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By ANDREW GRIMM
NEW MANCHESTER -- Oak Glen boys' basketball coach Jerry Everly is hoping that with just three returning players, the new faces on his club can carry over success from jayvee and freshman levels to the Golden Bears' varsity program and help build off of an 11-12 record a season ago.
"I really like these kids," he said. "They are good. They have won at the jayvee level and have won on the freshman team, but this is a whole different ball game now. We're a little younger in terms of varsity experience so I think we might struggle a little bit early, but I think we will get better as the season goes on and progresses and we should be pretty good by the end of the season hopefully."
Everly also believes his schedule will be beneficial with a lot of home games later on in the season when he hopes the Golden Bears will be hitting their stride.
"Our schedule is pretty good," he said, "We play some away games early. Toward January we get on a home stretch so we will be excited to get to that point and see where we are at. I hope that we come into that home stretch as we are hitting our stride."
Oak Glen will have two seniors in point guard Chris Kokoski and forward Marcus Poling. The third varsity returner is junior forward Ethan Travis.
Everly is hoping Kokoski and Poling can be leaders for his team.
He is also expecting junior point guard Wyatt Wiley, junior forward Jarrett Gittings, and junior center Alex Staub to play a big roll after playing a lot of jayvee basketball last season and dressing varsity.
Another junior he expects to make an impact is point guard Sean Smith, who missed all of last season with knee injury.
While he thinks they are still learning their strengths, Everly thinks initially that the strength of his group is the ability to shoot the ball.
"We can shoot," he said. "We've got some good shooters that can hit the open shot. We're trying to find out what our strength is going to be but one is definitely that we can shoot."
One thing that the Golden Bears are working on improving from last season is being more consistent defensively.
"We are focusing on trying to play better defense and get after it more and be more aggressive on the defensive end," Everly said. "That is our main focus right now. Last year we had spurts where we played really well defensively and we also struggled sometimes in stretches on defense. This year we just want to be more steady with it and play better as a team defensively."