December 12, 2022 by John Vilca (’23)
On Friday December 2nd, the Saratoga boys’ varsity basketball team opened the season with a 67-27 win over Scotia-Glenville at home. With the beginning of a new season, emotions were running high throughout the team. Point guard Ryan Farr explains, “I thought we were excited; I mean we’ve had to wait all year for the start of a new season. I didn’t think it finished as we wanted last year, but I think we were excited, and we came out and showed it.”
Throughout the course of the game, Toga’s defense seemed impenetrable as Scotia was limited to 27 points. Their first field goal of the game came 3 minutes and 20 seconds into the second quarter. Saratoga Forward Drew Stallmer described how the team worked on their defense and their trap plays saying, “we practiced on our press all week. We wanted to get better at bringing the pressure and making them nervous when it came to making passes so we could force more turnovers.”
Coach Usher, head coach of the boys’ varsity basketball team, gives credit to the team’s energy on the defensive end saying, “I loved our energy on the defensive side of the ball. I thought we were working really hard. Talking, switching on screens, and making them earn every point they put up. We’re obviously not the biggest team so we’re going to have to rely on effort, hustle, and making sure we’re playing as a group five out there and tonight I thought we did a great job at that.” Toga’s defense led to many fast break opportunities and scores.
On the offensive side, Toga seemed hungry and determined to get their buckets, as Drew Stallmer puts it, “we worked really well on moving the ball. Coach Usher wanted us to move the ball a lot, be unselfish and that’s exactly what we did.” Coach Usher preached the idea of spacing the floor on offense during practice and preseason saying, “thats something we’ve been doing a lot of this preseason is trying to space the floor and play off two feet in the paint and looking to kick out to shooters when we draw help. Tonight, our guys did a great job of staying focused on spacing the floor and playing unselfishly and moving the ball.”
For the first game of the season, the team already looks scary, which Coach Usher attributes to the tough preseason games they scheduled. He said, “we’ve had some tough scrimmages, we scheduled some pretty tough teams to scrimmage, and we knew that going in. I’ve been impressed with the way we’ve played in our scrimmages even though we haven’t shot the ball great. We’ve kept ourselves in some games against really tough teams that have lots of size. Tonight, it was nice to see us score some baskets early, get our press set up, and stretch the lead. The goal was to try to win all four quarters, and we did that.”
Toga’s team heads into their next game against Schenectady with momentum and energy from their massive win. Although the team has many players this year who are new to varsity basketball, the chemistry was on full display. Coach Usher believes in the importance of the team’s close-knit bond, saying, “something we’ve really tried to emphasize is the communication and the brotherhood and playing together and that unselfish, not really caring who gets the credit or who gets the points. As long as, as a team, we succeed and play our brand of basketball then we’re happy with our effort for the night. The energy and the communication, it was great tonight. Hopefully we can keep that up in a game that’s closer or if we’re on the wrong side of it, that’s going to be the challenge.”