Doug Hofmeister, head coach at Forest Grove high school describes his team of four seniors, six juniors and three sophomores succinctly.
“We’re awfully young and inexperienced,” he said.
The team returns just 57 points and 53 rebounds from last year – all from Andrew Hutchins.
“We made the playoffs last year for the first time since 1996,” Hofmeister said. “We lost some senior leadership. But this years group is kind of amazing me a little bit. We’re 1-3 right now. The three losses have been close. We could have won all three, we could be 4-0. We have a great groups of kids. But we have some growing pains.”
Learning how to play together and win is always tough on young teams, hofmester says. The team features four captains: seniors Blair Davis and Tyler Brekke and juniors Andrew Hutchins and Dillon Davidson. All of whom have earned their spot.
“The seniors have worked their way up to get where they are at. And [Blair] and [Tyler] have, too. Its been smoother than you would think. That is one of our strengths our kids get a long and play well together. They don’t care who scores, they just want to win.”
The Vikings are going to be grounded by their solid defense. So far this season, they are only giving up 48 points per game and allowing just 32-percent shooting.
“We are only scoring 44 points per game though.” he said “But that will improve with time.”
The Vikings offense is going to be the focal point of the season.
“Our biggest battle is being as solid as we can be on offense and being a team that could score 60 points every game,” Hofmesiter said. “We are good enough on defense to win if we can score 60 points. The most anyone has scored on us this season is 51. I’m just worried about our scoring. I want our scoring to get better. Taking good shots and getting our percentage higher.”
The team plans to push the ball and run read-and-react with a lot of pass-cut, dribble-drive plays. Hofmeister says, while they lack speed they plan to keep the tempo high in order to get good looks and get high percentage shots.
“This team is getting there,” Hofmeister said. “They are learning to work hard. But its a learning process right now. In some ways, as a coach, thats frustrating. But its also rewarding because they learn how good they can be.
“I have one of my ex-players coaching with me this season,” Hofmeister said. “He came up to me and said ‘coach you are going way to soft on these guys this year’ and he was right. We told the kids that. And I asked them, ‘do you want me to give you the best, and coach hard?’ and they said agreed. We want to be as good as we can be. So practice has been tough and they are responding well.”
The goal is still to make the playoffs and Hofmeister plans to push his players hard in practice.
“That is our goal: playoffs,” he said. “The league is going to be pretty tough but there is no one that is totally outstanding, except Newberg. We beat them this summer. We are thinking we can get there.”
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