Cabot boys’ pantry stocked with strength, skills
The Cabot Panthers boys basketball squad enters the 2022-23 season with a wealth of experience. Having graduated just one player off the bench and returning all five starters from last year’s campaign, head coach Logan Bailey, assisted by John White, is optimistic about improving on last year’s 9-18 overall record and 5-9 in 6A Central Conference play and the team’s early exit from the state tourney.
“We feel not only that our size, but our strength, will be an advantage,” he said. “These guys — not only have they grown a few inches and gotten a little taller, but they have gotten significantly stronger, and that plays a lot into how we play. We want to be physical, so we value the weight room a ton in our program.
“We had a really good summer, and we expect a lot of big things out of our returning guys, as well as a couple new ones, maybe. We’ll see.”
In addition to being experienced, the Panthers are also expected to be very balanced in their scoring, which Bailey hopes will make them harder to defend. Only one player, 6-5 senior forward Jarrett Coleman, averaged in double digits in scoring last year.
“Last year, I think we might have had seven or eight different leading scorers during the season,” the coach said. “We had a bunch of guys who were scoring between 8 and 13 points in a game a significant amount of the time.”
Cabot shot 49 percent inside the arc in 2021-22, averaging 51 points per game, about half of which came from inside the paint. The squad also shot just over 29 percent from the 3-point line.
“We do a really good job of finding the hot hand, and whoever that is, our guys are fine with it being him that night,” Bailey said. “We don’t have anybody who’s selfish and thinks they’re supposed to be the leading scorer. We do a good job of sharing the ball.
“That’s a big key for us offensively; we have great ball movement, and that’s what makes us harder to guard. I expect similar things this year.”
Starters include all-conference junior Jermaine Christopher, the team’s 5-10 point guard. Flanking him are seniors 6-1 Brandon Bennett and 6-3 Gavin Muse, another all-conference selection. Senior Austin King, a 6-3 all-conference forward, and Coleman anchor the front court. Coleman shot just under 50 percent from the field and 82.5 percent from the free-throw line last season, easily the best on the team.
Despite the team’s healthy experience and track record, Bailey still has some improvement goals for his 2022-23 ensemble.
“I’m hoping to see our shooting percentage around the basket go up, hoping to see our turnovers go down,” he said. “As I look back on last year and previous years, we’ve turned the ball over too much, and that’s one particular area that I’m really looking for us to improve.”
The squad plays in the deep 6A Central, where the Panthers’ skills and resiliency are tested every night. Bailey said mental toughness is key to the team reaching maximum potential and achieving its goals.
“I’m really excited to see our mentality going into games,” he said. “In the past, we’ve kind of just hoped we could stay in it and hoped we’d have a chance at the end. I don’t want us to be that underdog anymore. I want us to feel that we have a right to be there and that we should be there. We’re hoping to switch those roles a little bit and be the ones with the target on our backs at some point.”