The Dike-New Hartford boys basketball team has reached the Christmas break after going 3-5 in December. With a new-look starting lineup, they’ve worked on building cohesion as a team. Head Coach Alex Tagtow says while the scoreboard hasn’t necessarily shown it, they’re much further along than they were at the start of the month.
“We’re far from a finished product,” Tagtow says. “We’re making big strides. I don’t know that necessarily is noticeable when you look at the box score, and maybe some fans notice it, maybe they don’t. But we’re starting to understand how we play defensively and how we can kind of be more cohesive in that. And we’ve seen huge jumps in that. We just really got to stay the course and the wins are going to come as long as we’re committed to this. But just proud of the guys and how hard we played in some of these losses that maybe ended up with a little bigger margin than is really indicative of how the game flow went. So just proud of the guys so far.”
Additionally, Tate Block and Jaiden Soppe have been out of the lineup with injuries in the three most recent games, opening up opportunities to go deeper into the bench for production. Soppe’s 10.0 points per game is the second-best on the team, behind Dawson Dietrick’s 13.3.
If the team is to take further steps, Tagtow says refining their skills on the defensive end will be crucial.
“I think we have a good understanding from a big picture of what we’re trying to do on that end of the floor. I think the guys are bought in and our effort’s been great, but we really have to have those detailed things refined because there’s no nights off in our conference. We’re playing great teams. We’re playing a string of ranked teams or teams that are kind of on the fringe of being ranked here coming out of break. So that’s what’s going to make the difference for us. And it’ll be nice to have five, six practices in a row where we can really hammer out those details and get dialed in with that sort of thing.”
After playing all but two of its December games on the road, they’ll have four straight home games to begin January. They’ll return to action Monday, January 5 by hosting Union.
