Less Than One Week Away

Almost time for basketball tryouts. Hope all that are trying out have been working on their game the past two weeks. This is going to be one of the most competitive tryouts I've had in the last 10 years.

With losing 9 seniors from last years team of 14, there are plenty of spots open for the taking. Just so it is clear I am looking for players that will can not only help a team win, but also is the right fit. I know that is very vague, but when a coach picks a team they look for different things.

Sometimes it may be a player that has no fear or doesnt get nervous in pressure situations.Other times coaches look for an underdog type player that is willing to do anything for the team, a guy that does the grunt work but never expects accolades or their name in the paper.

Without any question this years tryouts are going to be tough, but I am eagerly waiting to get this thing rolling.

Pick Your Friends Wisely

Today an unfortunate event happened to a kid that was working to be on the team this year. I don't want to go into too much detail as to who the kid is or what happened. I just want to mention that this kid had an opportunity to make his senior year his best year, but decided to do something that got him suspended.

This kid had been warned that the choices he was making were not good for him, and they would catch up with him sooner or later. He knew he had a golden opportunity being at South and had a great shot of making the basketball team if only he stayed on the right track.

As it turned out he never fully trusted the people that cared about him most. He decided to be around the people that don't want to do the right thing. In doing that he found himself suspended from school and with no chance of being on the basketball team.

He is not the first person to waste a chance to become better and he certainly won't be the last. The lesson here is that if you are in high school, you DONT know everything, you are not indestructible, and there are consequences to your actions.

Besides trying to be a basketball coach sometimes I find myself being a life coach.


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24 Points 29 Turn overs

No team will win when they have more turnovers than points. I repeat, no team will ever win with more turnovers than points. Why have we had so many turnovers? Its a combination of many things, but what stands out the most is we are just not experienced, and that's because we didn't do as much as we should have this off-season.

The off-season is to get better, and many of the players at South chose not to do that this off-season. With the exception of three players, every other person missed out on a large chunk of the off-season or showed up sporadically for whatever reason. This is being said, we have much work to do before Nov. 18, which is when we play our first game.

I will say that we do have some upside. I think this group is getting better and will come around. Im not just saying that because Im the coach, but I truly believe this group has the talent to win. When that happens will be around the same time we start to value possessions.

Today We Got Better

Moving fast was the theme today. Everything was done with speed and efficiency. We started the day running baseline to baseline in under 10 seconds, most made it and some struggled.

We did some more full court running drills where all except for two were gassed after 5 min. I don't want to call out the players that were sucking wind but I will mention the few that pushed hard. John McFadden, Delan Sinclair, and Kamal Jones all three of them ran their butts off and kept going.

After 2 1/2 hours of working and running, we went out to the track to finish with a mile run. Did I mention it was about 90 degrees out side.

I'm sure that everyone that showed up today, either took a nap when they got home or will be out before 9:30 tonight.

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