By TYLER HENRY
Salina Post contributor
Despite a rough start to their 2022-23 campaign, the Salina South boys’ basketball team has shown real resilience in the midst of a brutal schedule, made all the more difficult by a revolving door of missing players due to illnesses.
While those factors are valid contributors to the aforementioned start, the Cougars still have a lot of work to do as they head into the final month of their season at 1-12.
Many teams in Salina South’s position would hang their heads and try to wait out the storm, but despite facing a gauntlet of a schedule, the Cougars have made a concerted effort to battle and improve with each passing day.
“Our kids are resilient and I feel like we’ve battled every night against some good basketball teams including some of the best in 5A,” South head coach Jason Hooper said. “There have been stretches where we’ve played really well and shown that we can play with these teams but we’ve also had stretches where we get tired or lose focus and find ourselves behind. Our kids haven’t put their heads down and I hope that continues.”
When healthy, South has shown flashes of what their young and still relatively inexperienced core might be capable of down the stretch and into next season, and the burden has been slowly lifted from the starting unit as the campaign has progressed.
“We’ve started gaining some depth on our bench,” Hooper said. “Early in the year, we were playing with six and seven, and when you’re battling illnesses that shortens that up even more but we’ve found some kids who can come in and give us a few minutes here and there.”
Ultimately, the biggest issue for Salina South has been in their lack of consistency, as poor stretches have put the Cougars in big holes against some of Class 5A’s premier talents.
“We’re still looking for more consistency,” he said. “You can look back to all of our games and find glimpses of really good basketball but there’s always a stretch where we seem to fall apart or lose focus. We need to understand what it means physically and mentally to play a full 32 minutes.”
In the SIT, the Cougars finally had a breakthrough, snapping a ten-game losing streak and gaining a ton of positive momentum with a 63-55 win over Liberal.
“Any time you’re sitting at 0-10 you start to question things but I feel like that was a great win for our kids,” Hooper said. “It was the same story, we played really good basketball at times and we let them in at others but to finally get these kids rewarded for their hard work and to get that goose egg off the win column was big for our kids.”
Things won’t get much easier for the Cougars, who faced a state-ranked Maize South team on Tuesday, and will face undefeated Hutch on Friday, but regardless of the results, Salina South continues to work and build for what’s to come.
“We want to continue to get better,” Hooper said. “Sometimes that means you play really well and still get beat but we want to come out and compete. We want to make progress in the things we’ve been working on, and to do the little things that we focus on in practice that sometimes don’t translate to the floor in a game.”
Salina South will be back in action against the #1 team in Class 5A in Hutchinson at home on Friday with a 7:00 tip.
For continuing coverage of Cougar basketball stay tuned to the Salina Post.