Football season is coming to a close, but another one of Argyle’s favorite sports has begun as the Eagle’s varsity boys basketball team start their season. This year, the team has made several changes in both roster and philosophy, all stemming from their new head coach, Russell Perkins.

After Coach King’s promotion to vice principal, the school made the personel change to Coach Perkins, who’s team officially started their season in early Oct.

“Practices have been going as good as can be expected,” Perkins said. “There’s a whole bunch of new stuff we’re trying to do. The kids have been very receptive, and they’ve been working hard to try to get ready. We’re trying to build the stuff that’s going to be good in January and February.”

A noticeable change in practice this season is the pace, as the players have put in a lot of extra conditioning to start the year.

“They’re really intense and there’s a lot of motion without any waiting,” senior Jonathan Davis said. “We get a lot of reps in, everybody is working hard, so there isn’t a lot of wasted time.”

Seniors like Davis and Joseph Clayton hope to be good examples for some of the younger potential on the team. The sophomores and juniors will be relied on to make plays and provide depth as the season unfolds.

“Nathan Priddy has done really well in the off-season,” Clayton said. “I think him and David Davis are the two younger guys that have really shown up. They’ve shown that they can play at a different level all summer and they’ve worked hard to earn a spot on this team.”

Eagles are used to winning in all their endeavors, so it’s understandable that coaches and players are excited about the season.

“We don’t have to improve on a lot because they’ve been so successful here in Argyle with what Coach King did,” Perkins said. “Argyle is just successful in everything, but we graduated a lot of our defensive kids that played really good defense, so we spent a lot of time in the fall trying to get better defensively and we’re going to try to continue to do that.”

To try and offset some of those losses, the coaching staff has changed their defensive schemes from last year and now spend a generous portion of practice drilling the techniques.

“A lot of our defensive rules are different this year,” Davis said. “Last year where we might have denied the ball with Coach King, we play in a different set now. We guard the post differently now. We have presses and zones that we can go into if we need to.”

Another new tradition Coach Perkins has installed is Wonderful Wednesdays, a weekly conditioning ritual during the off-season that many players described as the hardest they’d ever practiced. His goal is to not only build conditioning, but also team chemistry.

“Any time you go through a trial with anybody it brings you closer, so hopefully this brings us closer,” Perkins said. “As games get harder, practices get tougher, they’ll know they’ve earned the right to be successful and hopefully it’ll be a positive thing.”

Overall, this is still an offensive team, but they are continuing to focus on defense, per their coach’s philosophy.

“If we can create open shots for people then we have the kids who can knock those shots down,” Perkins said. “We’re not as good against teams that really pressure us because we can’t do some of the things we need to do against that yet. That’s when it comes back to chemistry, knowing where everyone is going to be and things like that. You win more games defensively than you do offensively, so I tell our players ‘Offense comes and goes but defense always shows.’”

One thing Coach Perkins has really preached to his players is ‘fearlessness’ and that extends to all phases of the game.

“Coach’s big thing is to control the things we can control like effort, aggressiveness, diving on loose balls,” Davis said. “There’s no excuse for not doing those things. If we can do that it will make the things we can’t control a lot easier to overcome.”

Fearlessness is also part of the chant the team breaks out to every day in practice. To a bystander, the word ‘flight’ might sound random, but the acronym epitomizes what they are trying to be as a unit.

“Play Fearlessly,” Perkins said.” we want to be extremely Loyal to our teammates, we want to have Integrity by doing the right things when no one’s looking, we want to have Gratitude because we’re just blessed to be able to do what we do, and we want to be extremely Humble by not thinking less of ourselves but thinking of ourselves less.”

Those attributes are drilled into the players everyday, and they work very hard with those in mind. However, it’s the last letter that may matter the most.

“The ‘t’ stands for Together, we have to play together,” Perkins said. “So that’s what those letters mean and we want to continually remind ourselves of how important those things are to our program.”

As always, this season means a little more to the strong senior leaders on the team, and they’re driven just a little more to go out and try to bring home a trophy.

“This is senior year, so this is it.” Davis said. “I gotta put everything out there so we can go as far as we can. I want to get to the state tournament, and I don’t want us to end on a loss.”