Speed key for senior Hawks

Justin Seward
Times Reporter

 

The Holy Cross Collegiate Hawks senior boys basketball team hope to improve upon their third place zone finish and get back there again this season.
“We have 11 players altogether, nine of our players are returning from last year. We were a junior varsity team last year because we had no senior players,” said coach Tony Hamilton-Irving.
“We have three senior players, which puts us up into a senior category. So we play in the Foothills Basketball League – it’s hard to say what we’re expecting of them in that league. A lot of the teams will be the juvenile ones that we played last year.”
Hamilton-Irving hopes his team will contend for a higher seed so that they can get a chance at the zone title but knows it will be tougher competing against senior teams.
“We’re hopeful that we’ll be a team that will contend to go to Zones and we finished third in zones last year, so we’d like to get there again and do even better,” said Hamilton- Irving.
“I assume it’ll be a lot of the same players that we played last year in juvenile and we finished second in our league out of eight teams. We hope to do the same again this year,” said Hamilton- Irving.
“Our team is built for speed, we’re not a large team in terms of size but we’re a really fast team. That’s what a lot of teams found competing against us.”
The leadership group on the team will be asked to assist not only in the overall team play but the new players as well.
“Chris O’Leary and James Bautista, would be two of our starting Grade 12s and they’ve been playing for the school since junior high. They are highly skilled, very quick and good shooters so they’re definitely the leadership on the floor,” said Hamilton- Irving.
“Josh Hauck plays four or five positions on our team, he’s a Grade 12 and is a strong basketball player.”
The adjustments of this team will be the addition of the two Grade 10s as they will have to adapt to the systems and have to accept less floor time at points during the season.