. It doesn't matter what the sport is.

"One winning team in one season can carry over to the next sport's season. We anticipated that and it happened."

Armagost is 91-61 in his six-year career at Moniteau and has enjoyed four winning seasons. He has rarely returned a lot of starters from one year to the next.

In fact, the 2005-06 campaign marked the first in which he returned more than one starter.

"This has been a senior-dominated program,"Armagost said. "We lose a bunch of seniors every year, but programs are built between seventh and ninth grade and what you do in the off-season.

"Sure, we're losing a lot of talent. I still believe we'll win next year. We've already started working on next year."

Among the seniors graduating are Tyler Grossman, Moniteau's all-time leading scorer and the Butler County player of the year (see related story) and Matt Schandelmeier, who amassed more than 700 career rebounds.

Moniteau averaged 63 points per game this season and allowed only 52.6 in winning its first Keystone-Shortway Athletic Conference championship.

"When I first started coaching six years ago, the KSAChad two or three teams at the top and that was it,"Armagost said. "Now we've added some teams, Cranberry and Rocky Grove have added some quality depth and the whole league has gotten better."

The 40 points scored by the Warriors in the District 9 championship game loss was by far their lowest production of the season. The previous low was 48 in a one-point win over Redbank Valley.

"I don't know what the reasons were, but it didn't happen for us that night,"Armagost said. "We didn't even play an average game. We didn't play well as a team.

"I guess it (district title) wasn't meant to be."

A successful basketball program at Moniteau High School?Different story.