A note from the desk of Coach Cooper

October 15^th is almost here! All of our players look forward to this date ever year. It marks the first day of official practice. Our guys have been working extremely hard to prepare themselves for the season. Travis Vlantes is our strength and conditioning coach, and he has done a great job with our team to get us ready. Our staff has been working very hard to make our pre-season basketball workouts very challenging for our players. With many new faces, we are still doing a lot of teaching at this point. Our returners are doing a great job of helping our new players develop the habits that we believe make for a successful team.

Lionel Foster, Courtney Carr, David “Chubby” Henderson, and Justin Tubb are our four returning seniors this year. We are counting on these four to quickly step in to a leadership role with this year’s team. Jordan Ashmore and Barrick Hodge are our other two returners.

We have brought in 5 new transfers and 2 true high school players in this year’s recruiting class. Kerry Jones (Hill College), Tyshawn Edwards (Erie CC), Donald Sims (USC-Salkehatchie), Kennon Washington (Faulkner CC), and Mike Bables (TAMUCC) are the transfers we have brought in. Tez Dumars (Lakeview Centennial) and Kevin Waller (Groesbeck) are the two freshman we have brought in. As I have stated before, we are very excited about the guys we have coming in.

A couple of weeks ago our team took a visit to BSA Hospital and visited several children. We also put on a free clinic for kids with the Lady Buffs. Family Pass members brought their kids, and we put them through a one day mini-basketball camp.

If you’ve had a little time to look at our schedule, you will see that 6 of our first 7 games are on the road this year. We have a very challenging schedule this year, and we think that it is the type of schedule that will allow our team improve with every contest. Our conference schedule will be a little different this year with the realignment. We open conference on December 1^st at Incarnate Word, and then travel over to take on TAMU-Kingsville. The league is very talented this year, and anyone could come out on top.

As always, I will never make any predictions about this year’s team. How quickly we gel together and buy in to the things important to Buff Basketball will determine our success this year. We are having our annual “Meet the Buffs and Lady Buffs” on November 6^th at the First United Bank Center. We would love for you guys to join us in the Buffalo Room at 7:00pm. Coach Gerlich and I would love for you to come out and meet our teams. More information will be on our website soon.

A note from the desk of Coach Cooper

Well I can’t believe another school year is already beginning! I am very excited about the 2011-2012 Buff Basketball team that will represent our University this year. All of our players have made it in and are already in classes. Friday, August 26^th, we had our entire team at the 2011 Buffalo Club Golf Classic. A special thanks goes to Jimmy Fincher, as he sponsored our hole at the classic. This is a big weekend for our fall sports, and we are very excited to go out and support them, starting with our football team tomorrow!

We have also made a new addition to our staff for the upcoming year. Kolby Huseman has joined our staff as a graduate assistant. He is coming to us after spending the past year at Texas Tech University in a similar position. We are very excited about what Kolby will bring to our staff. K. C. Beard, who was our graduate assistant for the past two years, graduated with his Master’s Degree in Business Administration. He will join Tim Cleary’s staff at Pacific University, which is located in Portland, Oregon. I know that K. C. is very excited to move back closer to his family, and also join a longtime friend in coaching. We are really going to miss him. Vinay Patel is back for another year! I can’t believe that he is starting his 7^th year with me on the coaching staff. He has done a great job helping us put together this year’s team. Wayne Parker is coming back for his 3^rd year as my student assistant. I can’t begin to explain how much Wayne has meant to this program. We are very fortunate to have him back this year.

We had a great recruiting class, and combined with the experience we have back, it should make for an exciting year! I will go more into detail about the players we have added, and our schedule in my next blog. We are very anxious to get started with our preseason workouts and begin efficiently using the time we have from now until our first official practice on October 15th to improve as a basketball team!