A year older and a year wiser may be the theme for the Gaston Greyhounds. The 2009-2010 season is looking up for a team that only won two games last season. The program is the most popular it has been in recent years. The team fielded 22 kids this season – forcing the coaches to make a JV and a JV2 team.
Head coach Lono Waiwaiole, in his third season, is calm and collected when talking about the upcoming season.
“This season, it’s basically about guys getting older,” he said. “We have one new player [on varsity], an exchange student, but it’s really that our young guys are a year older. And they are still just sophomores.”
Both Zamora and Carr will lead the Greyhounds on both sides of the ball. Wiawaiaole’s schemes feature a lot of ball pressure on defense and “Transition” offense.
“On defense, we are going to have a lot of ball pressure, both man and zone,” he said. “[Full court press], we are going to try and do that more. [We need to] be small and fast. On offense, we run a transition-spread offense. It’s basically a power triangle we set up in transition”
The power triangle may sound familiar. Phil Jackson spent most of the late-80s and early-90s perfecting it.
Last season, the Greyhounds went 2-18 overall and winless in conference play with a team comprised of mostly freshman still learning the system. Now with the group of kids a year older, Wiawiaole hopes for better results.
“Well, we are 3-3 now,” he said. “We only won 2 games all of last year, so that’s good. But it’s hard to say. We are 0-3 against 3A teams that look similar to the top teams in our league. We might end up like last year, though. Those better teams, we may be a bit behind them.”
The top teams in the league are De La Salle, Knappa and Portland Christian. All three schools finished with 18 or more wins and only lost a combined six games – all to each other.
In order for the Greyhounds to challenge these teams Wiawiaole says it isn’t a a matter of size. He needs his players to get a lot of ball pressure and take care of the basketball.
“If we learn to play [in this system], size wont be a problem,” he said. “Right now, we need to continue to improve on defense. It’s tough, getting after the ball requires a lot of rotations that we are still a little slow on. And we have a hard time playing without turnovers. We need to take care of the ball.”
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