Pilgrims recap: Q&A with Plymouth coach Joel Grindle
Q — We haven’t talked much about your JV team this year and they’ve been having a good season.
A — They are playing well. They’ve been on the short end the last few times out but they are playing well.
One of the things that get missed in the whole varsity being short-handed is what that does to your JV.
There might be times they are playing kids minus quarters, where we are holding kids out in quarters.
The way it works is that kids can play five quarters on any given night. At times when we are hurt and all of a sudden you start thinking about “what
if this kid gets hurt (on the varsity) what happens?” You need somebody for that “Uh-oh” and that can cost a player a JV quarter because you don’t know.
For the most part, we’ve used up those quarters on the night but there are a few times that it may have cost the JV a game. They are very competitive in about every game they’ve been in.
Trent Van Duyne has come up and been really good for us. Trey Delp has had some good minutes for us. Dan Nguyen is another. He’s a freshman and all you have to do is watch him and you can see what he’s capable of. Caden Milliser is another varsity-level athlete who has been with us at times. C.J. Delee is another who we really like.
Overall for that group, it’s been fun to see and fun to watch and if you look at the coming years a lot of those kids are going to be changing (to) varsity jerseys next year and we are excited about what they might be able to build with our varsity kids.
Q — You mention full strength and the thing about that is when you have been early, you’ve looked good. Now that you are full strength again you’ve looked very good. It had to be a shot in the arm to get everybody back.
A — I go back to the question when were we fully healthy? You realize that it was back to Winamac (game 4) or really even Triton (game 2). Having everybody available in practice.
We’ve had guys who sat out three or four nights and come back to do some walk-through things and try to play on Friday.
Christmas we were pretty healthy and back for the tournament and that turned out very well for us. Very quickly after that things went the way of adversity.
It’s great to have people back and we are seeing some of the fruits of the adversity we went through.
When you don’t have an Easton Strain, or Davis Wray can’t do what Davis Wray does, who is going to step up and take those spots?
The results in those games may not have been what we wanted but all of a sudden you start looking to see how well Kadyn Ellery is playing, what Preston Wolfe is doing, you start seeing what Coby Walters has done.
Now you have kids playing with confidence and you just hope they continue to do that.