The Waynesburg University men’s basketball team is getting ready to start its 2018-19 season by traveling to Hamburg, New York, for the 9th Annual Hilbert College Hawks Against Hunger Tip-Off Tournament.
Head coach Mark Christner said he is excited to see how his team will begin the season as it strives to compete in the upper echelon of the Presidents’ Athletic Conference after finishing in seventh place last season.
“Every year you enter the season with fresh optimism about how things can go,” said Christner. “I believe that we have what we need to be in the upper half of [the Presidents’ Athletic Conference]. I believe that we have what we need to compete day-in and day-out and game-in and game-out.”
This season the Yellow Jackets will be hitting the court without Jon Knab, who was a first-team All-PAC selection in 2017-18 and led the team with 16.5 points per game. Knab was also was just the 34th player in Waynesburg history to reach 1,000 points in his career at Waynesburg.
However, sophomores Matt Popeck and Ben Vitovitch, as well as junior Frank Bozicevic and senior Nate Gearhart, are back this season and ready to make a statement in the PAC.
“I think that we have a good mix of guys that do things a little different,” said Christner. “So, we are able to have a good competition about who will start for us.”
For Hilbert, the team will face Grove City before they take on Waynesburg, which Christner said will help him and the team strategize for the season opener.
“I would expect that they are very fundamentally sound,” said Christner. “Their backcourt is very good and if they start the same guys who are back this year from last year, then their rebounding will be very good.”
Waynesburg has had a couple of scrimmages already and, according to Christner, has looked solid except for not being physical enough, especially on the boards.
“We have to be better on the boards than we have been,” said Christner. “That is a concern of ours and it has been exhibited in our scrimmages and our practices. We need to be better, especially the defensive glass in particular.”
The first five games the Jackets play will be in a 10-day span. For the Yellow Jackets to win, Christner says they need to focus and stay calm.
“Whenever you play a team that is more physical than you are, the less physical team tends to foul more,” said Christner. “They are responding to the physicality and so we have to make sure that we are equally as physical and it is definitely something we can do and we can control.”
The first game of the tournament for Waynesburg will be against Hilbert College, the host of the event, with tip-off scheduled at 8 p.m. Friday.
For the second game of the tournament, Waynesburg will face either RPI or Utica depending on the outcome of both games. In the tournament, the two winning teams of the first round play each other in round two with the losing teams facing each other.
“It’s an opportunity to win two games,” said Christner. “I think that there is something to be said about the bus ride and the time together to start the year, it’s good for [the team].”