The winter season is finally here. Basketball players have been preparing all throughout the year to dominate during the winter, whether they were getting in shape on a fall sport team or just attending scheduled conditioning. There are big expectations this year after an 11-8 season last year, which was the best record the team had achieved in ten

Although the team has lost many valuable senior players due to graduation they have a lot of talent reserved for this season. Some players were eager to share their expectations about this season. Brandon Duncan (10) of the JV program says, “We have a lot of big players who can be aggressive in the post, but we lack players that can shoot on the perimeter. We are expected to achieve at least a positive win to loss ratio this season and work hard which will hopefully lead us to be the best in our conference at the end of the season.

“In practice we emphasize conditioning and defense, defense is a thing many teams struggle with but we want to improve our defense to be as polished as possible, you can’t win without defense our a well conditioned team. When it comes to conditioning we have a few players who are in really good shape but we need a few people to catch up to reach our maximum potential. When it comes to conditioning we do a ton of cardio which includes timed sprints across the court, [which the coaches] use as a tool to keep us mentally disciplined. For example, if we mess up a drill we run and then repeat the drill over again.”

Sahas Upreti (10), a varsity player, says, “For the most part we expect ourselves to rank at least second at the end of the season. Our goal as a team is to improve to reach our greatest potential and win our conference. Our greatest strength is just our lack of weakness; we aren’t amazing at everything but we have a very versatile set of strengths. Our greatest weakness is that we’ve had trouble incorporating all of our new players including myself into our offense, but we hope to eliminate that problem with repetitions and practice.”

It’s almost Winter Break, but don’t forget to come out and support the Jaguars on the basketball court. There are boys and girls varsity doubleheaders on Tuesday, December 16 against Marshall and Thursday, December 18 vs. Jefferson. Both doubleheaders start at 5:45—don’t miss them!