New faces with the hope of the same story
By Drake Horton, Contributing Writer
Can history repeat itself?
If you are a fan of the Darlington Falcons boys’ basketball team then you are hoping that is the case.
Three years ago, a group of sophomores took to the court for the Falcons and set off on a three year run that saw two lower-state championship appearances, one lower-state championship and one state championship appearance, not to mention the region championships and a plethora of total wins.
Now those players are gone, graduated, off to college and Darlington is back at square one.
But in the joy of winning, the Falcons never stopped building behind the scenes. As this past group of players like Frankie Johnson, Marquise Green and Tyriq Smith dominated on the court, the middle school and JV teams were being groomed for the future.
Well the future is now the present and it is time to see if this group of young sophomores mixed with juniors and seniors can put together a run as successful as its counterpart.
“We have a good group of sophomores like Marquise, Tyriq, Darius and Jovaski and Elmo,” Darlington boys head coach Ken Howle said, referring to his previous team. “All came on board in that 10th grade year and we got three years and we will get three out of this 10th grade year and one of those is a Johnson.”
The potential is there, the talent is there and the skill is there. These newest additions to the Falcons basketball family have had success on every level so far. Unfortunately, a lot of them have not had any valuable game experience on the varsity level.
“I just don’t know yet, like I said I don’t know what’s going to happen when we turn the lights on,” Howle said on what to expect with such a vast amount of inexperience. “We are going to try to run the same kind of system that we do and we are going to put some wrinkles in, some different defenses maybe that we haven’t done in the past.”
These potential fears of the unknown have come up in the past and every time Darlington has seemingly had the right answer; develop the players you have and make sure they understand the scheme you run.
“It’s how people develop and fit in to what we do,” Howle said. “That is one thing about our teams, we’ve had kids that have bought in to the total package and they contributed in other ways than just scoring. I think back to last year with Isaac Simmons, he was a transfer, came in one year and did a good job just fitting in. We have a transfer in this year from Airport. His name is Kris’Shawn Hickman; he’s the most athletic kid on the team.”
For the last three years, Darlington has had possibly one of the best back courts in all of South Carolina. They scored, they orchestrated the offense; they did anything Howle needed them to do. The Falcons offense ran through them.
“We have lost a lot of scoring and that is probably our biggest concern, how are we going to be able to score,” Howle said. “I think defensively we can be as good or better in all five spots. Right now our initial thoughts are we have 10 deep, we are going to play these guys.”
Large rotations like that are usually something a coach does early in the season to see what he has and by the time the season reaches the home stretch the rotation has shortened in some sense or another. Howle is not sure if that will be the case this season.
“I don’t know if that is going to happen, we’ve talked already about utilizing these guys, they need to play, until some of them start to separate themselves and they haven’t done that yet.”
One of the main reasons none of the players have had the ability at distance themselves from each other is due to the time constraints that the team has had to battle with.
Outside of the normal high school league rules, a larger number of players played football this season, and with Hurricane Matthew delaying that season by two weeks the Falcons were set back a little more. But while Darlington may have been low key this offseason from a basketball standpoint, it did shift its focus to something else; the weight room.
“We didn’t go to summer camps, we didn’t have any scrimmages or anything, we just did some stuff here,” Howle said. “We have been in the weight room more than we have ever been in. We maxed them out and all of them had increased their max by 15 or 30 pounds.”
This added strength to go along with more players playing football than in the past, especially with a “by committee” lineup will all possibly give Darlington an element to its game that it has not had in the pass.
“I think we can be a little bit more physical than we have been in the past,” Howle said. “We aren’t going to worry about scoring or who’s on the floor, we are going to use our fouls if we have to.”
If history is way to predict the future, then I think it is safe to say that will be more than strong enough to have a successful season.