Photo by Barry Stephenson.
Will Stephenson is one of three senior guards for Oak Mountain, as the Eagles look to follow up a regional final appearance.
Oak Mountain head boys basketball coach Chris Love estimated that his team lost to graduation roughly 85 to 90 percent of his team’s scoring and rebounding production from a season ago.
That fact may scare a coach as he deals with the uncertainty of his new roster and how he may regain all of those lost contributions.
Some coaches would sit back and be content with calling the 2016-2017 season a rebuilding campaign, to take some of the pressure off.
The Eagles advanced to the Class 7A Northwest Regional Final a season ago and were a buzzer-beating shot away from advancing to the Final Four at the BJCC. Seven seniors from that team have since departed.
But that’s not dampening any of Love’s eagerness to attack the season ahead.
“We are really, really excited about everything we have coming back,” he said before the season began. “We’ve got a lot of quality minutes coming back, and we’re excited and ready to go.”
That starts with three of Oak Mountain’s players who now hold the title of “senior leader.” Logan Sheaffer, Will Stephenson and Kris Hutchins were all contributors last season, and they will look to take lessons learned and apply them to the current season.
“Last year, we had great team chemistry with all the seniors and with us three guys on the team last year,” Sheaffer said. “But I think the biggest part of our group is we need to gel. Gelling is key for our group to have success, and last year that’s what got us to where we went.”
Stephenson sees that need for team chemistry as well, and he said he thinks the Eagles are pretty close to achieving a solid balance.
“(We) three and the group we have playing this year have all been playing a long time, so the chemistry shouldn’t be too much of a problem,” he said.
Concern for a slow start to the year is present, due to the many new faces on the team along with the fact the Oak Mountain roster consists of six players who also played football, so getting up to speed with them may take some time as well.
“The most important of that is people learning their roles, and I think that’s the process we’re in right now,” Love said. “We’re probably going to get on into the season until we each understand our role as a sum and being a really good basketball team. I think we will.”
Many of those football players bring the same strength to the basketball court as they do to the football field: height. Nathan Jones and Noah Egan are listed at 6-foot-4. Carson Bobo is 6-foot-5.
“We’ve got tall, tough players, and we’ve got experienced guard play with us three seniors. The combination of the experience of the guard play and athletic bigs helps us a lot,” Hutchins said.
Hutchins said he feels confident in the Eagles’ progress on the offensive end of the floor. But in order for Oak Mountain to reach its full potential, the other side of the floor will be key.
“We’re going to be able to score at a high pace against any team we face,” he said. “I think we need to work on our defense, putting two efforts together, as our coach says … You have to be able to play a full possession of defense.”
