Bedlam returning to Bristol defense
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BRISTOLVILLE -- Always a perennial contender, the Bristol Panthers look to right some wrongs from the 2022-23 campaign.
With a roster that returns nearly everyone from last season, the Panthers want to put the growth from this past offseason to the test.
Last year was the first time the Panthers lost 10 games in coach Craig Giesy's tenure with Bristol. This season, the Panthers are going back to their roots and focusing on each of the ingredients that make a winning program.
"We returned almost everybody. We're trying to stay away from the goals of wins and losses right now and focus on a couple of things which get us back to where we want to be," Giesy said. "We're really hammering home a few things right now and that's being a great teammate, being coachable every day, staying positive, playing hard, really a bunch of non-basketball things. I feel like if we're able to do that, I feel like this group is going to have a lot of success.
"We have four sophomores that really came into their own in the offseason and a couple of them played at the end of the year for us as freshmen that we feel are going to give us some huge minutes this year to kind of add into that experience that we have coming back. We're going to play fast like we always do, and we're excited to get rolling and see what we're made of."
Highlighting the group is senior Mikey Burbach. Burbach has been a focal point for the team each of the last three seasons. Don't expect that to change much this year.
Juniors Croc Thorp, Kaiden Kohler, Jack Berry, senior Zane Shafer, and sophomore Colt Berry will see significant time on the court for Bristol as well.
It's been a few years since the Panthers have truly played Giesy's trademark "bedlam" defense. With some taller and slower players in the lineup, it was more difficult to run.
This season might mark the return of the bedlam that's helped Bristol be one of the top teams in the area over the last few decades.
"The last couple of years we've had a little more size, we've been a little slower, so we haven't played as much," Giesy said. "We haven't had those speedster guards that we had in the past to kind of set the tone up front, so we've had to tweak some things. We played a lot more zone than we ever did in the past over the last few years, and we've committed back to getting back to kind of who we are as a program. That's the direction we're trying to get back to. We're trying to play faster and get up and down a little bit more."
That was Giesy's overall sentiment -- faster, harder, and more aggressive. Expect Bristol to lean into that more and embrace the chaos.
"Let's make it fast. Let's make it sloppy at times. Let's just see who can last the longest. That's kind of where we're at right now with the Bristol Panthers," Giesy said. "We're going to see how gutsy our guys are through the next month here. I thought we had a nice June that showed signs of that. We just have to be a little more consistent. That's a great way to put it for us this year because it's not always going to be pretty as far as basketball-wise, but as long as we're we're making people work and work and we're playing hard ourselves and being good teammates, I think we should be able to be a fight most games this year."
With a wide open league, slugfests were always going to happen. The Panthers are hoping that going into games expecting a battle will translate into success. The schedule is just as difficult as always this year, with teams like Kennedy (at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland), Ursuline, and LaBrae on the slate. The team's first test is set for Tuesday at McDonald.
byauger@tribtoday.com