Matt Jurcisin take a free throw during a game against Ewing on February 12.
Austin Hill drives to the net on February 12.
The seniors on the Hopewell Valley Central High School boys’ basketball team have seen three coaching changes during their four-year careers. Consistency has been hard to come by.
First-year head coach Amir Siddiqu set out to change that at the start of this season. At 8-13, the Bulldogs still have some work to do, but he said the team is showing some positive changes heading into the state tournament.
“You want to be peaking when the tournament starts, and I like where our heads are at right now,” he said. “We communicate well with each other. I like the way we’re playing right now.”
Consistency, though, has plagued the squad all season.
“A lot of times, we just need to put a few games together,” senior captain Bailey Schrader said. “We’ll play two and a half or three quarters of great basketball, but we’ll have the one quarter where the other team will go on a run. If we can put four quarters of our best basketball together, we can beat a lot of great teams.”
Fellow captain Chaz Bell agreed.
“I definitely think we’re a lot stronger than the record reflects,” he said. “I think we just struggle in the third quarter. We’re definitely in most of the games we play. We just need to work on staying in.”
That was evident in the Feb. 12 game against Ewing. The Bulldogs started out strong; they stayed within two to three buckets for much of the first half. In the third quarter, though, Ewing outscored Hopewell 20-8. The team was never quite able to recover and ended up losing 72-42.
When the the Bulldogs played Ewing for the first time earlier in the season, though, they stayed within five points throughout the game. The same theme played out against Lawrence in the opposite order. Hopewell got blown out in their first meeting, but stayed within five in their second.
“I think the effort is there,” Siddiqu said. “It’s just a matter of playing smart and at times playing together. Two or three minutes in a basketball game can be a lifetime, and sometimes the score indicates that. It’s just being consistent all the way around.”
Siddiqu said his team is starting to do just that, with the exception of the most recent Ewing game. As the former football coach adapts to his new position, the team is improving, too.
“Jumping right from football to basketball and having that mentality has been tough for me,” he said. “It’s been a smooth transition as of late. It took a lot of getting used to early in the season, but I’m getting way more comfortable with it.”
He attributes that to the leadership of his senior captains, Schrader, Bell and Murf Butler.
“These guys have been great,” he said. “I’ve relied on them at times to pick up where I’ve left off. When we have timeouts, even if they’re not in the game, they’ll take charge. They can sense the direction of the game and see what the five on the floor need. They’ve been invaluable.”
The seniors’ authority will surely come in handy during states. Each captain is confident that the Bulldogs can advance to the later rounds of the tournament.
“Going into the tournament, you want to have the mindset that you can win every single game you play,” Bell said. “That’s definitely the mentality that we have. I think we all believe we can win every game we go into, and that’s what the mentality should be.”
Butler said the team’s recent play is encouraging.
“I think we’re heading in the right direction,” he said. “We’ve been trending upward recently. With the record that we’ve had, a lot of teams are going to view us as an underdog or a team that’s just going to roll over. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to surprise a lot of people.”
Siddiqu, though, may be the most confident of them all. At the start of the season, he said, a parent asked him whether she should schedule the end-of-season banquet before or after the state final.
“I said, ‘Absolutely after. I plan on winning the state championship,’” he said. “That’s why we play the game. I like where our heads are at right now.”
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