By Drew Terhall

DailyAdvocate.com

VERSAILLES — There’s no time like the summer to start offseason activities. Versailles Exempted Village Schools hosted a varsity boys basketball shootout on June 8 with 16 teams competing in four games throughout the day.

Each game had 16-minute half’s with a running clock. Teams had the chance to see different competition from around the area to kick off their summer training.

For Tri-Village, this was just the start to their summer. Head Coach Josh Sagester said the program will have a busy two and a half weeks of attending basketball camps at the University of Dayton, Wright State, Findlay and Wittenberg.

After losing a great senior class, Sagester said the team played well with some new faces and some new roles for players.

“I thought our kids played well in our first outing after coming off a 21-6 campaign with seven seniors. I was proud of our effort,” Sagester said.

Versailles also took this opportunity to see what their young guys are capable of at the varsity level. Head Coach Travis Swank said the summer is the chance to see if guys are ready for the varsity level and to work on some things that is new to the team or things that the team didn’t run a lot of last season.

The Tigers showed a good starting point against their competition. Swank said the summer is not going to be perfect. They just want to see the team continue to get better and to get tougher.

“A lot of our guys are either freshmen from last year that played at the freshmen or JV level. It’s a big jump from each level as you go along. We were happy with what we saw here today,” Swank said. “We’re not satisfied, but there’s a lot of time still to get better. That’s really what we’re focused on in the summer.”

Even this early in the summer, going up against great competition is always helpful. Bradford is losing three seniors and will have some new players come into the fold for them.

Railroaders Coach Alex Swabb said it was great for the team to go up against these teams that were giving it their all against them.

“We played some very good teams today. They gave a lot of great effort. It’s nice to be able to compete against that, especially this early in the summer. To be able to play against teams giving you that much is very beneficial,” Swabb said.

It did take some teams time to shake off some rust. For Mississinawa Valley, it took the first two games to get back into the flow of a game situation.

Head Coach Cole Hamilton said the team had a rough start, but started to improve as the day went on.

“We started off the morning kind of rough a little bit. I didn’t know where we were going to start out at. But as these last two games came on, I felt like we improved a lot scoring wise. There’s a couple things that we need to work on defense, like every team does,” Hamilton said.

One of the main things Hamilton wanted the team to improve on was communication. He said it’s one of the most important aspects of basketball, especially when it comes time for tournament play down the road.

Contact Daily Advocate sports editor Drew Terhall at [email protected]