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.