The high school basketball regular season is still five months away, but the summer still represents a time for teams to start to gel and gain valuable in-game experience for the upcoming season. These summer sessions are a time for coaches to start making key talent evaluations, experiment with different lineup combinations and start the process of installing offensive and defensive concepts.

Eleven Lexington County schools will have at least one of their basketball teams participate in the South Carolina Live Team Camp showcase June 15-18 in Rock Hill. Airport, Dutch Fork, Gilbert, Gray Collegiate, Irmo, Lexington High, River Bluff and White Knoll will all be bringing both boys and girls teams to Rock Hill. Brookland-Cayce and Chapin will have their boys teams represented and Swansea will have their girls team represented.

The Chronicle caught up with a few of the coaches participating in the event to preview and discuss what they’re looking for in the early renditions of their teams.

Girls

Lexington High

The defending Region IV-5A champs have plenty of big shoes to fill this off-season. The Wildcats lose four of their five starters to graduation and will have an entirely new starting lineup to figure out before the start of next season.
Not only did the Wildcats lose four seniors, but they also lost Charlize Misick-Rivas to a non-contact ACL injury. Rising sophomore Kailen Parks is also still recovering from an ACL injury. This leaves a window of opportunity for young players to step and earn spots in the rotation.

Wildcat head coach Molly Goodrich will balance evaluating these young players as well as a couple of impact transfers that will look to assimilate into a new group. These summer sessions will be key in determining which role she sees certain players stepping up into.

“We lose four starters and so it’s kind of like it’s somewhat of a whole new team and it’s been exciting,” Goodrich told the Chronicle, “We did gain a couple players who moved to Lexington. Sydni Anderson is a 6’2” post for us and she’s going to try to take the role Lindsay [Garner] had. And then there’s Emory Waters-Inman. She moved in from Batesburg-Leesville so she’s new to us. Sometimes these players move into your school and you’re like ‘oh my gosh’. It’s a blessing to us. We’re excited for them to be in our program. It’s going to be a big summer for them to learn what we do and how we do it and to play ball with us as well.”

River Bluff

The Gators go into the summer showcase needing to figure out the best way to replace do-it-all guard Jaden Tucker. Tucker was the leading scorer as well as leading distributor.

Outside of Tucker, River Bluff played a young roster with several different lineup combinations. This young group from last year will look to step up as a group in order to replenish the departing offensive production. According to coach Candice Cobb, this means changing the way they ran their offense from the past few seasons.

“We have to have more of a settle down approach,” Cobb said. “We are doing more half court sets and just trying to find who we are as a program. By losing such a big piece, because I would say she scored about 60 to 75% of our points last year and the year before that, so it’s going to be tough. But I got a lot of new girls, young girls coming in and we’re excited about the opportunity to just get to it.”

Outside of the X’s and O’s of basketball that every team figures out in the summer, Cobb mostly wants to see how her team responds to adversity.

“I want to see them struggle and I want to see them succeed as they struggle, if that makes sense,” Cobb said. “Resilience, I want them to battle. That’s it. I told them that if we lose games and we fight hard and we work hard, I’m completely ok with that. But if we fold and just let people walk all over us, I’ll have a problem with it.”

White Knoll

The White Knoll Timberwolves struggled last season with the loss of point guard Sydney White. White missed last season with a torn ACL suffered last June but has made her way back onto the court this summer and according to coach Coretta Ferguson, she’s looking like the same high IQ point guard she was before the injury and that alone has rejuvenated her team.

“She’s been looking really good,” Ferguson told the Chronicle. “We’re confident that the team has been magnetic around her. They look for her leadership. She’s been able to get them in good situations and it’s gonna be a joy to see.”

Ferguson also mentioned the importance of players like Shaelyn Hayes and Vanessa Borrero taking over more leadership centric roles.

But for the summer, Ferguson is focusing on her team gelling and learning how to play with one another.

“I want to be on that cohesive team, I want them to learn each other and build on each other,” Ferguson said. “I want us to be able to read and react more and not run a system of play.”

