Currently the mens varsity basketball record is sitting at 6-4 and fourth in the region. This squad is being led by head coach John Bauersfeld and assistant coaches Reilly Campbell, Dan Morrison, and Brian Weber.
Most years, the first few weeks of the basketball season are overlooked because of the success of football. This team has players that are determined and hungry to win every game.
Basketball is a sport that requires lots of physical and mental activity, and is played at different paces and speeds for certain teams, depending on how they want to play.
Marist basketball has a specific style of play of how they try and win games. Head coach John Bauersfeld described his thoughts on this topic. “Marist should expect a fast paced entertaining brand of basketball, and our hope is that will translate to some big wins throughout the season” Bauersfeld said.
The reason for playing fast this year is because this basketball team has built upon the skills of former teams, and the basketball team is a little smaller. Their goal is to run the court and tire out the opposing teams.
With this style of play and since the jump down from 6A to 4A this past year, fans have high expectations. Student fan John Loudon put it this way: he expects a “deep playoff run” from our basketball team this year.
This year, the region is looking completely different from last year apart from St Pius X. Some of the new teams fans can expect to see include Southwest Dekalb, Tucker, North Springs, Northview, Druid Hills, Lithonia, and Clarkston.
According to player Ryan Bailey, some must win region games this year are “Every Pius game and Southwest Dekalb game.” These two teams are some of the better teams that are in our region, and if our basketball team wants to win the region we need to beat these teams.
There is a word that every player and coach on the team tries to live and play by, and that word is “ascend.” This word ascend has a deeper meaning behind it with each letter of the word standing for an aspect of the team. The A stands for Attitude, S for Solidarity, C for Commitment, E for Enthusiasm, N for Next Play, D for Details.
An interesting fact about basketball is the first basketball hoop was a peach basket with the bottom of it cut out. And the basketball was like a football but in a sphere shape.
