By George Bremer, Herald Bulletin Sports Writer
ALEXANDRIA — Zach Yeagy has experienced plenty of adversity on the basketball court.
Now the Alexandria senior is ready to see the other side of the coin.
Yeagy is one of 11 Tigers returning to the varsity roster this season, and he believes all that experience will pay off.
“This team is a lot more confident than any team I’ve been on here,” he said. “A lot of our other teams thought we could win. We actually believe we can win.”
The Tigers won a lot early last year, sprinting out to a 6-2 record. But something changed after Christmas break, and the team stumbled to the finish with 11 losses in its last 13 games.
Garth Cone has won 402 games in 31 seasons over two head coaching stints at Alexandria. He’s been around long enough to know what it takes to win. He also knows there are few shortcuts that work and even fewer easy answers.
“Some people always want the quick answer,” he said. “And they want one answer so it’s simple. We don’t have just one answer. It’s not simple. You can’t solve everything quickly. That’s not what basketball’s about.”
Cone said his team’s collective experience puts it in a slightly better starting point than a younger group might have, but the Tigers can’t rely on experience alone to cure all ills.
“We’ve got some people back, and that’s nice,” he said. “But we also have some weaknesses we have to offset. We have to do things the right way.”
Chief among those things is defense.
Alexandria didn’t communicate well enough on the floor last season. That led to breakdowns, which in turn led to losses.
“They’ve been doing it (talking) since they were 2 years old,” Cone said. “But somehow they won’t do it on the court. You get them in English class, they won’t stop talking. Get them out on the basketball court, and they won’t start.”
Yeagy said some of the communication problems were easily explainable. The Tigers began to employ a match-up zone fairly late in the season, and it took some time to get everybody on the same page.
He doesn’t believe the same problem will creep up this year.
“We’ve got a lot of communication,” he said. “The starting five are best friends. I think that’s going to transfer over to the court.”
The Tigers didn’t miss the mark by much a year ago.
Except for a stretch in and around the Madison County tournament where it lost three games by a combined 89 points, Alexandria was competitive in every contest.
The difference often came down to small details.
“In basketball, you develop habits both good and bad,” Cone said. “We can’t change all the bad habits to good habits. But, hopefully, we can cover them up a little bit. The biggest things we can change are certain aspects of the way we approach the game.”
Some already are in the works. Cone praised his players in general for their hard work over the summer, and he believes Yeagy and fellow senior Matt Johnson will be good leaders.
Yeagy understands this is his last shot, and he wants to make it count.
“My freshman year, everybody was hoping to win,” he said. “Sophomore year, we thought we could win. Junior year, we thought we should win. Now, we expect to win.”
