Jackets prep for 3 big games this week
Slowly but surely, the Calhoun High School basketball team is putting things together.
And they’re getting all their pieces back.
“We go through this every year, so we kind of know how to handle this,” Calhoun High head coach Vince Layson said at the beginning of the season. “Every year, we start out without a few of our players and once football season ends, they start coming in and we start working them into the lineup and into the rotation. So, it’s always tricky, but we’ve been through this before as far as adjusting and working kids onto the team after we’ve already started playing games.”
And while there is no doubt it’s been tricky, Layson, his staff and the players seem to be figuring it out and putting it all together at just the right time with the start of the 5A Region 7 season officially here Tuesday night when they meet Hiram at The Hive at 7:30 p.m.
The Yellow Jackets are 7-4 overall and have won four of their last five games with that one loss being to Chattooga, which they then came back to beat 49-45 last Tuesday night to conclude the non-region portion of the schedule.
“We play in a tough region with a lot of good teams,”
Layson has said of the region. “You’ve got to be ready to play every night. We might be behind a few of the teams as far as the number of games we’ve played when we do start region, but I got a lot of confidence in my players that we’ll be ready when it’s time.”
And make no mistake, with two big games this week against first the Hornets and then Woodland Friday to begin region and then a trip out of the league Saturday night to play at archrival Dalton, big-game time has arrived for the black-andVegas-gold.
It would also seem on top of putting everything together at just the right time, they are getting everybody back together at just the right time as well because besides beating Chattooga Tuesday night, Calhoun basketball fans were treated to the return of 6-foot-8 junior Dylan Faulkner to the lineup as he heals from an injury.
Faulkner, who got a thunderous ovation when he was announced into the game, has been nursing an injury and has been out for over three weeks, but he was still solid in his return Tuesday, scoring nine points and grabbing five rebounds in limited duty.
But with he and 6-foot-6 Peyton Law, who was the
JACKETS,
team’s leading scorer in both of their recent wins over Cartersville and Chattooga, hopefully on the floor together for long stretches very soon, the Yellow Jackets are about to be two handfuls for every team they play.
During this recent run, they also had a couple of high-scoring games with 91 points against Excel Christian and 83 against Cartersville, which they will see two more times in games that count over the next four weeks. In both games, a lot of different players made shots as the team was racing up-and-down the floor, finding the open man for good shots and attacking the basket on the run.
In their two most recent wins over Cartersville and Chattooga, the team was inconsistent offensively,