Tip-off is here. The Cody Broncs and Fillies officially get their season underway this weekend. Earlier this week I caught up with a few of the Cody basketball players. Today hear from both teams head coaches as Cody basketball prepares for the Remax Basketball tournament in Gillette.
From this time last year to now the Fillies have shown huge strides in improvement and following last weekends scrimmage head coach Chris Wagner says he likes what he’s seen from this group early on.
“A lot of maturity over the past year. More physical, more potent scorers. I think last year it took us a while to get the first couple of buckets in but we came right out, they were hitting some good shots. Aggressive, I mean on the floor, diving for loose balls, rebounding really well. A lot of things you like to see.”
Both Cody basketball teams will see fierce competition to open the season as they are matched up with a pair of out of state opponents. The Fillies Friday opponent, St. Thomas More out of South Dakota was a Sate tournament team the past two years while Scottsbluff Nebraska is a team they faced a year ago. Coach on preparing for those contests.
“We’ll kind of go back to some of the things that were clear that we need to work on from this scrimmage. Gotta keep driving the tempo up a little bit. I just know that team next week is going to come out and pressure us and they’re going to be a big program that has lots of players to shuffle in and out. So we’ve to be in condition and prepared to go 32 minutes hard.”
Following last weekend’s scrimmage I was also able to catch up with head coach of the Broncs Jake Kraft who talks getting on the floor and the importance of playing in a game-like atmosphere.
“We’re thankful to have it. Excited that got to see a lot of basketball today. A lot of up and down, individual performances. See where we need to make some corrections, some fine tuning especially on the defensive end. We do a good job in practice of communicating and I think we can do a better job when it equates to a game like scenario.”
Like the Fillies, the Broncs too will play against St. Thomas More and Scottsbluff. St. Thomas More was a State Tournament team the past two years, while Scottsbluff made it all the way to the 2020 State Semi’s before falling. Coach Kraft on preparing for two tough opponents and what he’s looking for from the Broncs.
“We’ll try to look at some film. We played Scottsbluff last year, they’re a really good program. St. Thomas More out of Rapid City is kind of an unknown so hopefully we’ll be able to get some film early this week and be able to see what they kind of do. Even if we look at film and look at our opponent, really we need to control ourselves first: play good team defense, guard the ball well. Granted we’re going to make a lot of mistakes over the next couple of weeks leading into Christmas and we just want to maintain our health and just get as many minutes as we can.”
The Cody Basketball teams tip-off play at the Gillette tournament this weekend. Both teams are in action Friday and Saturday with a double header beginning at 12 noon. You can hear all those games live on KODI.
