New Cougar Basketball Head Coach Daniel Brown asked one very simple question of the players and parents assembled Wednesday evening in the PCHS Jeff McCoy Theatre.
“Why not us.”
Coach Brown asked that question after being officially introduced to the Cougar players, parents, and fans Wednesday by PCHS AD Scott Vest. He then went on to answer.
“I’ve watched some of your game film from last season,” he said. “There’s some talent there, but there are also some things I see that we need to work on. It’s going to come down to how well you listen to what I’m saying and how fast you pick up on what our coaching staff will be teaching.”
Brown went on to set the expectations for the program, both short term and long term.
“I want this program to be competing for district and region championships regularly,” he said. “Our goal should be to play that last game in Richmond every season. If that’s not our goal, we need to re-examine things. We want to win a State Championship here in Pulaski County.”
Brown then began to lay out his overall approach to the game.
“We will work on defense every single day,” he said. “We need to score, but we also need to be able to stop the other team. Defense wins championships. We’re going to need to change the way we approach the game. We’re going to be gritty. We’re going to play fairly, but we’re going to play tough. We’re going to play as a team. I should never see a player go down and not have two or three of his teammates there to help him up. When you’re on the floor, I’ll expect a hundred percent because that’s what you’ll be getting from our coaching staff.”
Brown also spoke briefly on some program building issues.
“I want our program to be consistent from top to bottom,” Coach Brown said. “I’ll be looking for rec league and middle school teams to look and play the same system we do at the varsity and JV level. We have to get that level of consistency and instill the type of work ethic we want in the kids early.”
Coming from the northern Virginia area, Coach Brown also talked about playing tougher competition and gaining confidence from that.
“I want to take our players to the 757 a few times,” he said. “I want us to go into one of those gyms and take on the type of competition that I’ve watched at the boys and girls level there for a long time. If we want to win State Championships, we’re going to have to win them by beating those types of teams. I want us to play against the toughest competition we can find and I want us to learn from those experiences. I don’t expect us to go up and immediately win, but it will be a tremendous learning opportunity for us.”
Brown, a Pulaski County native who graduated with the PCHS Class of 1980, spoke very fondly of his playing days at PCHS under then Head Coach Alan Wiley.
“Every practice was a battle,” he said. “You knew walking into the locker room it was going to be a fight. That’s just how we were. Everybody wanted to be on the court, and you had to earn your spot every day. We’ll be doing that. You must compete for your spot every single practice. That’s the only way I know how to do it. If we make mistakes, we’ll correct them and move on. If a player can’t correct their mistake, they’ll watch for a while. We can’t afford to put anyone on the court that’s not will to go all out. It’s all about effort.”
When a parent asked about how he corrected mistakes, Brown was very direct.
“Sometimes my players for other teams came in to the locker room and noticed there were no basketballs out. All they saw were the shorts and shirts,” he said. “If we have a problem we can’t fix, it’s going to be track practice for a while until we can figure it out. We have to get into better shape anyway, so this will just be another way of working on that. This school system has more equipment available than any other school I’ve been to. We’re going to put it to use.”
While he hasn’t officially hired a coaching staff yet, Brown will continue to look at that and other items as he finalizes his move back to Pulaski County.
Player contact information was taken after the meeting and open gyms will resume next week.
