Men’s basketball head coach excited about upcoming season

Southern basketball coach Rob Spivery has a certain look of happiness about him. That look only comes around once a year.
Entering his third season at the school, Spivery is excited about his team and their chances this coming basketball season. Last year Southern went (10-21) stumbling out of the gates and never recovering from a 0-9 start which featured the Jaguars powerhouses such as Florida, Wisconsin, Georgia and Oklahoma State.
“This is a team I’m very excited about,” said Spivery. “We’re competitive everyday day in practice, something we did not experience last year. Last year we had a lot of new guys and had to depend on them playing. This year it’s a different story.”
Last season Spivery only returned two players (Steffon Wiley and Deforrest Riley-Smith) who had ever played collegiate basketball and lost six of his eight top players from the 2006 championship team.
“Last year we only returned two players that had previous experience playing college basketball,” Spivery said. “We had a number of young people, inexperienced people. Anytime you have that situation it lends itself toward not being highly successful.”
“Losing six out of our top eight players from the 2006 championship team and having the number of players we had last year just was a sign of inconsistency. Anytime you have that in athletics, specifically basketball, you’re not going to be very successful.”
A plus for Southern is that of the 10 players returning from last years team, nine played significant roles with the exception of red-shirt freshman Julius Ingram.
“We came on at the end of last season winning the last four regular season games,” Spivery said. “All of those guys are returning this year. They gained experience from the SWAC tournament and suffered through some adversities last season but with the recruiting class we brought in, I think our basketball team will be very competitive.”
Key losses for Southern include leading scorer Deforrest Riley-Smith, Javaris Bradford, Jefny Anderson-Brown, Emmanuel Njomo and Mariun Price. The bright side of this is that Southern only returns two senior, C/F Joseph Jack and G Joe Holliday.
“Sometime we were what I call some timing,” Spivery said. “Sometimes we played hard, sometimes we didn’t. Inexperience was the reason for that because when you don’t know what to do; you can’t give your best.”
“This year we have enough guys returning to know what we’re doing,” Spivery said. “We don’t have to depend on one or two guys. We have three or four at each position that we can go to, to get the job done.”