SALAMANCA — The Salamanca boys basketball team proved what it’s capable of last year and, though some of the faces have changed, expectations are still high.
The Warriors still have their two leading scorers from last year’s state semifinalist team in senior Andy Herrick and junior Lucus Brown, both returning Big 30 All-Stars. Brown (21 points per game as a sophomore) was a Big 30 first-team all-star and first-team all-state selection while Herrick (13 points per game was a first-team league all-star and third-team Big 30 selection.
They’re joined by three new starters in the Warriors’ core starting five, though all were rotational players on last year’s squad: juniors Tayoni Galante and Jaxson Ross and sophomore Maddox Isaac.
“They were a part of that team and a part of the run and all three of them are excited to step into bigger roles,” Warriors coach Adam Bennett said. “We feel like we have depth, we feel like we have a lot of athleticism. We lost a lot of talent from last year’s team but we are excited about the guys that we have coming up and certainly the guys that we’re bringing back. The biggest thing is just to put our heads down and work really hard every day just to try to get better. These guys understand if we can do that, if we ignore everything else and just try to improve day in and day out, they know where that can take them now and that’s certainly an advantage that we really haven’t had in the past.”
The Warriors again play in CCAA West I, a division that produced three sectional champions last year in Salamanca (Class C), Olean (B1) and Allegany-Limestone (B2). And a third meeting with either team isn’t out of the question now as Salamanca moved up to Class B2 this year.
Salamanca finished last season at 17-8, playing its best with a complete lineup by the postseason to win a Section 6 Class C title and then a Far West Regional to earn a trip to Glens Falls. A 64-56 loss to Stillwater in the state semifinal left the Warriors hungry for even more this year.
“Honestly I think the way it ended for us has been a great motivating factor because we were able to make it to Glens Falls and surpass a lot of the external expectations about our team and how we would play last year,” Bennett said. “There’s a strong will to get back, which is very difficult. There’s a lot to take care of before anything like that can happen, but there’s just that hunger that we didn’t end our season last year with a win and this group has worked really hard. I’m not one of those coaches that’s going to tell them just to forget about last year and this is a completely new year. The reality is we can learn a lot of lessons from last year.”
The biggest lesson, Bennett said, from last year was to “ignore the noise or anybody’s expectations of you on the outside,” whether they be positive, negative or in between. So while last year put them on the map, it doesn’t change Salamanca’s approach to the new season.
“I think this year’s team has really embraced that,” Bennett said. “We don’t start out with any extra wins this year because of what we did last year. Everybody’s 0-0 and if anything we’ve got a little bigger target on our back, but none of that should matter if we show up every day and work as hard as we can to simply get better. If we do that, we know that we’ll have an opportunity to compete with anybody.”
Bennett expects the Warriors’ length and athleticism to be a strength. Of the starting five, four are listed at guards, with only Galante at forward; Herrick (6-foot-4) and Brown (6-foot-1) are taller than many high school guards, however.
Graduating their traditional point guard, Hayden Hoag, from last year requires some adjustment offensively.
“We’ll probably play a little more in transition and we have a lot of versatile guys this year, guys that can play multiple roles and multiple positions,” Bennett said. “I think we’ll be a little less traditional than we were last year and probably a little more multiple defensively. This team, so far through the summer and the early part of the season, has played very solid half-court man-to-man defense whereas last year we kind of used our full-court press to propel us a little bit. So there’ll be differences on the court, obviously offensively we’re still very much built around Lucus and Andy, who are two of the top scorers in the area if not the state at this point. So there’ll be a lot of similar concepts but there’ll be some differences as well.”
Hayden and his twin brother Harley Hoag are still around the program as volunteer coaches, helping a staff that includes Bennett’s longtime assistant Greg Herrick, Jared Fish and J.V. coach Pete Weishan. That continuity has Bennett optimistic that this team can have a similarly strong chemistry to last year’s.
“Those are two guys that graduated and obviously played a huge role in what we were able to accomplish last year and now they’re donating and volunteering their time to come be volunteer coaches and help this group succeed because they’re still so bought in,” Bennett said of the Hoag brothers. “The players have reacted very well to that and to their leadership. It’s a close group. This is a really fun group to coach.
“We’ve got players that care, they put in a ton of time in the offseason, especially in a year where it would have been easy to take a couple months off and kind of enjoy what we did last year but as soon as we got back, we got back to work and I thought our guys did a really good job of using the offseason to work on their individual skill development. We started coming together as a team through team camp and summer league and certainly now in the preseason, getting to be with each other six days a week for two hours a day, it’s been enjoyable and we’re definitely starting to see some improvement.”
