City of Basketball Love

Kevin Troilo (@kevin_troilo)
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(Ed. Note: This article is part of CoBL's "Prepping for Preps," our series of articles previewing area high school teams for the 2015-16 season. For the complete list of schools previewed so far, click here)

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Size is difficult to come by at the high school level.

And size with experience is always a plus.

Things start to get a lot more difficult when you lose multiple players who fit that bill, as Bishop Eustace is dealing with.

“I essentially lost four starters,” Eustace head coach Bob Falconiero said. “I lost six seniors overall, a lot of them with a lot of size. Five of them were bigger than 6-foot-5.”

This includes the loss of 6-foot-7 forward Brandon Cazan, who was voted first team all Olympic Conference in the National Division--the only player to receive this honor not wearing a Camden or Camden Catholic uniform. Cazan reached double digit points in 18 of Eustace’s 27 games last season and led the team in scoring at the state playoff game.

Also amongst the graduating seniors was 6-5 Conor McLaughlin, a second team all-National Division player and one of the leaders on this Eustace roster.

Replacing this kind of size and experience is never easy.

“We’ll be smaller but we’ll be quicker,” Falconiero said. “We’re going to be a little bit of a different style. I want to run more and do some things differently.”

Despite finishing below .500 last season at 13-14, they earned a 13-seed in the Non-Public ‘A’ South state playoffs, a bracket that is typically led by top seeds such as St. Augustine, Paul VI, and St. Joseph-Metuchen.

It was Metuchen who ended their season in the first round of the playoffs.

One of the most important pieces of this new offense will be senior point guard Mikey Cohen. Cohen, a 5-10 guard, is an excellent 3-point shooter who also excels from the free throw line. He has already committed to play college hoops at Auburn University following his senior season.

He joined McLaughlin on the second team all-National Division following his junior season.

They will also be returning Nate Carpenter, who Falconiero called a “part-time starter with experience.” Joining the lineup will be 6-3 junior Jesse Saul, a versatile wing forward.

Falconiero is excited about 6-6 junior Alec Dipietrantonio getting the chance to break out and really excel in his role as a full-time starter.

“We have a really strong junior class,” he said. “As for experience, Jack McCaffery and Eric Sobocinski are both seniors and played for us last year. They were in our steady rotation of eight.”

There may be a slight adjustment period, as is with any group that hasn’t spent much time playing together as a unit. Falconiero cited strong defense as something they’re focusing on in order to gel before they really figure out where this teams strengths lie.

“We played a lot of games in the summertime, so we have somewhat of an idea of what we have,” he said.

New Jersey doesn’t allow high school teams to practice as a whole until Thanksgiving. The team is currently playing in a fall league to prepare for their season opener where they’ll face the Indians of Lenape High School, a group they lost to at home 39-35 at the beginning of last year.

Their schedule doesn’t get any easier as the season progresses.

They play home-and-home’s with both Camden and Camden Catholic as well as a season finale against national powerhouse St. Anthony. These three teams handed the Crusaders five losses in five contests last season.

A mixed up schedule creates multiple stretches of consecutive home and away games. They play five straight road games in mid-January before returning to their home court to finish the season with five of six inside friendly territory, something that could help the team’s confidence prior to entering the state playoffs.

“I’m not far enough into it yet to set goals for the team as a whole,” he said. “I’m mostly worried about gelling this new group of guys and playing as a team.”