Warriors Back to Work

Hi everyone, Coach Moore with a new post. First I would like to apologize to everyone who has been checking recently for updated news. I must admit I took a few days off to be with family and friends so I was not around a computer too much at all and didn't have enough time to put anything up, sorry for that but this thing will be going strong for the rest of the basketball year.

Well I guess we should start with a recap of our game against Lewis. Wow, I think that is a good start, that game was a great game to watch and be a part of. It was too great teams battling to the end and we made the final move and came out on top. This was a great learning game for our team and it showed we can come back when given adversity of the loss of Curt Robinson at the break due to his ankle flaring up. Our guys deserve a ton of credit as they stayed within striking distance the entire game and we made that run at the end to put it in overtime after trailing almost then entire game. Then to come back in the last minute like we did really shows how far this team has come to battle back and never give up. This was a huge step forward, hopefully we will carry this one over and make some more strides on Sunday.

As for our play in the game I think you saw a team that once again came out flat to start the game. For some reason we are struggling to find energy at the start of most of our games. I would say only two games this year have had good energy from start to finish (Bemidji and Duluth) otherwise we have come out flat. Luckily we were able to stay in striking distance in this game and were able to pull it out in the end. I really can't put a finger on why we are starting this way but we need to change it and fast. Once again our rebounding was pretty good. After struggling the first couple of games we have started to realize we must rebound the ball. The effort has been getting better but it can be even better. We need to have a game where we go out and out-rebound a team by 10 or more boards here to say we have made a huge step in our progress. The tempo of the game was played more at their level then ours for most of the game, until we picked up full court. Then we had the tempo in our hands, they struggled with it, we caused some turnovers and capitalized on them. We need to continue to control the tempo of the games. Lewis did a nice job controlling the tempo for most of the game but as you saw we had spurts where we had the tempo at our pace and it helped keep us close. We need to continue to push the ball and get great open shots. Finally our defense is starting to get better and better. We gave up a ton of point to Dagons in the first half but that kid is pretty good and we did limit him to five points in the second. I think our guys are really starting to understand how we want them to play D and as we play each game it should get better.

Moving on to our game on Sunday versus Texas A&M International. We don't know too much about them other then they are another solid DII team. They play in the Heartland Conference where many teams of the past have come out of to play in the Elite 8. They currently play a ton of guys with each playing a good amount of minutes. We will see some zone, zone trap, full court press and they will go with a ton of motion on the offensive end. It should be a very exciting game to watch for fans as it could be a high scoring game.

Some keys for this game will be each of our guys containing their man. The like to go to the basket a lot and break teams down off the dribble. We must contain our man first and not let them break us down, this is going to be a huge part of the game. Another key is we will need to be fundamentally sound. Obviously you want to be solid fundamentally every game but this game we will need to handle the pressure they are going to put on us and to do this effectively we will need to use a ton of jump stops and pass fakes. This should get the defense out of position as a team that pressures a ton will get out of position as they overplay everything. If we can do the little things we should be able to handle the pressure just fine. Finally we will need to rebound the ball once again. We need to go and get the ball just like we have the past 4 games. We need to continue to do this and with our break it will be interesting to see if we have carried this over or if we have taken a step back.

Well that is all I have for now. We will be doing a "Get to Know your Warriors" again next week as we get back into NSIC play. I will also be doing another alumni update here in the near future. Until then.

GO WARRIORS!!!