Preview: Southeast looks to turn things downside up

Published 11:36 pm Monday, November 19, 2007

Southeast head coach Tim Rogers has had plenty of time to chew on the 5-21 record his Raiders compiled in his first year back at the school after a brief hiatus.

And he doesn’t like the taste.

“Nobody likes how the season went for us,” he said. “But this is a really good group of kids who are fun to coach and ready to turn it around.”

The Raiders began the 2006-07 with six consecutive losses against some top-flight tournament competition before notching a big Region 7-4A victory at Northwest Whitfield. Southeast beat the playoff-bound Bruins again in January to record the series sweep, but couldn’t take care of weaker teams in the league and were eventually bounced by Ridgeland in the region tournament.

Rogers said he would like to bottle the things the Raiders did right in those two wins over a quality Northwest team and carry them over to this new season.

“I can’t tell you the formula we had in those games,” said Rogers, who coached the Raiders to a 17-8 mark in 2004-05 before resigning to spend more time with his family. “I’m not 100 percent sure what it was, but we put it together in those two games, and we have the potential to do more of that this year. If you look back at the tapes of the games we won, we had a refuse-to-lose mentality and a grittiness about us. We need that back.”

Both of those attributes start with hustling Alain Morales, a fan favorite at Southeast’s gym. Morales, a 5-foot-11 shooting guard who can run some of the point as well, got more minutes due to injuries down the stretch last year and developed into the kind of leader required to turn Southeast’s fortunes around, Rogers said.

“I don’t know if I’ve been around a kid who loves to play basketball more than he does,” Rogers said of Morales. “He’s gotten a lot of confidence and has worked very hard on his skills in the offseason.”

With the graduation of smooth point guard Isaiah Tibbs, Mart Stidmon, Ryan Hollingsworth and Jeremy Macon, Rogers will depend on the play of Morales and fellow seniors Ryan Brewster and Brice Johnston. Brewster earned the Raiders’ award for Best Junior Varsity Player last season. Johnston earned the Coach Alan Long Award, bestowed upon the player who best exemplifies the spirit of the program on and off the court.

There is help on the way from underclassmen such as Zach Harper, who won last year’s award for Outstanding Freshman, and juniors Damond O’Neal, Matt Hall, Cody Gibson, Nathan Baggett and Adrian Storey.

Rogers has labored to make this a more focused group — one that won’t disintegrate if the Raiders find themselves in a 10-point hole or one of their leaders in foul trouble early in a game.

“Mental toughness is a major thing we’ve tried to work on,” the coach said. “We’re a lot stronger physically, but we also wanted to breed some mental toughness to go with that. That started to show some in summer at camps — we saw that the kids were playing with more toughness than we had last year.”

Rogers doesn’t regret returning to the whistle for a second tour despite a bad season last year. If anything, he says, it has reaffirmed his desire to lead young men.

“Gosh, no, I have no regrets,” he said. “It’s made me want it more.”