Basketball tryouts are the end of the offseason and the beginning of a new season. Tryouts are an opportunity for coaches to make their final decisions for a roster and are also an opportunity for players to show off the skills that they have developed over the span of mid-March to mid-November. Many players who tried out also attended optional training and workouts in preparation for tryouts and the beginning of a new season.
Parker Neu is the varsity girls basketball head coach, and he has been a part of many offseason practices and training.
“Going back to the start of the school year, we had open gyms on Monday nights. We had 4 player workouts, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and two weeks prior to tryouts, we had conditioning every single day for two weeks straight to get the girls ready for tryouts,” Neu said.
During these practices, Coach Neu can determine which players he thinks would help benefit the team and lead the others to success.
“My three biggest things that I look for are, even going back to the summer when I was super brand new and we weren’t running plays in practice, things I was always looking for in are players were hustle[/]effort, coachability, and just being a good teammate are the three pillars and the three baseline things I look for and we can work on building a basketball player from there, come in with those three things, that’s the baseline,” Neu said.
In addition to the three pillars that Coach Neu looks for in players, he also looks for leadership from his players.
“We have a couple of captains this year were gonna have like three and they all lead in different ways but [leadership] also doesn’t have to come from captains, one of our juniors, she’s a great leader, she’s not going to be one of our captains but she can still use her voice and also lead by example in a great way that others can look up to.
Senior Grace Bohrer plays varsity basketball for the girls’ team, and she has played in almost all of the available training during the offseason to prepare and help work out any problems she has before the season starts.
“By playing, you make mistakes in open gym and less on the court, get it out of your system,” Bohrer said
Senior Brody Jones is also another player who participated in many optional practices during the offseason, and he notices the benefits from doing so.
“You definitely get rewarded more minutes and more opportunities when they see you’re coming to stuff that technically isn’t required,” Jones said.
These optional trainings and workouts that coaches organized during the offseason helped many players prepare for the start of another season and gave them an advantage over other players battling for a spot on the roster.
“You get more reps and are better prepared for what comes next than if you didn’t show up,” Jones said.