Boys

Dutch Fork

After a disappointing 2022-2023 campaign, Dutch Fork is looking to build towards competing for Region IV-5A titles again this season. Last season’s struggles can be attributed to the absence of two of their best players in Jarvis Green and Landon Danley.

With those two players not really contributing, it was up to the young players to grow up and learn some basketball lessons the hard way. Those often came in the form of tough losses.

This year, coach Bret Jones expects a few of those younger or lesser experienced players to use last season to propel them forward towards being more high impact players this season. Players like Bryson Taylor and Corey Stagg will be expected to run the offense more fluently this season now that they have a year of playing major roles under their belts.

“Just with a year of experience and guys getting older, you can see a big difference out there,” Jones said. “I played an eighth grader last year, a couple ninth graders and tenth graders so now they’re a year older, a year bigger and a year more mature and all the old cliches. They’re good, but they just weren’t quite ready last year.”

Gilbert

If you ask Gilbert head coach Oz Exume what his point of emphasis is this summer for his basketball team, you’ll get a very straightforward answer. They need to be stronger.

As the boys basketball coach and the offensive line coach for the football team, he has brought in his basketball players to lift weights with the football players to try to add more strength and improve his team’s physicality.

“That’s kind of been our issue, the lack of strength and physicality consistently against teams,” Exume said. “We’ve had a lot of court time and a lot of time in the weight room getting stronger.”

Exume is also wanting to see his team become more consistent in how they create offense during this summer period.

“The truth is, with the team that’s coming back, we’re a very perimeter oriented team. We have some guys that can shoot and so in the past, we’ve had issues getting the ball consistently to the paint to create shots for our team. This year, especially on the court, there has been an emphasis on ball handling. Not just with guards, but across the whole board one through five so we’re harder to guard.”

A few players Exume’s looking at to increase their roles and grow over the summer are combo guard Oscar Gould, Garrett Wright (who is recovering from what was referred to as a medical scare), rising senior guard Aiden Barefoot as well as rising ninth grader Tyzai Smith (who played significant minutes as an eighth grader last season).

Gray Collegiate

The Gray Collegiate War Eagles will be looking to replicate last season’s state championship run. They lost five players from last year’s team but return a lot of size and experience that will still make them a 2A favorite to win state.
This summer, head coach Dion Bethea will be tasked with getting his team to continue that elite defensive effort and maintain their dominant form going into next season.

“I really think that the defense can carry over from the championship team,” Bethea said. “They’re just staying solid working on rotations of it.”

They’ll also rely upon the incredible size they have in the post and on the perimeter as Treyvon Maddox, Ellis Graham and Braylhan Thomas all return.

Lexington

The Lexington Wildcats are not only the reigning Region IV-5A champs, but they return two of the best basketball players in the state of South Carolina with Cam Scott and Jaxon Prunty.

With Scott and Prunty both playing significant minutes with Team United in the AAU circuit, Lexington and coach Elliott Pope will have a great opportunity to give the rest of the roster valuable experience that can translate towards helping their star players in the regular season.

This summer, Pope will lean a lot more on Kaleb Evans, Caleb Campbell and Coulter Bell while Scott and Prunty are on the AAU trail.
For the whole team, Pope wants to see his group exercise more “intelligent aggression”.

“There were so many times last year where we had opportunities for easier shots and we backed it out or we didn’t commit on a defensive closeout or a box out because we weren’t strong and aggressive enough going to that ball or coming into that box out,” Pope said. “We want to go hard, we want to play tough and physical but we got to do it the right way and play within the framework of the game.”

White Knoll

One of the biggest unknowns of the summer is the White Knoll boys team. New head coach Willie Thomas has come in to change the culture and is going to rely heavily on the summer period and this showcase to learn exactly what he’s got on his team going into his first season as the Timberwolves’ shot caller.

Thomas told the Chronicle that he’s looking to install a defense that presses and speeds up their opponents while also playing a slow and methodical offensive style. He also hopes to be able to reach his players and get them to adjust to playing a new brand of basketball.

“They’re very receptive to what we’re trying to tell them,” Thomas said. “We’re trying to get them to listen, because the stuff they’ve been doing hasn’t been working too well.”