The boys basketball team fell to the Lutheran South Lancers 39 – 56 on Feb. 11. The team has won 11 games and lost 13 so far during the 2024-2025 season.
The team welcomed new head coach Wesley Voyles this year. Voyles said that he has been trying to center their practices around the team and not their opponents.
“At the beginning of the year we tried to focus on specific actions and players to take away. Halfway through the season we did some team reflection and started focusing more on us and how we can be good at what we want to do, rather than taking away what other teams want to do. We still scout and make sure we show a video playlist of what the other team’s tendencies are but we have started focusing more on us,” Voyles said.
The basketball team only has two seniors this year and Voyles said that he thinks that it has had a negative impact on the team.
“Having only two seniors is tough because normally with experience comes wisdom. Without having a ton of returning seniors we have experienced some lows in our season due to lack of being in that moment. Seniors who have been around the block before can also be very vocal so it is nice to have multiple seniors with differing personalities to help and support our program and be player led rather than coach led,” Voyles said.
Junior Massimo Edigi also believes that there are downsides to having fewer seniors on the team.
“[The] drawback of having [mostly] sophomores and juniors is that we are young which means we had less experience on the team for this year,” Egidi said.
Although there are disadvantages to having a diverse team, Egidi believes that there are also advantages.
“[The] benefits of having sophomores and juniors are that we are young and will have more experience for the next season, and the benefit for having seniors is that they have more experience than everyone else so they can lead us in the right direction and teach us new things,” Edigi said.
Next year, Edigi said that he thinks that the abundance of juniors on the team will help with the absence of this year’s seniors.
“With the seniors leaving, we will lose a bit of chemistry and experience on the team. But the good thing is that we are a junior heavy team and only have two seniors leaving, so we won’t be losing a lot of players,” Edigi said.
Even though the team is made up of different grades, Voyles said that the team has been improving recently.
“Coming into a new program with a new system I think there were some differing opinions on what our expectations should be. Over the past few weeks though I believe we have turned the corner and have started playing in a way that is more desirable from our coaching staff,” Voyles said.
With the betterment in the players’ performance, Voyles believes that they will continue to improve throughout the final days of the season.
“I believe we are still a work in progress and [are] very young but we are on pace with where we wanted to finish this year, and can go into March and still have an opportunity to exceed those expectations,” Voyles said.
