...And it's over!!

Well, staying with the trend, after a #1 ranking we lost Fri. to Averett University in the semi-finals of the conference tournament. It was a tough loss to what looked to be a promising season. We fought hard pushing the game to overtime only to end up losing by 2 points! It's always hard when you know that you've played your last game of the season. As a coach you hate it especially when you have a very good team. But losing is all apart of the game and once your done there are no "do overs". Coaches can't dwell on a loss even if it's the last one, but it really hurts especially for the seniors on the team. The seniors don't get another chance. Coaches and underclassmen get their payback next year. After all this I have learned that no position is safe, to be successful you have to work hard every single day and never get lethargic. Once a team thinks that they are the best and they have everything in control, that team is in trouble. Anyone can beat on any occasion and as a coach you have to instill that thinking in your players from day one! Although the season is over, my coaching career is an ongoing process. Now is the time to recruit hard and work on getting your players better for next year. We will be arranging individual workouts for all returning players and entertaining recruits visiting the school. For a stable coach there's always next year, even though I hate to go out the way we did.

Holiday Weekend

Well it has been a long weekend for me with the celebration of MLK day on Monday and all. Saturday started things off for me and I had a varsity game to attend. This would be varsity's 2ND conference game, we played Ferrum College and we played well. During varsity games my main job is to keep track of what the other team is running, this is the 1st time that the basketball program has had the luxury of having 4 coaches on the staff, so it has been nice to have extra pairs of eyes around and people to lighten some of the load. Like you can imagine game time is hectic, but that is why we practice, to prepare for the game. Basically I scout what the teams do against us to help the team better prepare for them the next time. When conference play starts we play everyone at least twice we will play some schools a third time as well, so the more we scout, the better prepared we are. We were very prepared for Ferrum and I am happy to say that we won the game moving Methodist to 1-1 in the USA South Conference. This was just the start of my weekend we took Sunday off to enjoy the playoff games, but by Monday we were back to work. Varsity practice in the morning and my last home Junior Varsity game at 7 p.m. against Louisburg Junior College. The Junior Varsity team and I both had to pull double duty. We had to be at the Varsity practice at 9:30 a.m. to go over the scouting report for Tuesdays game against Averett University. I told the JV's to use that opportunity to warm-up for their game later on that day. The JV's have been helping with the scouting report since the spring semester began, so as a coach I adapted and used the scouting to our advantage. Junior Varsity had gotten used to running other teams plays so, before our game against Louisburg I told them that we would be running all the plays that we had been learning from the beginning of the semester. Needless to say the JV's were just fine with that idea and they showed it with their play. We played so well, you could see the progress we made as a team from the beginning to now our last game together. We won the game and improved our record to 4-6, 2-0 in 2008. That would be my last game as a Head Coach but the experience will always stay with me.