Serving Lucas, Ottawa, Sandusky and Wood Counties
With the graduation of leading scorer Brady Thatcher, the Woodmore boys basketball team will rely on more of a balanced approach offensively this year.
“We've got a lot of guys who can do a lot of different things,” 12th-year head coach Aaron Clouse said. “There's a couple guys who can get there off the bounce. We're hoping it's more of a committee. Last year, we had Brady, who was a 1,000-point scorer. He was pretty gifted offensively, and we relied on him a lot. This year, we're going to have to have a more balanced approach.”
That approach will start with the team’s three returning letterwinners — Carson Slates, Gavin Donley, and Camdyn Schwartz. Slates is a 5-11 guard who was the team’s second-leading scorer, and all three of them started the majority of games last year.
“We’re going to need a lot of everything from them on the court,” Clouse said. “With us bringing up so many kids from JV, they're going to have to really carry guys offensively and defensively. We're relying on them to fill up the stat sheet in pretty much every category until we can define roles and kind of see what else everybody can do at the varsity level. It's such a big jump from the JV to varsity. You just don't know how certain kids are going to react, so we’re putting a lot of responsibility on those three early.”
While the Wildcats return just three letterwinners, Clouse said his team still features a good amount of experience.
“We’re relatively young in varsity experience, but not relatively young overall,” he said. “A lot of kids who played JV as a junior are now coming up as seniors contributing. We have a couple sophomores in the mix. We’re just trying to puzzle this all together. They all bring different skill sets, and we’re just trying to piece it together and see what we have with so many new faces. I feel like you never have enough time. Once we get started with this first game, it goes pretty quick. We have a good idea going into it, but we'll find out.”
Clouse also said he expects contributions from a pair of sophomores, Caden Hilt and Collin Perkins.
“Hilt gives us another ball handler,” he said. “He’ll give us that third option. He's played point guard all the way coming up through. He’s a smart kid, plays real hard. If Slates needs to take time off the ball, he'll be able to fill in pretty nicely there if we need it. And Perkins is a good shooter.”
Clouse said the team has especially been focused on defense and rebounding in the preseason.
“We’re hoping we can be a little less vanilla defensively, be able to do some more things, and try to keep some teams off balance more,” he said. “We’ve worked really hard at spending time on defensive fundamentals, and hopefully we’re able to rebound the ball better. If we can defend and rebound better, that’s kind of the backbone of whether or not we can have much success.”
Rebounding is the big area of focus in terms of improvement from last year, though.
“I don't know if we've said it enough,” Clouse said. “We've been harping on them on the glass. We gave up so many second shots last year and gave away so many possessions. We're really trying to limit them to one (shot per) possession and cutting down those multiple (shot) possessions.”
Clouse said the team isn’t big on getting to a particular number of wins.
“We're just really focused on the process and trying to get better every day,” he said. “I know that's coach speak and everyone says it, but we don't sit down and try to figure out number of wins. We just want to get this program back to where it was, back to where we have winning records, where we're playing the game the correct way, and playing really hard. That's really our focus. If we do that, the results will fall where they fall.”
Overall, Clouse said the team is ready to get going.
“We're ready to go,” he said. “We're just so tired of practicing against each other. Anybody but us at this point. It's starting to get a little chippy at practice. Kids are playing real hard. So the day in and day out of that, it's kind of wearing on them a little bit. They need somebody else to go after. I'm excited. These kids have been working really, really hard.”
