If you make the trip out to the Douglas High gym this winter, it's a fair bet you're going to see a different style of basketball than you have in the last eight years or so.
Both boys' coach Corey Thacker and girls' coach Werner Christen said that this year's teams will be much more press-oriented on defense and more up-tempo on offense.
It'll be a stark contrast from the post-dominated play we've seen for quite a while now. Simply put, the Douglas basketball program was blessed with great size and height in the paint for a long period of time there.
It appears, at least for the present, that they've inherited a class with great overall speed and athleticism.
In Northern 4A ball, the lack of overall size doesn't really hurt you in the long run as long as you can make up for it with an opportunistic defense, scrappy rebounding and a solid transition game.
With the groups both coaching staffs have kept, the potential is there for the Tigers excel in all three areas.
Nearly half the roster for both teams will be new to the varsity level. Both squads kept one freshman. Youth and inexperience are among the few qualities in sports that simply go away with time. Basketball is one of the sports where they tend to disappear the quickest, what with the full month of tournament and non-conference play before the thick of the league playoff race settles in.
Expect to see some bumps in the road those first few weeks. By January, though, expect to see some entertaining basketball down at the old gym.
I'm planning to be at these games this week, so check online for updates (Cover It Live is the tool we use to post automatic updates during games and also allows for comments and questions from fans during the game, so be sure to check out our Web site if you can't make it to the games I will be posting from.):
Thursday: Boys' Basketball at Wild West Shootout (Cover It Live)
- I may go to another game this weekend, but we'll see how the tournament plays out.
- "I'll be honest with you, we could be a 9-1 team as easily as we are a 6-5 team," Florida State coach Bobby Bowden - a man I truly respect, but he apparently shares my deficiencies in math.
- What in the world was the Florida football team wearing on Saturday? The creepy eight-fingered hand prints on the shoulders and the weird Olympic swimming Speedo pants were too much.
The announcers hailed the Nike outfits (which I saw several other teams wearing on Saturday) as high tech. I'm not sold on it.
If you've read this column for any length of time, you probably already know I attended TCU my freshman year.
Florida, Texas A&M and Auburn all let me down. Now its up to Nebraska this Saturday to give my Horned Frogs any shot at the national title (A Pitt win over Cincinnati couldn't hurt either). Now we just sit and wait.
